Coffee and caffeine addiction

With more and more people in offices now a days, coffee inside these offices has become, sadly, almost mandatory. A cup of coffee seems to stimulate your senses, but did you know that the regular in-take of caffeine can leave you wired and a complete wreck. Why? It’s because coffee (with caffeine) will stimulate the central nervous system of your body and will increase the stress hormones in your blood. You will feel very alert which makes you think the coffee is doing its job and everything is great. This causes a type of stress and leads to different types of disorders. Drinking coffee frequently reduces your body’s natural instincts and reactions, preventing it from relaxing when it needs to. Drinking anything with caffeine on a daily basis will cause cyclic disturbances in your body. We all know that the morning cup of coffee “gets you going” so it’s going to be hard to stop that first cup in the morning. Almost every coffee drinker develops a need for that next cup and by the end of the day they feel tired and sometimes jittery. While many cups of coffee makes you feel great from the morning up until mid-day you will feel like resting, be fatigued or tired when the evening comes around. Fatigue is the usual symptom later on in the evening when you get home from work.

Did you know that drinking too much coffee will result in developing dark circles under your eyes? You will also acquire acidity problems and more.
Do you drink to much coffee or drinks with caffeine?

Believe it or not, there is a such thing as caffeine addiction and it is usually tied to coffee drinkers. Similar to the nicotine in cigarettes, people drink coffee when they are battling stressful situations or they drink it “casually” which is a fancy term for habitually. You know when you’re caffeine intake is too much when you have frequent headaches, have a hard time going to sleep at night, periodically feel dizzy, have ulcers, feel dehydrated, or feel a heaviness under your eyes. These are only a few symptoms but there are may more that I did not mention. If you have any health issues, by all means cut down on your caffeine intake and see what happens but don’t just quit cold turkey because your body won’t be ready. You’ll need to take less and less as the days go by so that your body can adjust back to normal slowly. Some things you might notice while slowing down your intake of caffeine is that you get headaches, feel tired, feel fatigued, feel sick, and forget things frequently. This is normal and is why I said you should slow down your intake of caffeine on a slow paced scale because if you go from having 5 cups per day to 1 or 2 then you will surely feel these symptoms and will of course make you feel bad. Gradually reduces your caffeine intake is the secret.

Some doctors say to start right away by reducing your caffeine intake by half. I would also say that cutting it down ¼ to start with would also be good since the last thing you want is a severe headache and cutting to half might be too much for your body. In other words, if you were drinking 4 cups per day, try drinking only 3 cups to start with for a few days then drop it to 2 cups per day. Avoid going out and getting a soda instead of coffee as they both contain caffeine and that will just makes things stay the same or worse since there’s tons of sugar in soda.

What if I don’t have any problems and feel great?

If you drink several cups of coffee or soda (anything with caffeine) then you should still cut down. You may really feel fine but I guarantee that you will feel even better if you reduce your caffeine intake. Your goal should still be to reduce it by half to start with and when you feel the need for a drink, get something like water. The best tasting water is reverse osmosis filtered water which can be found at many grocery stores and convenient stores. Soda and coffee only make you thirstier throughout the day and they make your organs work harder to get the water out of those drinks and remove the garbage, caffeine, etc. Drinking some water is the best solution to any caffeine problems. If you are always craving some type of drink with caffeine but you just don’t feel like having some water then get some juice or even a sports drink in the meantime and maybe have only one drink during the day that has caffeine.

This caffeine addiction needs to be stopped but it can only be stopped by you.

Other benefits of less caffeine

I can use my own mother in this example as she used to drink lots of coffee and also smoke cigarettes. Most people who were heavy drinkers of coffee usually were noted to be smokers as well. When they would go have a cup of coffee they would also light up a cigarette. This is a terrible combination but most people have no idea. Both smoking and drinking coffee really messes up your body’s ability to respond and do the normal things it should be doing throughout the day as well as the way you feel. The benefit of quitting or drastically lowering your caffeine/coffee intake is that most people will tell you it was easier to quit smoking after drinking coffee or the other way around. Once people see that they were able to quit one bad habit, quitting another one becomes much easier so it’s like hitting 2 birds with one stone. Your body will benefit from not having the caffeine anymore and your lungs will breathe a sigh of relief after you quit smoking. It will then be time to move on to exercising which will be easy to do now that you’ve stopped drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. Exercise also plays a role here but people who are still drinking coffee and smoking don’t even think about exercising simply because they have been defeated by coffee and smoking but once they quit those bad habits they will want to exercise and they will feel how good exercising makes them feel both physically and mentally.

Comments

[David Slabotsky, R.M.T.]

I came acoss your site while searching for other Typepad folks involved in rehabilitation. I have an endless relationship with coffee. Mostly I have a cup first thing in the morning, and later in the day I may have another cup or a cup of tea. Then I may not have any caffeine for a month or two. But sooner or later I'll be out for dinner or visiting a friend and someone will offer me a coffee and I'll say "Oh, just one cup is ok" and before I know it, I'm making coffee in the morning again! I don't believe I have excessive amounts of caffeine, but the amount of time I spend thinking about it makes me realize how deeply caffeine and I have "bonded". Mark Twain had the best line about addiction: "It's easy to give up tobacco, I've done it hundreds of times."
Best Regards,
David

[Self Improvement Tips Free]

Absolutely great info. When i used to smoke i would always have a coffee or a tea (black), it was almost natural to have them both together. But since i quit drinking coffee and tea and replaced them with herbal teas (such as rooibos tea) i sleep better and have more energy throughout the day. i thought i would get tired without caffeine, but i find a proper routine of some cardio and weight training gives me lots of energy and reduces my need for sleep.