Caffeine is an Addicting Drug
Every day, every morning, I feel numb, and dead inside where the world is black and white around me. I always felt tired and couldn’t care less about those around me until I started drinking coffee. The idea of getting coffee fills me with hope and joy and the adrenaline I need to get through my toughest days. The smell of coffee brewing when I stepped into a café shop, welcomed me with pleasantry and the anticipation of drinking it. Drinking coffee motivates me to the point that I can’t live without it. Coffee is my toxic love-and-hate relationship. I want to end my connection between myself and coffee, but I’m on the deep end where I’ve become addicted to the point that I ended up crawling back to it despite knowing the red flags because I was practically color blind.
It occurred to me that we never ask ourselves why we are so reliant on coffee when there are other methods to keep us up and going throughout our days.
The first go-to method we use when we feel tired and need something to keep us going throughout our days is to drink products that have caffeine in them. Caffeine is the world’s most popular psychologically addicting drug that is consumed daily by a certain proportion of coffee, soda, tea, and energy drinks. The effects of caffeine target our central nervous system where it decreases drowsiness while increasing alertness. It can bring positive side effects in certain situations, but there comes a price if one doesn’t manage their consuming habits. Caffeine can boost mental and physical energy, however, due to its mastery of availability to consumers where they can alter their own time of intake, dose amount, and time intervals, a person can become restless, sleepiness, headaches, and withdrawals. Regardless of the risks, we still continue to consume caffeine products that we are unable to stop taking them to the point of becoming addicted which defines caffeine as a psychological substance.
Researchers are having trouble defining whether caffeine is in the category of true addiction to provide concrete evidence to support that position. One example from an article by a team of various researchers such as Udan Sahab in “Neuropsychological Effects of Caffeine: Is Caffeine Addictive?” stated that caffeine is “not truly addictive.” Despite Udan Sahab claims that caffeine is “not truly addictive,” their readings of the Diagnositc and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders where it refers to “caffeine addiction” and “caffeine withdrawal” as a familiar mental disorder. A theory from Sahabs team, which seems to support the claims of caffeine being addictive, is the effects of caffeine itself where it “can produce life-threatening health hazards,” such as anxiety, insomnia, reproduction abnormalities, and even death. His team’s only dispute with caffeine’s easily noticeable addictive characteristics is that it is not accountable for severe health risks based on their readings from the Food and Drug Administration, where the intake of caffeine is categorized as “generally recognized as safe,” than the abuse of a more dangerous drug of addiction like heroin.
The difference between caffeine and heroin is that heroin is categorized as an opioid which is a class of drugs that derives from or mimics, natural substances that are found in the opium plants. Opioids are a type of medicine that is like painkillers with effects that are difficult to obtain since they are created in laboratories. In contrast to heroin, caffeine is very common in modern age society where its adverse pharmacological effects have no value due to how easy it is to obtain them. Despite the availability of caffeine or heroin, they both have similar functions that target our bodies which are the central nervous system in our brains. What heroin does is the exact same effect as what caffeine provides for us users when it comes to the need to feel energized and has the same aftereffects once it wears off. Both heroin and caffeine are two different sides of the same coin, however, heroin or opioids are far more extreme drugs than what caffeine does to us.
CBC radio host Jian Ghomeshi, the voice of the daily art from a podcast by Savin Monique in ProQuest, admitted that he was a caffeine addict, who relies on drinking coffee and energy drinks to keep himself up from his job. He shared his daily routine with his audience about how one day he wanted to crash in the mid-afternoon when he was bleary-eyed, and he couldn’t speak, but later on, his energy would drastically come back to him. The job he does every day and night takes a toll on his mental and physical health from drinking coffee in the morning, one in the afternoon, and a triple espresso at night for his radio sessions. His struggles with the caffeine addiction turn into a psychological addiction where Ghomeshi found the effects of caffeine like a rollercoaster where it has some ups and downs of caffeine giving energy with a small amount of stress, and discomfort.
Even though the love-and-hate relationship between us and coffee will mostly never fade away since we want that spark or boost that lasts in the short-term rather than long-term relationships. Caffeine in our coffee is an invisible psychological drug that we are not aware of from the fact that caffeine builds up in our immune system slowly through age. We all became victims of drinking caffeinated products during our high school, or at the start of freshman year in college where we would either do an all-nighter to finish our assignment at the last minute due to our procrastination before our due dates or stay up late to have fun while we have class early in the morning the following day. There will be pros and cons of how and what caffeine does to our bodies when we consume it when it makes its way to our stomachs. The effects of caffeine are benevolent to us initially until they’ve become thorns on our side.
References
Savin, M. (2010). Caffeine addiction: Ghomeshi’s wake-up call. Toronto: The Globe and Mail.
Uddin MS, Sufian MA, Hossain MF, Kabir MT, Islam MT, et al. (2017) Neuropsychological Effects of Caffeine: Is Caffeine Addictive? J
Psychol Psychother 7: 295. doi: 10.4172/2161-0487.1000295
Counterintuitive Fall 2024 
Overall your claims are unclear, GamersPet. Not limited to this paragraph, let me highlight the overall problem using examples from these few lines:
—I don’t see how this helps you at all, GP. It seems uncertain whether you want to call caffeine addictive or you don’t. Udan says it isn’t; the Diagnostic text says caffeine addiction is a mental disorder. Or is that not what you meant?
—Here you still seem to be hedging. Apparently, caffeine is not a “drug of addiction,” but it results in health hazards.
—Let’s be clear about this, GP. It’s YOUR JOB to determine the LOCAL DEFINITION of addiction, by which I mean how YOU DEFINE addiction for the purposes of this essay, these 1000 words.
—I can’t reconcile what YOU SAY Ajmal says
Do you see why I’m confused what you’re arguing here?
Let’s work on just this one paragraph to start.
Your Introduction is also confusing.
—I think what you’re trying to say here, GP, is that “We all eat and drink things we know we shouldn’t: saturated fats, refined sugar, simple carbohydrates.” Why not just say that? Your job is to be clear. There’s no point trying to sound academic if you can’t be understood.
—I really don’t understand this at all, but I guess it means “We eat when we’re hungry because our bodies need food, but we ingest other things not to live but to change our mood: caffeine, alcohol, nicotine, THC.”
—I really don’t understand this, either, but I’ll try: “We would never think to put caffeine in the same category as addictive drugs like heroin or cocaine, but the evidence suggests that it belongs there even if the consequences of addiction to caffeine are not as severe.”
Do you think you could adopt a similar “simplifying technique” to the rest of your paragraphs? It’s the best strategy for improving your writing.
Researchers who doubt the addictive nature of caffeine have a hard time finding good evidence to support that position. For example, Udan, Sufian, et.al., stated that caffeine is “not truly addictive,” even though their reading of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders refers to “caffeine addiction” and to “caffeine withdrawal” as a familiar mental disorder. Another proposition from them, which also seems to support the claim that caffeine is addictive, is that the effects of caffeine “can produce life threatening health hazards” such as anxiety, insomnia, reproduction abnormalities and death. Their only dispute with caffeine’s OBVIOUS ADDICTIVE CHARACTERISTICS is that it is not accountable for severe health risks linked with the abuse of MORE DANGEROUS drugs of addiction, LIKE HEROIN.
Another article “Caffeine – An Invisible Addiction” by Sidra Ajmal and Laiba Ajmal can back up the claims that caffeine and addiction are not conclusively associated which depends upon the definition of addiction.
Your latest draft is hardly recognizable as the same essay you posted back in October. Massive improvements everywhere.
Regraded.