Despite being a good morning (or afternoon) pick me up, coffee can have some adverse effects on our body.
Stop for a moment to think how much coffee you consume in a day. The right amount of coffee is actually good for health, but over consumption can break our focus by causing anxiety and can also lead to poor sleep. High consumption of caffeine has been linked to a heightening in the body's stress levels.
Quitting the beverage is not easy because most people develop strong dependency on their daily dose of caffeine both mentally and physically. Let's not forget "caffeine is a drug," but if you feel that your intake has increased then it's high time to kick your addiction to the curb.
Murray Carpenter, author of Caffeinated: How Our Daily Habit Helps, Hurts, and Hooks Usexplained in an interview with Science of Us how over time your body finds "its coffee sweet spot."
"Researchers call it a partial tolerance," he says. "You're not just going up and up and up [with how much you consume]."
In an experiment conducted at Johns Hopkins, subjects who were designated access to unlimited coffee of different strengths drank more of the weaker options than stronger brew, demonstrating how people are "figuring out how much caffeine their body wanted and then dosing themselves with it."
A slow but way to reverse the addiction is to cut down the amount of caffeine consumption for a while. Founder of coffee chemistry, Joseph Rivera, suggests to reduce your caffeine intake by half for a few days, then halving it again for few more days, and so on.
"After about a week you should be pretty much back to how you were without drinking caffeine," he said.
"When you take caffeine, it constricts your blood vessels. That's why a lot of times, when you don't take it, the vessels relax and they create a pressure in your brain, " he continued, explaining that when these stretch out and press against the nerve this leads to a headache.
There are some other ways to control your caffeine intake, such as replacing it with herbal coffee or with green tea. You don't have to give up caffeine entirely, all you need to do is controlling your intakes.