Coffee And Mental Health

Caffeine, mental health, and psychiatric disorders
Journal of Alzheimer's disease

I'm surprised by how much I enjoy coffee each morning, despite a dairy allergy preventing me from ever indulging in a Café con leche. It would be easy to say that bean juice is toxic, like booze apparently is, but scientists are hard at work to prove you’re better off finding a reason not to drink it. The latest dietary guidelines for Americans mentioned coffee for the first time in its 29-year history, because, as they put it, drinking coffee can help you live longer. The panel of nutritionists and doctors concluded that up to five cups per day is perfectly healthy (keep it below 400 mg of caffeine though, let’s not get carried away).

Today's study focuses on caffeine use in subjects with and without psychiatric disorders. We're all familiar with the increased alertness associated with coffee, so I'm not going to dive into that, but there are other benefits associated with mental health.

This research found that moderate caffeine intake (<6 cups/day) is associated with less depressive symptoms, fewer cognitive failures, and lower risk of suicide. (Anyone else hung-up on 6 cups being moderation?)

The line of healthy/unhealthy intake seems to stop with anxiety. Notably, "patients with panic disorder and performance social anxiety disorder seem to be particularly sensitive to the anxiogenic effects of caffeine." It’s these anxiety-inducing effects of caffeine that I believe deserve our awareness.

Stimulants like caffeine mimic the symptoms of anxiety. This arousal to your nervous system can appear as a rapid heart rate, muscle tremors, or less recognizable symptoms like frequent urination and indigestion. Maybe coffee doesn’t exclusively cause anxiety, but it can certainly make symptoms worse.


TAKEAWAY
Coffee may be ubiquitous in our culture (I'm drinking my second cup as I write this), and it may improve your energy and mood, but make no mistake, it's a pharmacological tool. And like any medicine, you should be aware of your ideal dosage to avoid side effects. Especially if you're prone to worry.