Coffee: is it helping or hurting you?
If I had to choose my favorite type of bold bean-vanilla, cocoa, coffee-it would be coffee, hands down. My inner child would be OUTRAGED that I would choose coffee over cocoa, but as I’ve gotten older, there is a certain mystique about sitting quiet in the mornings with a HOT cup of coffee, sipping it slowly and reading or daydreaming. As a mother of a busy 2-year-old, this exact scenario rarely played out, but having a cup of coffee in my hand at least allowed me to pretend.
It turns out, my body reacts pretty violently to even just one cup of coffee. I swing from anxiety to depression and back to anxiety at night. It causes digestive issues and an unsettled feeling that I can’t really even name. As much as I love it, I love myself more and I had to say goodbye. My non-doctor, let-me-live-my-life brain gets SO frustrated by this, but I know that I have to respect what my body is trying to tell me or I’ll face more serious consequences down the road.
There are some wonderful health benefits to coffee. It’s a powerful anti-oxidant, and provides a mood and metabolism boost that can aid your body in greater athletic performance. Coffee just makes you feel GOOD, and your body can use it in many positive ways. However, coffee can have detrimental effects on some individuals due to genetics, health history, and current relationship with stress.
Coffee increases adrenal output, meaning you will experience an increase in cortisol and epinephrine/norepinephrine (adrenaline) output. These compounds are important for alertness and in large quantities, puts you in ‘fight or flight’ mode. When you are in this mode, your sympathetic nervous system takes over. Your body is primed and ready for any perceivable danger lurking. While in most cases this simply provides enough attentiveness to do our jobs efficiently, there are those of us out there (and more every day) who are simply living in sympathetic nervous system dominance-or fight or flight mode-already. Individuals such as myself who are genetically prone to anxiety or have a history of unresolved trauma or PTSD are at a particular risk for the damaging effects of extra coffee-induced fight or flight. Human beings are only meant to be in this mode when under extreme, life threatening conditions (being chased by a bear), and long-term sympathetic dominance is showing serious health consequences.
When the sympathetic nervous system is dominant, the parasympathetic system-known as the rest and digest system-is dormant. Aptly named, the rest and digest system does a myriad of things to help us breakdown our food, absorb as many nutrients from it as we can, and excrete what we don’t use. The parasympathetic nervous system also helps us conserve energy and store it away to use later. When we are in fight or flight mode the majority of the time due to constant work stress, home stress, driving stress, and any other perceived stress, our parasympathetic nervous system struggles to do it’s job. This starts a vicious cycle that goes something like this:
We perceive stress—>fight or flight mode activated (cortisol and adrenaline are released)—>stomach acid production slows and our food doesn’t get digested properly—>We don’t absorb nutrients as well due to undigested food—>Our bowel movements aren’t as regular and healthy—>Our bodies lack the necessary energy to sustain fight or flight mode—>brain tells us we’re hungry—>we reach for the easiest and most readily available food (like processed and high in carbohydrate)—>our bodies run on cheap energy and burn out quickly—>can’t sleep due to not enough sustainable energy at night—>metabolism slows and fatigue sets in—>motivation and endurance for exercise decreases—>need coffee to keep us going—>repeat cycle.
As you can see, getting stuck in this cycle is going to have serious effects on your body. This cycle is partly responsible for insulin resistance and development of type II diabetes. This cycle perpetuates anxiety AND depression-as a drop in serotonin leaves you worse off than before, much like withdrawal from other stimulating drugs such as cocaine. This cycle can leave you malnourished despite eating a relatively healthy diet. Not to mention this cycle disrupts your sleep, leading to an inability to recover and benefit from all the necessary elements you need from sleeping deeply.
If are under an enormous amount of stress, you feel like the weight is on your shoulders, and coffee is the only thing keeping you going…rest assured you’re not alone. I was you. I’m a women’s health doctor, helping women with these types of ailments every single day, and yet I just very recently had to come to terms with the fact that I was consciously perpetuating this cycle by choosing to drink coffee. I had to stop and listen to what my body was saying (more like screaming), and I had to make the decision to make a change. This was not easy, and continues to be a challenge. I’ve had to force myself to evaluate WHY I was perceiving so much stress. I had to acknowledge that I was choosing to continue living in fight or flight mode, and that I could never get out of it by drinking coffee every day.
Coffee may not be the thing that you are personally affected by, but this concept I’m discussing holds true for anything surrounding your health. Not exercising, not eating the right foods (or eating the wrong foods that you KNOW make you feel crappy) are all choices we make daily that affect the health of our bodies and our minds. You may not be ready to take the leap and make a change, and that’s okay. I encourage you to keep seeking information and keep listening to your body so that one day, when you are ready, you’ll know exactly where to start.
Much love on your health journey,
Dr. Chelsea Rackham