Coffee: The Sacred Fuel Of American Labor & Office Drama.
Wait!!! We understand. The moment it sounds like someone wants to take our coffee 
(or any other caffeinated beverage) away, all we hear are war drums, because those are fightin’ words. Excluding those few individuals who’ve ascended to a healthier plane of existence, we all have a brew of choice (we ❤️ cold brew), and life without it seems inconceivable.
You can relax! This article has no intention of stopping you from enjoying your daily cup-of-joe. But, we will be digging into the truth of how caffeine affects your office, and offer some unorthodox perspectives for counterbalancing your office’s caffeine consumption.
Busting The Caffeine Dehydration Myth.
Before we address the real issues, it’s important to clarify a huge misconception. How many times have you heard someone tell you that you shouldn’t consume so much caffeine because it dehydrates you? We don’t know about you, but to us that advice is always unwelcome, especially when we’re trying to wake up. While it is true that caffeine is a diuretic and causes you to urinate more, all of those naysayers left out one vital piece of information:
According to the Mayo Clinic,
“Drinking caffeine-containing beverages as part of a normal lifestyle doesn’t cause fluid loss in excess of the volume ingested. While caffeinated drinks may have a mild diuretic effect — meaning that they may cause the need to urinate — they don’t appear to increase the risk of dehydration.”
Say what? 😮 In case you missed it, here it is again: “…doesn’t cause fluid loss in excess of the volume ingested.” According to that, at worst there is zero net effect on your level of hydration, so no need to ditch your coffee, folks! In fact, the Mayo Clinic states, “It is true that caffeinated drinks can contribute to your daily fluid requirement.” So, while we wouldn’t personally suggest counting coffee towards your recommended daily intake of two liters of water, you might pick up a little extra from your favorite latte.
Disclaimer: Everything we’ve stated, and even the laws of physics, apparently does not apply to double brewed coffee. Read at your own risk (contains profanity and insanity). 
The Real Problems Caffeinated Beverages Are Causing In Your Workplace
Now that we’ve addresses the guilt-myth, it’s time to face the real adversaries that stand between us and the professional and productive work environments we all desire. When it comes to business in general, we often want proposed office benefits to be quantifiable, so that we can measure their effectiveness and ensure that they’re worth the investment. While much of what we’ll be pointing out to you in this article cannot be directly measured, you will surely be familiar with many of the problems we address, and we hope to offer you a simple and accessible solution.
While coffee has taken off as an effective fuel for the masses, most coffee drinkers don’t realize how disruptive caffeine can actually be to their daily work flow. Mid-day caffeine crashes can offset office productivity, and that highly coveted, early morning energy spike often translates into jittery, unfocused behavior. In addition to causing headaches, jitteriness, and insomnia, the worst side-effect of caffeine is pretty much universal: eventually, everybody crashes.
We set out to tackle the greatest issues that result from the caffeine crash, as well as what steps you can take to counteract them.
Solving The Top Three Caffeine Related Issues
Problem #1 – No one is productive when they feel like garbage.
We speculate that the greatest issue that caffeinated beverages cause is indirect. A staggering percentage of people substitute their coffee or soda in place of the water they should be drinking. In addition to the direct side-effects of the increased caffeine consumption, this is problematic because:
- When your employees feel anywhere from subpar to awful, it results in lower motivation and productivity. Familiar with a Monday morning hangover? The vast majority of symptoms one experiences during a hangover are the result of dehydration. Most employees deal with similar, albeit less severe effects on a daily basis due to the crash after caffeine consumption. These mid-day ‘micro-hangovers’ prevent your employees from giving their job their all.
- Do your employees require ‘extended’ bathroom breaks? While most stall occupants are probably just using the opportunity to browse their Facebook feeds or play solitaire, many others are probably struggling to, shall we say, clear out their systems. A lack of water shackles the body’s internal systems, slowing digestion, hampering bowel movements, and even inhibiting the blood’s ability to pump oxygen to the brain – resulting in slower thinking and memory formation.
- Chronic dehydration can result in more sick days and longer recovery times. When you’re admitted to the hospital, nine out of ten times the first thing they do is inject you with IV fluid. Why? Because in order for your body to heal itself as quickly as possible, it needs to be properly hydrated. IV fluid contains sodium and water. Last time I checked, Americans didn’t have an issue with consuming too little salt, but imagine what being properly hydrated could do for your employees’ recovery times and immune support.
Solution #1 – How do you get your employees to drink more water?
Why do people properly hydrate? While most people may have fostered the habit so long ago they can’t remember why, the primary causes are usually the taste of the water (conscious) and the dispenser it’s accessed from (subconscious).
Consider the majority of places that people obtained the water they drank as a child (prior to the pandemic of disposable water bottles): The kitchen or bathroom sink, a refrigerator that probably hasn’t had it’s (already ineffective) filter changed in a decade, a water cooler that looks like it hasn’t been wiped down in a century, and a drinking fountain that is quite possibly culturing a new strain of the bubonic plague.
