MORE COFFEE OR BETTER FOCUS? The Surprising Science of Caffeine & Breathing | Dr Sedat Arslan

Benjamin Hopkins (0:04)

Okay, welcome back, everyone. We have a really exciting guest today. He's going to talk to us about a new study. Most of us reach for coffee when we want to think more clearly, but when we're performing better, are we just feeling more switched on, right? Does that coffee actually lead to better performance, or is it just this feeling of feeling wide? Because today we've got the pleasure of being joined by Dr. Sedat Arslan. Sedat, thank you for your talk.

Sedat Arslan (0:27)

Thank you, Ben. Hello, everyone.

Ben, thank you very much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here for this podcast. Do you want to introduce myself?

Benjamin Hopkins (0:37)

Yeah, well, I mean, I know you're a nutrition researcher at Bursa Ulaag. It may be the presentation. Yeah, the presentation would be wonderful.

Sedat Arslan (0:47)

Yeah, just very briefly about my background. I'm an associate professor of nutrition and dietetics at Bursa Uluda University in Turkey. My research mainly sits at the intersection of nutrition, health, performance and increasingly technology. Over the last few years, I have become particularly interested in esports because it's such an unusual performance environment. The athlete may be sitting in the chair, but cognitively the demands can be extremely high. I also recently edited a Springer book called Esports Nutrition, Enhancing Cognitive and Physical Performance in Competitive Gaming. So for me, this study is part of a broader question. How can nutrition and simple behavioral strategies support cognitive performance and not only physical performance? And what made this particular study interesting to me was that we didn't simply ask whether more caffeine is better. We asked something slightly different. Can we combine stimulation with calmness and get a better result? So that was really the idea behind combining caffeine with L-TNN or with diafragmatic breathing.

Benjamin Hopkins (2:08)

It's a brilliant study. I really enjoyed reading it. And I think our audience and myself are very interested in powerful performance, right? In focus, but in a calm way, getting the best out of the brain power. So a good place to start was what made you interested in the way e-sports use caffeine? As you said, it's a very unique group.

Sedat Arslan (2:28)

Yeah, sure. Because professional sports is much more cognitively demanding than many people imagine. A player has to continuously process visual and auditory information, maintain attention, keep the eyes and hands, make very fast decisions and perform precise movement under pressure. And they have to repeat this for quite long periods without losing concentration. In a game such as Counter-Strike, for example, the player is constantly monitoring the environment. Something may appear on the screen for a very short period, or there may be an auditory coup that requires an immediate response. Short reaction time and accuracy are not abstract laboratory outcomes.

They have direct relevance to actual performance. That is why we choose professional esports players rather than simply recruiting healthy university students. We wanted to investigate these interventions in people for whom milliseconds and precision actually matter. I think esports is also a very interesting model for studying human cognitive performance more generally, because it combines attention, perception, motor control, decision-making and stress in the same activity. So although our participants were esports athletes, the broader scientific question was really about how we optimize a cognitive performance under pressure.

Benjamin Hopkins (4:09)

I think that's what everyone wants, right? Cognitive performance under pressure, right?

It's in demand, people want that. But so question two is why caffeine, why L-theanine and why diaphram breathing? How do you say that?

Sedat Arslan (4:25)

Yeah, that's true.

It's a good question also, makes our study interesting, because the starting point was caffeine, because caffeine is non-performance-enhancing substance in both sport and everyday life, we know that. It can increase alertness, concentration and attention. But there is an important point here, because more arousal is not always better performance. If stimulation becomes excessive, some people become restless, anxious, or less precise. So, we were interested in whether caffeine could be combined with something that produces a more balanced state. L-thiamine was one option. It's an amino acid naturally found in tea. And previous research suggests that when it's combined with caffeine, it may help maintain attention, while reducing some of the excessive arousal associated with caffeine. But then we wanted to ask an even more interesting question. Could we achieve something similar without adding another substance? That leads us to diaphragmatic breathing. Slow diaphragmatic breathing can influence autonomic regulation and stress. So conceptually, we had two very different ways of modifying the effect of caffeine.

One was a nutritional strategy, L-tianine, and the other was behavioral study, like breathing. The idea was essentially, caffeine gives you alertness. Can L-tianine or breathing help turn that alertness into more controlled attention?