Source: Flickr
As a student, getting close to the end of the semester can be quite stressful. Assignment deadlines and exams are building up in all the courses so you get overwhelmed and feel extra tired all the time. Then, this stress evolves into anxiety and feeling so down that the motivation to get good grades is lost. You reach a point just want to get over with the semester alive. Does this sound familiar? I bet you’ve felt like this at least once in your life, I know I have! Well, an easy solution to help you feel better is drinking coffee. I know, we usually think of coffee only as a source to keep us awake. Even some of us might have grown up with the idea that drinking coffee is bad for your health, but turns out it is actually beneficial to our mental health.
Coffee has been shown to help decrease depression and stress by boosting your mood and sense of well being. Consuming coffee, inhibits the adenosine hormone in the brain, which is the one responsible for making you feel sleepy and down. This inhibition leads to a state of alertness and it is related to increased dopamine, which is a stimulant in the brain that is responsible for making you feel good. Moreover, that feeling of enhanced alertness is what helps to keep us awake and feel more energized. This also has been proven to increase memory, attention spam and cognitive functions. Drinking coffee can improve our mood and feel help us feel more energized, thus, it reduces stress which helps us be more productive to excel in our courses.
However, everything in excess is bad for your health. Taking excessive amounts of coffee can be detrimental to your well-being. Caffeine is considered a drug, meaning that we can create an addiction to it and if not taken in moderation. If this happens, a day without coffee can actually make us feel worse by producing withdrawal symptoms, which ultimately makes us feel more stressed. Essentially your body gets used to the benefits coffee gives you and stops moderating these hormones naturally since caffeine does it for our organism instead. To avoid this, parameters of the amount of caffeine that can be safely consumed daily have been stablished. For healthy adults the recommended amount is no more than 400g of caffeine per day, which is about 240 ml or three 8oz cups of coffee per day.
As we know, student life can be very stressful and so we need to take care of our mental health if we want to be productive, have good grades, and be happy. Drinking coffee can help make us feel better and also keep us energized and focused in school. But, as everything in life, moderation is key to get all the benefits and avoid the disadvantages.
Andrea Olaizola.
