Coffee and Your Mental Health

Drinking coffee can help you keep your focus when you are tired. Drinking coffee can also make you feel nervous or jittery if you drink too much. However, there are a lot more effects of coffee on your brain and how it functions. What are ways in which coffee and your mental health are related? Some of the effects of coffee have to do with its caffeine content. Others appear to be related to the many healthy antioxidants found in coffee.

Coffee, Caffeine, and Your Mental Health

Caffeine from coffee confers alertness, a sense of well-being, and energy, especially when we would otherwise feel tired. It is the world’s go-to wake me up and keep me awake drink. And when we drink too much (which varies from person to person) we have trouble sleeping and feel jittery. If one’s coffee consumption is high enough there is a withdrawal effect of cutting back consisting of more irritability and headaches. When students drink coffee there is good evidence that it helps consolidate learning. All of this applies to consumption of coffee in normal amounts. When coffee is ingested in toxic levels individuals with schizophrenia experience worsened symptoms and others can also experience psychotic symptoms as well as symptoms of ADHD. There is no evidence that coffee consumption in the normal range has any long term detrimental effects of mental health. On the contrary, it can have significant benefits in some cases.

Coffee and Your Mental Health

Coffee and Reduction of Incidence of Alzheimer’s Disease

Long term observational studies of humans indicate that people who drink coffee have a lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. This is a degenerative condition of the brain that appears to be related to long term effects of inflammation. It has been suggested that the antioxidants in coffee are responsible for coffee’s benefit in reducing the incidence of Alzheimer’s. Interestingly, a study done on rats used one of the antioxidants in coffee, eicosanoyl-5-hydroxytryptamide, in treating rats and found that it helped prevent the rat version of Alzheimer’s! In humans, those who report higher coffee consumption up to six cups a day also turn out to have a lower rate of Alzheimer’s than those who drank only a cup or so each day.

Coffee for Treatment of Depression

We generally think of coffee as a stimulant to keep normal people awake and alert late in the day or while driving at night. Coffee is not generally considered a treatment for depression but that may not be entirely correct. Doctors in Japan evaluated 1992 women in nursing home for caffeine intake and depression. They found that increased amounts of caffeine intake from coffee, tea, or caffeine pills all were related to lower levels of depression in women aged 65 to 94 years. This was a cross-sectional study of symptoms and behavior. The authors suggest follow up studies in which caffeine is used for depressed individuals and in which caffeine and no caffeine groups are studied for depression over time in order to confirm their findings.

Interactions of Coffee and Medications

As we have noted, the caffeine in coffee can make you jittery and nervous. It can even raise your blood pressure. These potential effects can be controlled by reducing coffee intake or going with decaf. However, if a person is taking some medications such as thyroid pills, the effects of caffeine add to the effects of the thyroid medicine and can make coffee more of a problem. Too much thyroid medicine can raise blood pressure and make a person jittery as can too much caffeine. These effects are additive in sensitive individuals. Thus, individuals taking thyroid pills should modify their coffee intake and intake of caffeine from other sources accordingly.




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