Caffeine, chemically known as trimethylxanthine, is a compound built of four of the most common elements: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen. Caffeine is classified as a central nervous system (CNS) stimulant, acceptably used for the treatment of fatigue or drowsiness to help restore mental alertness or wakefulness.

Energy: Caffeine acts as a mild stimulant, temporarily speeding up heart rate, increasing alertness and giving an often much needed boost of energy.

Problem Solving: Caffeine is known to safely improve many mental functions including speeding up reaction time, improving processing skills, increasing alertness and the ability to concentrate. Caffeine has also been shown to be effective in preventing attention lapses and improving the performance of simple, familiar, routine tasks.

Scientists have shown that caffeine produces its greatest beneficial effects in most people at doses no higher than 200 mg. Less may not achieve the benefits you are seeking. More can actually begin to reverse the benefits you achieve. However, because of wide variations in the amount of caffeine in different coffee beans and tea leaves and in their methods of preparation, it is almost impossible for people drinking coffee or tea to know how much caffeine they are getting. One advantage of a caffeine pill is that you know and can control the amount of caffeine you are using.

For example, a large cup of strongly brewed coffee served up at one coffeehouse may contain as much as 400 mg of caffeine. Another cup, from another coffeehouse or from the same coffeehouse on a different day, could contain less than 100mg. Overall, cups of tea have less caffeine than coffee, but even they demonstrate considerable variation, giving you as much as 80mg caffeine or as little as 10mg each.

As with the use of any pharmaceutical agent, the benefits you experience with caffeine depend upon using it knowledgeably. VIVARIN offers you the convenience of the optimum doses of caffeine in a single 200mg tablet, allowing you to take just the right amount to achieve the full benefits of caffeine.

Credit: Bennett Alan Weinberg is the author, with Bonnie K. Bealer, of the critically acclaimed book The World of Caffeine (Routledge, 2001)

Most people know that caffeine can help you overcome fatigue and keep you alert. However, did you know that some scientists believe that caffeine's mental boost can also actually help you to think better and perform certain tasks more accurately?

Leaders in the computer industry tell us that caffeine helped fuel the computer revolutions and continues to drive the software industry today. This is due in part to caffeine's ability to help give us the energy we need to complete our work. Computer professionals often rely on caffeine to stay alert during the long hours required to develop a new software system and to answer the calls to rescue the system when it crashes (which usually happens in the middle of the night!). However, caffeine's popularity in the computer industry may also be due to the special mental boost caffeine confers, which helps improve accuracy and speed in completing certain tasks, including writing computer programs and operating computer systems.

Experiments have confirmed the common experience that, especially when prolonged efforts are required, caffeine improves performance in work relying on the use of short-term memory, simple mathematical calculations, or carrying out repetitive tasks. Many scientists think that the mental boost caffeine provides can also help us process certain types of information better and thereby perform these tasks more accurately and rapidly, whether we are tired or not.

Whether you write computer programs, or just use them on the job or in your studies, you will be happy to know that a single VIVARIN tablet, containing the caffeine found in two cups of coffee of four cups of tea, can give you the boost you need to complete work, anytime and anyplace.

Credit: Bennett Alan Weinberg is the author, with Bonnie K. Bealer, of the critically acclaimed book The World of Caffeine (Routledge, 2001)