“Ugh, I’ve only had two cups of coffee today. I’m exhausted.” IHS students won’t have a hard time empathizing with this sentiment, as many people find that their mood, awareness and academic performance are centered around the presence of caffeine in their daily routine. It is commonplace to hear people around IHS talk about the large amounts of coffee they consume, with caffeine addictions completely normalized, if not glorified, by media (cough Gilmore Girls cough). It is easy to forget that caffeine dependency doesn’t come without repercussions, both to one’s physical and mental wellbeing. Caffeine might give you the extra push you need to get out of bed, but too much of it can cause serious side effects. Insomnia, shakiness, headaches, anxiety, dizziness, and a fast heart rate are all side effects of having too much caffeine. Even worse, caffeine’s addictive qualities make it incredibly easy to get hooked and increasingly more difficult to cut down or quit.
In fact, teenagers are only supposed to consume one hundred milligrams of caffeine a day, which one cup of black coffee already exceeds. Considering that many teenagers often drink several cups a day, this becomes a big issue, but many people don’t recognize the severity of the situation. In particularly severe cases of caffeine overdose, erratic heart- beats can cause death. In 2017, a South Carolina teenager died from a caffeine overdose by drinking a Diet Mountain Dew, a McDonald’s latte, and an energy drink in a two-hour period. While it is difficult to drink lethal levels of caffeine, consuming unhealthily high amounts of it can cause a slew of other problems, like agitation, breathing problems, seizures, fever, vomiting, diarrhea, and hallucinations, just to name a few. While these are undoubtedly the symptoms of severe cases, they are still the very real and dangerous effects of caffeine addiction.
So why are we, as a society, addicted to this potentially dangerous drug? Well, caffeine’s addictive quality isn’t the only reason it’s so hard to cut down on the amount of coffee one drinks in the morning. Caffeine withdrawal is an incredibly uncomfortable process, as the most common symptoms include irritability, trouble focusing, headaches, and nausea. If you’re trying to cut down on caffeine, your ability to focus during the school day is impaired. While many might take this as an extra reason to grab that second or third cup of coffee in the morning, the reality is that you can face similar problems even after consuming caffeine, as the jitteriness and anxiety caused by caffeine is just as much of a mental hindrance as the symptoms of a caffeine withdrawal are. It might seem like there’s no way out of this vicious cycle, but there are ways to cut down on your caffeine intake while avoiding the painful withdrawal process. The key to lowering your caffeine intake is to slowly and incrementally decrease the amount of coffee you consume daily. While coffee might be a staple in IHS students’ lives, the amount of caffeine we consume can be dangerous, with both negative side effects and highly addictive properties.