Coffee & Anxiety

Coffee, anxiety, and fatigue. 

Ahh. This won’t make me anyone’s friend (initially anyway lol). But, if you take this advice and apply it… you could very well come back to me in a month and be happy you saw this post. 

And to be clear… I LOVEEEEEEE coffee. You couldn’t love coffee any more than I do… but I at different points in my life I’ve had to weigh the pros and cons and eventually listen to my body when it needed a break from the stimulation and adrenal response that coffee can invoke. My tension and anxiety have always subsided immediately! 

So here’s the deal. Coffee doesn’t give you “energy”. Caffeine creates a stress response that signals a series of hormonal and adrenal responses that your body perceives as a threat to its survival. This triggers the sympathetic nervous system to go on high alert and compromise other functions like digestion, focus, regeneration etc. to give a surge of chemicals that make the body feel alert. AKA, at a primal level, it’s preparing you to FIGHT or FLIGHT. While this feels good temporarily, energetically it is the equivalent of charging your energy to a credit card with a 500% interest rate for repayment. 

Caffeine and coffee are two huge large picture culprits for anxiety, although most people tend to deny it and say “I drink coffee all the time and it doesn’t promote anxiety”. This is because they don’t feel an instantaneous cause and effect, and are accustomed to the positive feeling of “energy” without knowing how to tap into the other biological responses that are happening and accumulating over time. Most people don’t know what it feels like to not be on this high Alert system because they’ve been on it for so long. 

Consistent, large consumption of coffee leaves you in an energetically depleted, hyper-vigilant state that is very hard to come back from. Add to this the various pesticides, mold and other toxins that are in commercial coffee and the fact that most people drink it on an empty stomach which jacks with alkaline and stomach acid levels and you have a lot of problems. Thyroid health begins to deteriorate, more fatigue, more coffee needed and the cascade of issues compounds. 

One thing that is especially frustrating to me as a professional is to see products known to help with anxiety (like CBD) being added to things like coffee creamers and energy drinks that will only compound anxiety. While it’s a good way to drink coffee, it’s a bad way to take CBD if you’re taking it for anxiety. 

If you suffer from even a tiny bit of anxiety and fatigue… one of the biggest things you can do is cut out all caffeine. Wean off slowly. 

Your body is exhausted because it’s overworked, not caffeine deficient. The more you jolt your adrenals into producing “false” energy in the form of adrenaline, the more you are putting your energetic bank account in a deficit. Yes, that’s what happens when you feel “energized” with a double shot. The same adrenal response happens if you almost wreck your car for example, but we seem to know that that’s not a healthy way to get “energized”. 

It’s not an easy process, but within 30 days you can feel like a different person if you chose to give up coffee and help your body regulate into natural energy cycles and rhythms. It doesn’t mean you have to never have coffee again. Sometimes I do decaf, sometimes I switch to teas, sometimes I do broths or just mineral and amino acid water first thing. But, I am in tune with my body and pay attention to subtle cues that I need less or more of something, and that’s what it boils down to. 

Some great replacements: Non-caffeinated teas, always go for organic. Raw cacao “hot cocoa”. Herbal infusions like Turmeric, And chicory root. Even decaf coffee is an ok choice although still has small amounts of caffeine and effects me negatively if I’m in a super depleted state. I do indulge with a high quality organic and low acid coffee! I definitely don’t feel good with just any ol decaf or regular coffee too often. 

If you’d like a list of my favorite teas and coffees and coffee items (even your filters matter) check my Amazon collection here.

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Love, Zen & Healthy Energy! 🙂

Holly Joy