Caffeine the Secret to ESports Success?
It’s no secret that many of the top competitive gamers use caffeine. And if you’ve ever had a cup of coffee you can definitely vouch for its stimulating effects.
Caffeine itself is found in a number of natural sources, most notably coffee. So when you drink that coffee, Caffeine enters the bloodstream and goes to your brain, where it acts as a replacement for a brain chemical called adenosine.
The role of adenosine is to basically make sure that your nervous system doesn’t become over-excited or run out of control, and it plays a big role in calming you down and making you feel tired.
Caffeine is actually thought to mimic adenosine in the brain, attaching to the same receptors and then blocking adenosine from working at all. This causes a stimulating effect upon the brain and central nervous system and heightens the level of chemicals like adrenaline and dopamine.
And this all results in some serious positives for performance boosting.
- And the first-way caffeine can give you a boost is by enhancing your alertness and concentration. Higher alertness means better ability to identify relevant information and react accordingly. As you can imagine higher alertness correlates with faster reaction and better accuracy. And of course, your alertness controls your level of engagement, meaning the more alert and engaged you are, the more you can channel your brain power into the game.
- The second way caffeine can help you is by improving your overall performance speed. During a competitive game, we are processing a lot of information, deciding what to do and reacting in rapid succession. Taking a few extra moments to execute your next move is enough time to leave you vulnerable to the enemy or miss a massive opportunity. Luckily Caffeine has been shown to boost multiple areas of our performance speed including reaction time, decision speed and movement speed.
- The third way Caffeine can help is by enhancing your memory, and ability to learn. In one study, Caffeine was shown to increase perceptual memory, which is the part of your memory that unconsciously encodes and recalls information. In yet another study exploring Caffeine’s effects on learning, Caffeine, when combined with glucose, improved learning and verbal consolidation. Since most of competitive gaming is about improving your skill level, this is huge! Improving your learning ability and verbal consolidation, helps you to encode new information easier, allowing you to learn new strategies, new characters, and new skills much faster.
- The fourth way that Caffeine can help your performance is by boosting your subjective state of mind. Due to Caffeine’s ability to heighten the level of neurotransmitters like dopamine, it can temporarily improve mood, motivation, and mental clarity. Of course, improving your mood sounds nice, and might help you interact with other players, but it also appears to have a beneficial effect on performance, specifically when the activity requires the use of the prefrontal cortex. Meaning that by improving your mood while gaming, it may lead to improved decision making, and better planning.
So by drinking a cup of DSCC coffee, you may be able to perform with greater focus, faster reaction time, improved memory and a greater mood.