For habitual caffeine drinkers, mornings often begin with a lethargic, fuzzy and blunt feeling, as well as – on the worst days – a dull headache. The one thing that will sharpen you up, get you thinking clearly and shift that thump in your head is a steaming-hot cup of tea or coffee. But does that overriding need for a caffeine hit first thing in the morning mean you’re addicted to it? The answer to that question depends on how you define addiction.
“There are a lot of criteria surrounding a diagnosis of addiction or substance use disorder that are to do with the illicit nature of it,” says Prof Jennifer Temple, at the University at Buffalo, New York.
“Are you using this substance at the expense of work or at the expense of spending time with your family, and are you going to great lengths (possibly illegal ones) to obtain this substance? It’s hard to get caffeine to fit the diagnostic criteria for addiction we use with other substances.”
How caffeine affects our brains also differs from the substances we typically associate with addiction.
“Most drugs that can be abused directly bind to dopamine receptors, or they’re inhibiting dopamine re-uptake,” says Temple. “They’re acting directly on the reward centres of the brain, and caffeine doesn’t act like that.”
Temple says she would describe caffeine as habit-forming, rather than addictive. “For the layperson who’s not a scientist studying reward and reinforcement, it’s addiction in the colloquial sense that they’re thinking about with regard to caffeine. So, people feel like they need to have caffeine and when they don’t have it, they feel bad. Part of that is because caffeine has a pretty short half-life, so you wake up the next day and it’s out of your system.”
Temple, a neurobiologist, has a pragmatic approach to her own caffeine intake. “I used to stop drinking caffeine at noon. I would maybe have a cup of tea, but would stop drinking coffee. But I have a kid who is a serious hockey player and in the last year I’ve found myself getting a coffee when I’m in a rink [regardless of] what time of day it is.”
Exactly what can be considered a caffeine problem is something that researchers have been wrestling with for years. In the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, widely used in the US for diagnosis, the American Psychiatric Association proposed a set of criteria for caffeine use disorder.
These are:
- A persistent desire or unsuccessful effort to control caffeine use
- Caffeine use despite having persistent or recurring physical or psychological problems linked to caffeine
- Withdrawal symptoms when cutting intake
Based on this set of criteria, studies indicate 10-13 per cent of adults have caffeine-use disorder. If you think your caffeine use is a problem, research on quitting caffeine shows that gradually reducing your intake is the way to go.
Stopping your caffeine consumption abruptly can lead to withdrawal symptoms that can be quite severe. In a Norwegian study published in Frontiers in Neurology in 2020, several migraine sufferers encountered severe migraines after they stopped drinking caffeine abruptly, instead of gradually cutting down.
Research published in the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence in 2020 identified ‘tapering’ (progressively cutting back on caffeine over 4-6 weeks) as a way to reduce or stop caffeine consumption while avoiding withdrawal symptoms.
In one study, published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology in 2016, participants were asked to reduce their caffeine intake to 75 per cent of their normal level in week one, 50 per cent in week two, 25 per cent in week three and 12.5 per cent in week four. The participants who followed the tapering guidance were still consuming reduced levels of caffeine a year after the end of the tapering-off period.
About our expert
Prof Jennifer Temple is director of the Nutrition and Health Research Laboratory at the University of Buffalo. Here she studies how caffeine impacts humans – particularly adolescents. Her research has been published in journals including Physiology and Behavior, Nutrition Research, and Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews.
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