Energy Drinks: NOS and Relentless

When I was an undergrad in the U.S., I used to buy an energy drink called NOS almost everyday. I first tried it just out of curiosity, but it turned out to work pretty well as I could focus on studying for a longer duration, thus becoming a habit. Of course, that could be due to the placebo effect, but I didn't really care as long as it made me more productive as a result! In addition, the energy drink was not very cheap, so that seemed to enhance the self-fulfilling prophecy.

In fact, this price-induced satisfaction has actually been reported as a people's general tendency in various experiments. Suppose there are 5 different bottles of wines, of which each is labeled with a different price. Experiments show that most people tend to rate the taste better if the price is higher despite the fact that these wines are actually the same. Even more interestingly, the brain activities that reflect satisfactory taste are also correlated with the price label. This indicates that only the beliefs based on given price information actually can change our physiological reactions!

It seems the energy drink NOS is only sold in the US, so since I came to the UK, I've started drinking another energy drink called Relentless. I tried several different brands, but this seems to have the most similar flavor to NOS, which is neither too sweet nor does it smell artificial. Maybe it is because both energy drinks are Coca-Cola products even though the ingredients are quite different. But the thing is, the price of Relentless is much cheaper than NOS. It is a very good thing for my wallet, but is maybe a pretty bad thing for the productivity that I can get out of this :P