While you may have consciously chosen to turn a blind eye to health concerns revolving around your water dispensers, most of them probably still echo through your subconscious somewhere. Or, if these issues were simply too bothersome to bury, you may have made the switch to bottled water. There are many options for bottled water dispensers if you don’t mind breaking you back lifting heavy jugs, and you could buy cases of bottled water if you don’t mind contributing to the billions of water bottles we don’t recycle every year. But what if there was an alternative water dispenser that didn’t compromise on taste or aesthetic and that didn’t contribute to the massive amount of waste already devastating our planet?
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That is exactly the need H2O is here to fill. Because we specialize in water purification and take pride in the quality of our service, we recommend investing in one of our purification plans in order to solve your office’s problems, but the bottom line is that a water purification system is the most effective way to keep your employees hydrated. As the tri-state area’s top-rated water solution provider, we recommend trying our entry Level 1 membership plan. This includes our waterREBORN water purification AND optimization technology packaged in our ultra-chic Endeavor dispenser. In this system, water is purified down to 0.0001 microns and subsequently packed with nutrients and minerals for a natural and delicious taste. Scroll through our Google reviews to find that employees drink a lot more water when it tastes delicious and is dispensed from an elegant device. At only $58/mo, this plan includes hardware, installation, and maintenance, and even comes with a free 7 day trial.
Problem #2 – Office drama will make your workplace environment and productivity bleed.
Whoever came up with the term ‘water cooler gossip’ has seriously confounded their culprits. While people in the office have an almost universal tendency to gossip, it isn’t the water cooler but caffeine that stands as the true office instigator.
If you’ve ever been responsible for children, you understand the chaos to come after they drain a Coke or Mountain Dew. Not only do you have to deal with their sudden, hyperactive boost, but the energy crash that follows often triggers a wave of intolerable crankiness. Yet when a colleague or boss snaps at work, it rarely occurs to us that they were probably just crashing from their latte or Red Bull. Imagine how much more productive and pleasant our workplaces could be if their was less caffeine crashing happening on a daily basis?
Solution #2 – If coffee they must drink, let it be meta-coffee.
Typically, we try to be fair and offer third-party alternatives in addition to our own services. Unfortunately, we are not aware of a standalone solution available from third-parties that can achieve the same results. If you know of one, feel free to let us know in the comments below. In the meantime, we recommend using one of our systems, which utilize innovative features to create a powerful and effective solution.
Not all water hydrates equally. Imagine your body is a lively club, and water molecules are people trying to get in. Because hydrogen atoms have a propensity to lose one of their electrons, these water molecules often cluster together in order to share electrons. However, aquaporins, or the bouncers at the door, don’t like to admit large groups of molecules. Therefore, this clustered, ‘destructured’ water fails to gain admission, slowing down your bodily functions and allowing toxins to accumulate. To solve this issue, the multi-phase waterREBORN technology we use includes a RESTRUCTURE phase. This utilizes natural FIR (far infrared) emitters to restore missing electrons and to de-cluster water molecules. This maximizes water’s hydration ability by allowing it to properly transport nutrients and toxins in and out of your body.
All of our membership plans either include our REBORN Coffee feature or offer it as an inexpensive add-on. This is a commercial grade Keurig appliance connected and supplied with meta-water by the waterREBORN system included with your membership.
In addition, if you simply can’t give up coffee, try switching to cold brew. According to the experts, cold brew releases caffeine more slowly than regular coffee, making it a more effective boost and preventing that dreaded crash.
Problem #3 – Fast, slow, and fidgety doesn’t win the race.
Riding the highs and lows of caffeinated beverages often results in inconsistent and cumulatively reduced productivity. Jitteriness almost always results in mistakes, usually requiring double the time investment to fix.
Solution #3 – Meta-ice, pH balancing, minerals, antioxidants, and electrolytes.
There is no shortage of experts telling you to drink more water, but knowing is the easiest part. At H2O, we’re focused on the difficulties: How do you realistically get your employees to drink more water? By removing as many obstacles (i.e. dispenser aesthetics) possible, by increasing water’s desirability (i.e. taste, pH, nutrients), and by making it widely available.
Some of the greatest feedback we get on our appliances is about how great they look in the office. All of our dispensers are easy to use and elegantly designed, consistently drawing employees to use them. For clients who already have coffee or ice making appliances they are attached to, all of our plans include or offer REBORN Connect for a small monthly fee. With it, we can connect compatible existing appliances to your waterREBORN system, supplying them with meta-water.
The RESTORE+ENRICH Phase (standard across all systems) amplifies your water with more than twenty antioxidants, electrolytes, minerals, and other nutrients. Not only does this boost your employees’ health, but adds a delicious and refreshing taste they are sure to return to time and time again.
The pH REBALANCE Phase(standard) further increases your water’s desirability by boosting alkalinity and optimizing water’s pH level. This prevents the water water from leeching calcium and magnesium from your body and supports bone health.