Plastic Bags are not Coffee proof…and Mindfulness can supercharge your performance

Imagine this scene, it’s 11pm and your office cleaner (let’s call him James) is going through the routine bin collection. Generally, a simple task, however tonight (like too many others) your cleaner looks up at the path he has taken through the office to notice the tell tail signs of office caffeine addiction. A trail of coffee has followed James through the office, the source, likely a half-finished cup of coffee nestled deep in one of the bins that has previously been collected.
This scene happens more frequently than you might imagine. As our work schedules become busier and increasingly dynamic, both our propensity to rely on, and then subsequently forget to drink our coffee is on the rise (it might seem). So, considering this, we thought we might publish some fun factoids that could be useful to help you get through the midday slump.
Plastic bags are not as water (or coffee) proof as one might think
It turns out that plastic bags (of the type typically found in office bins or your kitchen waste) are not really designed to retard liquids. The polymer chains that make up the plastic bag are so loosely connected that liquids with a lower surface tension can quite readily move through what seems at first to be a solid plastic bag. If you could zoom in on the plastic bag and see it at the molecular level, it would look like a whole bunch of spaghetti noodles stacked on top of each other (with many gaps in between) – perfect for your coffee to pass through!

Spare a thought for James (and your office carpet) and pour the excess away before you throw out your coffee cup next time.
There are Alternatives
Before you close the page in disgust, it turns out quite a lot of research has been done into the effects of caffeine on productivity and alternatives to its use. Here are a few we think might help you and your teams:
• Avoid coffee – most of the time. Caffeine works by masking the effects of your low energy, however over time we require more of it to achieve the same (relative) boost. If you can avoid the routine coffee consumption, then you can save the caffeine hit for when it is really required (e.g. before that big board meeting)
• Get more sleep. This seems relatively obvious but there is a stack of science to back up the need to improve the quality and duration of our daily sleep. A 2009 study found that four days in a row of poor sleep was comparable to a blood alcohol level of 0.6 BAC! The study also points out how one night of sleep >8hrs was enough to restore the baseline of the participants.
• Try Meditation or Breathing Exercises. Mindfulness and the benefits of meditation are well researched but are surprisingly still relatively unpracticed in modern work environments. The research on mindfulness suggests that meditation sharpens skills like attention, memory, and emotional intelligence all whilst decreasing anxiety and building emotional resilience. So next time you’re thinking about that 2pm coffee, perhaps try a 5-minute mindfulness exercise instead! We have even copied some instructions here for you to try https://www.mindful.org/how-to-practice-mindfulness/.