Have you ever felt the wearing, awful bite of anxiety? A majority of us have at some point. I remember the day I first realized I had some kind of anxiety troubles vividly. I, like many, was at work and one of my deadlines was nearing quickly for an important project I had been delegated to, and my boss stepped into my cubicle and demand to know what the status was. Fear washed over me and hit me in the face like a bucket of ice cold water.
I was cold to the touch, and yet had a film of moist sweat suddenly appear all over my body starting with my forehead, scalp, and hands. How could I respond? I’d indeed been procrastinating. The obvious truth is that my anxiety was induced by a behavioral problem, yes, but also a neurochemical imbalance (which I was causing!). I’d been imbibing somewhere in the neighborhood of five to six cups of gourmet coffee every single day to keep moving, and this was obviously quite excessive.
What I didn’t understand is that most of the coffee consumption was entirely unnecessary. In fact, every single mug that I drank increased my dependence to a greater degree, and by the next couple of weeks was only glossing over the symptoms of caffeine withdrawal that the coffee had itself generated. This daily coffee sipping was causing my moods and stress system to swing violently from one end of the spectrum to the other all entirely dependent on my blood level content of caffeine.
One of the principal ways that coffee can manage to knock us out of balance is by interfering with night time rest. Coffee has a long half-life of approximately 4-6 hours and this means that a mere half of the caffeine in your body is removed a whole six hours after drinking. This consequently means that depending on the overall quantity you drank, and the approximate time of day you drank it, coffee can interfere with your capacity to dive into those deeper levels of restorative sleep.
What does this mean? It means that when you rise in the morning after you are indeed going to be quite sleepy, and probably a bit cranky. The next step in the cycle is that you’ll reach for that pot of fresh brewed coffee, and most likely because you feel so drowsy you’ll consume just a bit more than you really need and therefore put yourself on the verge of a full blown panic attack quite quickly… and all you require at this point is just the right trigger to set the ball in motion.
Thanks for taking the necessary time to run your eyes over this article. Perhaps you would be interested in checking out a few of my other creative works: Gourmet Coffee Beans and Sauna VS Steam Room: How Does One Decide?.