From BetterHelp
Medically Reviewed By: Kimberly L Brownridge , LPC, NCC, BCPC Counsel The Mind, LLC
When you think of addiction, you might think of hard drugs or illegal drugs. However, all sorts of substances can be addictive. That includes everyday substances, like caffeine.
Because caffeine is so every-day, people tend not to take it seriously. However, caffeine addiction is real. Here, we’ll talk about how caffeine addiction works in the brain, how to tell if you’re addicted to caffeine, and what to do about it.
How caffeine addictions work
Caffeine addiction works on two basic levels. One has to do with the balance of chemicals in your brain. The other has to do with how caffeine affects your body if you let it get out of control.
Chemically
Your brain works through sending chemical messengers called neurotransmitters to receptors throughout the brain and body. If the number of neurotransmitters becomes elevated for some reason, the receptors can become damaged. Then, more neurotransmitters are required to do the same job.
However, sometimes, neurotransmitter receptors can receive chemicals other than their intended neurotransmitter. This is how many drugs – including caffeine – work.
Some neurotransmitters are stimulants, and some are depressants. Stimulants make you feel energized, and depressants make you feel tired – that’s a little simplistic, but it works for our needs.
Adenosine is a depressant neurotransmitter. Adenosine receptors can also receive caffeine. When there’s caffeine in your brain, it occupies the adenosine receptors so that that depressant molecule can’t get in.
If you’re used to having caffeine blocking your adenosine receptors, and the caffeine runs out … well, we’ll get to that.
Physically and psychologically
Caffeine has a half-life of about five hours. That means that if you have two cups of coffee with dinner at 5 p.m., you have the same amount of caffeine in your blood at 10 p.m. as if you’d had a fresh cup in bed. Give-or-take, considering it takes time for the caffeine to get into your blood. But, you get it.
While coffee makes us feel awake by preventing adenosine from making us feel sleepy, coffee is no replacement for actual rest. As a result, relying on coffee can become a vicious circle of drinking coffee to stay up, the coffee keeping you from getting a good night’s rest, and then waking up and pouring a cup.
Are you addicted to caffeine?
While we have a pretty good understanding of whether someone has a problem with alcohol-based on how much they consume, that’s not necessarily the case with caffeine. That’s partial because caffeine affects different people differently. It’s also because of the varying caffeine content.
Soda and energy drinks can have drastically different caffeine contents in a serving, and there’s usually more than one serving in the standard container. Plus, different sugar content and other ingredients often included in energy drinks can change the impact of the caffeine.
Drink coffee or tea? That’s all well and good; you skip the sugar and most of those mystery ingredients. However, the dosage is still a mystery. How you make your coffee or tea, and the kind of tea or roast and press of coffee that you’re drinking can drastically change your brew’s caffeine content.
Most people find out that they have a caffeine addiction through withdrawal. That’s right: caffeine addiction is real, and so is caffeine withdrawal.
Caffeine withdrawal
It’s true: as far as active chemicals are concerned, caffeine isn’t that bad. Depending on how much you drink, you may never get addicted. If you do, the symptoms that you experience will vary in severity based on how much caffeine you’re used to and whether you’re sensitive to it.
Caffeine withdrawal – which researchers officially started to recognize as a health disorder over fifteen years ago – can range from grogginess and irritability to headaches to flu-like symptoms, including muscle pain and weakness.
If you love the feeling of drinking coffee or soda, it might be because you really love coffee or soda. Also, it could be because you were experiencing withdrawal without knowing it, and that feeling is you getting your fix.
How do you know for certain? Try to go a day without your favorite caffeinator and see how you feel.
I’m Jon, and I’m addicted to caffeine…
So, you went a day without your morning cup and could feel the difference. Now what?
Fortunately, as far as addictions go, caffeine is pretty easy to kick. As long as you watch your serving size and frequency, you never have to stop drinking it completely. Just cut back until you don’t have to fear withdrawal.
Do I have to?
Again, as far as addictive substances go, you could pick a worse crutch than caffeine.
It is possible to overdose on caffeine, though it’s pretty hard. It takes a lot of caffeine in a relatively short amount of time. Remember adenosine? It doesn’t just make you feel drowsy; it allows your body to slow down. Too much caffeine and your heart rate and blood pressure can actually get dangerously high.
Still, the biggest reason to kick your caffeine habit – or at least reign it in – usually isn’t because you’re afraid of your morning joe killing you. It’s because you don’t want to live in fear of the day that you can’t get your morning joe.
Another possibility is that your caffeine habit is kicking you in the pants. If you buy all of your coffee or tea out or stock up on soda and energy drinks to feel functional, it can cost quite a bit.
Maybe you’re not afraid for your health, and you can afford your habit. Well, Aristotle wrote that self-control is an inherent good and that those who can’t control themselves are doomed to be controlled by others. Now, what’s your excuse for not kicking your coffee addiction?
How to go about it – the stepwise method
So, you’ve decided to kick your coffee addiction. How do you go about it?
Some people swear that cold turkey is the only way to go. But maybe it isn’t.
There’s a lot to be said for it if you can pull it off. It’s the hardest way to quit, and quitting is only useful if you manage to stick with it. If you really want to try to quit cold turkey, more power to you. Otherwise, keep reading.
A “stepwise approach” involves gradually cutting back on caffeine until you return to an acceptable level. Getting started takes three steps. First, determine how much caffeine you usually take in. If you like, give yourself no fewer than one and no more than seven days during which you don’t change anything – just to give yourself a benchmark.
Then, decide how much caffeine you want to cut back. You may decide that you want to cut caffeine out of your diet entirely. That’s fine. You may choose to cut back to healthy levels. Decide that you’ll have no more than three cups of coffee, two cups of soda, or one energy drink each day.
Now that you know how much coffee you drink and how much you want to cut back decide how long you want to give yourself to reach that goal. It shouldn’t be impractically short (a day) or impractically long (a year). Your ideal window will depend on how much you drink and how much you want to cut back.
You should end up with a calendar that starts with you drinking as much caffeine as normal and gradually cutting back to your desired goal. Ideally, this system will be psychologically sustainable and will eliminate or minimize withdrawal along the way.
How to go about it – the intake method
There is another way to cut back on caffeine. It may be the way to go, depending on why you want to cut back or quit. That involves changing your intake method.
Energy drinks are toxic for a million and one reasons. If they’re how you get your fix, you might want to focus on switching from energy drinks to at least soda (or even diet soda?). In addition to cutting the caffeine, you’re cutting out all kinds of sugars and mystery ingredients that are at least as bad for you.
Here, there’s a lot to be said for coffee and tea. If you get your caffeine from canned beverages, you have very little control over how much caffeine you’re getting. But, as mentioned above, coffee and tea have loads of variables. If you make your coffee and tea, you can control the caffeine content.
Coffee has more caffeine than tea. Here’s the tricky part: the lighter the coffee bean roast, the more caffeine. The darker the tea blend, the more caffeine. How long you steep the coffee or tea can also give you more caffeine per cup.
Blending your coffees and teas is a fun way to develop your unique flavor profile while finely tuning your control over your beverage potency.
By the way, when we say “tea,” we mean black tea, green tea, and white tea. “Tea” is a plant, but it has adapted to mean “a method of preparing a drink from steeping leaves.” In case you didn’t know, herbal teas don’t have any caffeine at all.
Getting help
If you have trouble kicking your caffeine habit, there could be several factors at play. It could be that you’re more dependent on caffeine than you realized or more to your dependency than chemicals.
If you want to pull out the big guns and kick your caffeine habit, consider reaching out to a mental health professional through convenient and affordable counseling through BetterHelp.**