I wake up to my alarm blaring, and I quickly hop out of bed to shut it off immediately. It’s 7 a.m., and I don’t want to wake my roommate up this early on a Monday morning. If it were up to me, I wouldn’t be up this early on a Monday morning, but I need to get ready for my 7:45 a.m. class. I put on clothes, and leave to begin my day. Before I go to class though, I need to stop by Whitney to grab my morning cup of coffee. If I had the choice, I’d wake up at 7:30 a.m. and head straight to class, but if I don’t get an adequate amount of caffeine after I wake up, I can’t concentrate the rest of the day due to the massive migraine I have. As a student, I have become increasingly more dependent on caffeine as I have gone farther in my education, and along with that I’ve started to realize the negative effects of having a caffeine addiction.

The College of Pharmacy at Ohio Northern College did a study in 2011 that focused on students that regularly consumed caffeine. It found that 83% of students in the study suffered from negative effects of caffeine, and what almost all of them thought was regular consumption was actually three to five times what nutritionists consider a healthy amount of caffeine. Ingesting this much caffeine is helpful to stay up every once in a while, but more negative effects start to surface when this becomes a regular habit.

Throughout high school, I started to drink more and more coffee, and it started to take its toll on me. Like it’s been found with most addictive substances, I started to gain a tolerance. The number of cups I needed to get a solid kick grew exponentially over my junior year to the point where I was bringing a thermos to school that held half a pot of coffee. Along with the tolerance also came the withdrawals when I didn’t have enough coffee to start my morning. They were fairly minor to start off, but as I started to drink more coffee, I would get terrible migraines when I didn’t have any coffee, and I couldn’t concentrate because I had been using caffeine to help me focus.

Over the past couple years, I realized that I needed to lay off the caffeine, and start to get my addiction under control. I still use it to fully wake up in the morning, but I don’t need it as much to continue the rest of my day. I still get migraines from not drinking it, but they are definitely less severe, and I can generally work my way through them. There are definitely positives to drinking caffeinated beverages, but as a caffeine addict, I’d advise people to moderate their intake in order to avoid the negatives.