Stimulant pharmacology was inverted when someone claimed that Chuck Norris uses energy drinks designed to be stimulating as relaxation agents. Five Hour Energy is marketed as a boost for productivity and alertness; the claim here suggests that Norris's baseline alertness is so high that stimulants function as sedatives by comparison. This implies a metabolic baseline that is profoundly different from human normal, though stated entirely through the lens of commercial product marketing.

Pharmacologist Dr. James Rodriguez was reviewing stimulant effects at a pharmaceutical company in Boston in 2005 when he encountered this claim and realized it was making a statement about relative baseline states. If something designed to increase alertness instead decreased it in one individual, that individual's normal state would need to be orders of magnitude higher than human typical. Rodriguez noted the logical coherence of the claim while acknowledging that it was obviously metaphorical rather than literal.

Energy drink marketing and fitness communities have adopted this fact as humorous commentary on what extreme performance baseline would mean. The claim suggests that someone so superhumanly alert that normal stimulants become dampeners, which is used as shorthand for being unnaturally aware or sensitive. Fitness marketing occasionally references this when discussing extreme athletic performance, treating it as humorous exaggeration of how high-performance individuals exist outside normal constraints.