How to use Caffeine to Excel at Job Interviews

Caffeine moluecule diagram on a bed of coffee beans

Being optimally caffeinated at just the right time for your job interview could make all the difference, as caffeine increases verbal acuity and mental sharpness. But what’s the best way to achieve this?

You could, of course, drink tea or coffee …

tea and coffee cups

There are a couple of problems with this, especially for tea:

• You may have to drink a couple of cups to achieve your intended level of caffeination
• Then if the interview takes an hour or more …

Guy has to pee!

I do drink iced tea, and I’ve come up with a solution for this that works for me:

• switch to decaf tea
• use caffeine pills

This works well for me. I’ve tried 3 different brands of caffeine pills, which all say they are delivering 200mg of caffeine.

I weigh around 170 lbs., and this is OK for me when I want a serious boost. But if you’re a smaller person weighing 100 or 120 lbs., this amount of caffeine may leave you vibrating like a tuning fork. This may be optimal for cleaning your house, but maybe a bit much for job interviews.

So it’s handy to be able to cut the pills into smaller pieces. Sometimes this is easy, sometimes not but I just came up with a technical fix for the challenging ones.

These are all exactly the same: 200mg caffeine dosage, just packaged differently.

First, the venerable one:

NoDoz

I remember hearing about this one since I was a child. The bottle has a bunch of loose pills; they are hard as a rock, though, so you can’t break them by hand.

The next is one from local pharmacy chain Bartells:

Alertness Aid

This is my least favorite; hard-as-a-rock pills in a blister pack:

Blister pack

why? Just extra garbage to throw away.

Now for my favorite:

Stay awake aid

This one is different: a bunch of pills in the bottle but somehow easy to break into pieces. So if you’re a 100-lb pixie you can break one of these in 1/2 and be good to go! I often use a 3/5 to 2/3 piece myself.

UPDATE: No more for this version of RiteAid’s breakable version … they’ve switched to the rock-hard version that the other two come in. Oh well. Fix below.

Finally, the technical fix for the rock hard pills:

A pill splitter

A pill splitter! I had never heard of such a thing, but apparently I inherited one from my aunt some years ago and my wife was keeping track of it.

I washed the ancient pharmaceutical dust out of it and tried it on one of the rock-hard NoDoz pills, and voila! 2 100mg (or so) halves emerged.

Good luck on your job interview and in general!