Why Coffee Makes Anxiety Worse
Coffee is a modern-day socially accepted drug. That is, it’s an herbal medicinal drug. As an herbal stimulant, coffee has a direct stimulating action on the central nervous system resulting in mental alertness. It potentiates the effect of pain medication like aspirin and, since it can also increase the transmission of dopamine and serotonin, coffee can enhance your mood while increasing both mental and physical performance. - It’s for these exact reasons that many of us rely on coffee to get through the day.
But, if you heal from trauma, the nervous system stimulation caused by coffee can be very triggering and lead to either anxiety and panic attacks or worsen depressive episodes. Another downside of coffee consumption is that coffee can lead to insomnia and cause sleeping problems, especially when consumed during the second half of the day. Coffee is also a diuretic, which means it increases your urine excretion. (In order to make up for the water you lose from drinking one cup of coffee, you need to drink about 2 glasses of water.) This excessive urination can over time lead to dehydration[i] and add to the exhaustion of your adrenals and manifest in the form of mineral deficiencies e.g. magnesium or calcium. Coffee can also contribute to blood sugar imbalances, adding further to the triggering impact it has on your body. Additionally, coffee has been shown to exacerbate PMS symptoms in women.
You might have friends that drink coffee from morning until evening without complaining about any issues and yet notice that coffee makes you jittery, wondering how such a broad spectrum of reactions to coffee is possible. It all comes down to your bio-individuality and your stress baseline level.
Remember: Traumatic experiences that we hold in our bodies unhealed can contribute to a changed stress baseline, making you much more vulnerable to any type of stressor. Stressors can be intense forms of movement, emotionally straining situations, work pressure, environmental toxins and radiation as well as what you eat and drink. And since coffee can potentiate the effects of stress, it can worsen the irritability, hypervigilance and anxiety, insomnia and sleeping problems you experience, particularly when your threshold to stress is lowered due to trauma[ii].
When you sort of zoom out to see the bigger picture, addictions are about self-regulating the nervous system with external means. When you haven’t learned from your parents to soothe yourself and regulate your emotions, turning to external means that act on the nervous system is particularly frequent and a basic quest for finding a solution. And coffee is no exception to this. The underlying mechanism is fascinating and once you dive into the sciences behind this, it enables you to get a deeper understanding and creates space for self-compassion and awareness around your consumption.
So, coffee. What makes it such a seductive external means of self-regulation? The key to this is that there is a compound in coffee called methylxanthine that binds to the so-called adenosine receptors in your brain. Normally, adenosine would bind to the adenosine receptors in your brain and this mechanism is in charge of regulating your neurotransmitter release. This, in turn, plays a huge role in your mood, alertness, cognition and memory, your sleep and your circadian rhythm (meaning, your wake-sleep rhythm and attunement to nature’s cycles)[iii]. This means, when consuming coffee, methylxanthine can bind to the adenosine receptors in your brain, blocking adenosine from binding to the receptors. The result is on the one hand, a kind of high impact, as if your body released lots of neurotransmitters while methylxanthine binds to the adenosine receptors (which lasts for about 4-6 hours). On the other hand, this also results in an impaired release of neurotransmitters like serotonin, dopamine, GABA, and norepinephrine[iv], because your body’s innate neurotransmitter regulation via this pathway is blocked. Typically, this leads to the experience of a kind of crash after 4-6 hours when the effect of coffee wanes off.
What does this mean for a body recovering from trauma? In an effort to self-regulate and feel better, you may turn to coffee. Then you may feel good at first, before feeling jittery, anxious, unable to concentrate or having panic attacks. Once the effect of coffee on your nervous system wanes off, you may feel like crashing – suddenly overcome with exhaustion, depression and irritability.
If this is you, I recommend waning off coffee, at least while you’re actively healing. It is one of these beverages that can have massive effects on your whole system. If a beverage stimulates your nervous system like this, it communicates one thing: you’re not safe. And feeling safe is at the very root of healing and recovering from trauma. Turning the overwhelm into safely grounding within and releasing.
If giving up coffee is a no-go for you, I personally recommend not drinking more than two cups of coffee per day and not drinking any coffee after 3 pm the latest. Always eat before drinking coffee to buffer its impacts on your system, especially to protect your system from blood sugar imbalances. If you have a sensitive stomach or suffer from GERD (heartburn), I’d also recommend you avoid it all together or drink cold brew coffee, as its acidity is lower. You can also transition to coffee substitutes made from roasted grains, seeds, or medicinal mushrooms, chicory or carob.
To wane off coffee, start by switching to black tea for a whole week, then green tea for another week. This helps your body adjust to the reduced amounts of caffeine in particular.