Innovation is something that most workplaces aim to encourage, but does the caffeine that’s an ever present in most offices help or hinder?  A study from a few years ago suggests the answer is most definitely not.

The research explains that caffeine blocks the adenosine chemical inside the brain. Adenosine acts to inhibit various chemicals within the brain, often therefore reducing our energy levels and helping us get to sleep. So how does this affect our creativity? Well it also affects our minds ability to wander.

Various studies have shown that a central part of the creative process is the ability to connect up seemingly disparate ideas, mashing them together into new and innovative mental collaborations. In order to do this well, we need to give our brain the freedom to wander wherever it may go, and that’s something that caffeine has a big impact on.

Rather than destroying our focus, it instead acts to laser our mind in on the task at hand. That’s great if you have something you need to concentrate on and need the energy to do it well. Just so long of course that this something isn’t coming up with new ideas.

Caffeine fuelled creativity

Interestingly, a second study suggests that the opposite might actually be the case.  It suggests that tea might actually benefit divergent thinking.

Participants in the research were given either hot water or black tea before proceeding to undertake a creativity exercise.  The results of the exercise were then rated by independent raters.  They found that the work produced by the tea drinkers were rated as more creative than their non-tea drinking peers for things like innovativeness, aesthetic appeal and grandness.

The researchers claim there work is the first to suggest caffeine can have an impact on divergent thinking, with most previously suggesting it’s much more effective for convergent thinking, ie coming up with the single correct answer to a problem.

If you remain unconvinced however and would not like to risk your creativity due to your love of coffee, the answer may lie in a study conducted at the University of East London.  They found that so long as people think they’re drinking real coffee, they get all the positive side effects of actually doing so.

So if you want the positive side of coffee, but also want your employees to be creative, it seems the answer is to serve them decaf but make them think it’s the real deal.