One Way to Reduce Anxiety: Check Your Caffeine Intake |
Feeling anxious? Is your heart racing? Are you having trouble sleeping? Are you taking a long time to fall asleep, thoughts zinging? Once you finally fall asleep, do you toss and turn and wake up frequently during the night? Besides any other events in your life you may be experiencing that might be making you anxious, check your caffeine intake. If you’re taking in too much, that’s something you can easily remedy to take the edge off your anxiety.
Too much caffeine can certainly speed up your heartbeat and interrupt your sleep and make you nauseous. Some people even experience panic attacks when taking in too much caffeine.
There are many hidden or half-hidden sources of caffeine that can add up throughout the day to tip you over the edge from an energized buzz to full-on anxiety. It’s not just the cup (or cups) of coffee or tea you drink in the morning, but also those energy drinks, colas, soft drinks, and even chewing gum, which contain caffeine. Then there’s chocolate, another source of caffeine, especially dark chocolate. While some caffeine is good for you, and other ingredients in dark chocolate are, too, too much is deleterious.
When it comes to coffee, the roast makes a difference in how much caffeine is present in a drink, and so does the way you brew it. The lighter the roast, the more caffeine is left in the beans, while the darker the roast, the less caffeine is present. The longer you brew the coffee, the more caffeine you will extract from the grind. In general, tea has less caffeine than coffee, and green tea has less caffeine than black tea. Teas, especially green teas, also contain components that counter some of the activating effects of caffeine, like flavonoids. This produces a more calming drink, in which the effects of caffeine don’t peak as........