Just a day after quitting, you may begin to feel groggy. What you probably don’t know is that these are the first signs of withdrawal. At first, you feel less alert. You don’t want to do anything physically or mentally strenuous, and you get upset easily. After a while, a headache starts to brew, and it becomes hard to concentrate. Eventually, you feel flu-like symptoms, muscle pain and nausea. The drug that causes these symptoms isn’t heroin or cocaine or even nicotine… it’s caffeine. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reports that more than 80 percent of people in America drink it every day. Constantly putting caffeine into your body means that it can never leave your system. If we limit the amount of coffee, tea and soda we drink and allow the caffeine some time to leave our bodies, we will never have to face any of these symptoms.
According to the 5th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), quitting caffeine and experiencing withdrawal symptoms is considered a mental disorder. The drug affects the brain so that you feel a sense of alertness. After consumption, the caffeine gets absorbed into the bloodstream.
Caffeine is also able to penetrate the barrier protecting your brain, much like a molecule called adenosine (a cell that helps with respiration), so effectively that the caffeine molecule takes its place inside the brain. Once the caffeine overpowers the adenosine, you begin feeling more and more alert. This only lasts a few hours,and many feel the need to ingest more caffeine to continue staying alert.
Buzzfeed: the Science and Lore of Caffeine and Alcohol explains that caffeine is not only a stimulant but a stimulant enabler. This means that depending on a person’s age and size, caffeine can stay in your system from four to six hours and can eventually metabolize in the body. There are no long term benefits to drinking caffeine. If you still want the feeling of alertness but don’t want to deal with consequences later, you should drink a cup of coffee rather than three. Drinking several cups of coffee doesn’t necessarily make you more alert than one cup.
The more people drink soda, tea and coffee, the more the brain changes to respond to a person’s habits. The brain produces more adenosine to remain equal to the amount of caffeine, so regular coffee drinkers are soon able to build up a tolerance. Those who have not yet built up a tolerance need to rapidly produce more adenosine receptors to equal the rapid amount of caffeine entering your system. If you are facing any of the symptoms from caffeine addiction, it is not too late to reverse them. The effects of a caffeine addiction are short term. It only takes about 7 to 12 days without drinking caffeine until you are back to normal. Your brain will decrease the number of adenosine receptors back to its normal amount because it will no longer need to balance out the caffeine in your system.
Try to quit caffeine for a week and see how much better you feel. You don’t need to fully quit but you should be cautious of your weekly caffeine intake. You don’t need to drink a cup of coffee every day but every other day is fine as long as it’s not too much. If it’s too much, try cutting out some of the cups you would normally drink.
