NHS' Caffeine Addiction

I would say my mom and I have pretty similar tolerance levels for stress and exhaustion. 

My mom didn’t start needing coffee to stay awake until 2013, when she gave birth to her third child and was raising a 6-year-old, 3-year-old, and a newborn all at once. 

I started needing coffee to stay awake when I entered my junior year at NHS. 

Caffeine. It’s everywhere at NHS. Most times when I walk into a classroom I’m greeted by a water ring on my desk from the iced coffee of the person who sat there before me. Students will chug a Celsius as they walk the halls and favor a Starbucks run over a sit-down lunch. 

Sure, it isn’t abnormal to need an energy boost to get through the day. However, in such young adults, does caffeine cause more harm than good?

I thought about this as I stood in the self-checkout line of CVS late last night with a cold La Colombe canned latte in hand. There I was, about to spend yet another $3 of my hard-earned money just for the hope to stay awake through the next morning’s long block. Not to mention the countless other times I had spent $6+ on a Starbucks’ grande iced shaken espresso. Personally, I don’t particularly like the taste of coffee. That’s not why I drink it. I drink it because I also don’t particularly like the feeling of my eyelids gluing shut as I sit in the back of a freezing cold classroom every morning. 

I was walking through the CVS parking lot back to my car when I wondered: where does our need for caffeine come from? And what does our caffeine consumption cost us, in dollars and in health detriments?

Thus, I put out a survey. How big is the NHS caffeine craze? 

Now, I take Psych. The first thing we learn in Psych is proper research methods and various ways to conduct valid research. I know that this was an inherently flawed study with a sample that was anything but random. The majority of the 22 respondents were my friends: girls in 12th grade. Still, the findings are interesting. 

NHS students reported having caffeine at various frequencies, ranging from never to multiple times a day. Most people reported having caffeine anywhere from once a week to most days a week, but not every day. The most preferred forms of caffeine were, as expected, café-bought coffee, such as Starbucks or Pressed, and unexpectedly, tea. I don’t often see people sipping tea throughout the school day (except for maybe an iced chai tea latte), but respondents reported having a cup of tea after school. 

Though most people reported café-bought coffee as their preferred caffeinated beverage, which in my experience, costs $5-7, most people also reported spending between $0-3 on caffeine each day. However, more people combined reported spending between $3 and $7, which proves that caffeine is truly putting a dent in our wallets. 

What surprised me is that 8 of my 22 respondents claimed to have started drinking caffeine before high school. What I probably should have followed up with is a question of how often they were drinking caffeine before high school, because in my experience, the high school workload, especially in my junior and senior years, is the reason I needed caffeine in the first place.

Personally, my caffeine intake is strictly due to a need to stay awake. Many of the respondents agreed with this, claiming that they drink caffeine because of a lack of sleep or because, and I quote, “Lang.”  But, as it turns out, many high schoolers simply enjoy the taste of tea, coffee, or other caffeinated drinks, and view the extra energy as just an added bonus. Students reported feeling more focused and driven during school and extracurricular activities after drinking caffeine. Very few reported feeling shaky, jittery, or otherwise off. Though most did not claim mood shifts after caffeine, one person said that caffeine causes them to have panic attacks. 

Overall, respondents concluded that caffeine in moderation is perfectly fine. Most decided that in the end, caffeine was more beneficial than anything else.

However, because we are relatively young, I have to wonder if we’re in denial about caffeine’s negative effects. And I say this with a four-pack of Celsius in my home fridge. Is NHS’ caffeine consumption really a caffeine crisis?