Most people simply view coffee as a useful beverage, forgetting that it often contains caffeine, which is a genuine drug that alters your mood. The extent of coffee's effects on your temper depend on several factors, including your age, your size, your personal sensitivity to caffeine and the amount of coffee you drink. The caffeine in coffee has the ability to change your mental state by affecting your brain chemistry and to influence your emotions by stimulating your nervous system, explains MedlinePlus.
Bad Temper Effects
If you drink coffee, especially if you drink too much or if you have a caffeine sensitivity, you may experience negative effects on your mind and emotions. The caffeine in coffee works as a stimulant on your nervous system, which controls your body's physical sensations, its involuntary processes such as breathing and pumping blood, and your body's physiological influence on your emotions. If coffee affects your temper negatively, you may experience anxiousness, nervousness and jitteriness. Caffeine can make you feel stressed, worried or agitated, and it can even trigger panic attacks or lead to depression, warns Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center. You may feel irritable towards things that normally wouldn't bother you.
Good Temper Effects
Although caffeine can make some people feel grumpy, moderate doses can actually help some people feel better emotionally and mentally, according to MayoClinic.com. Drinking coffee may improve your mood by giving you more energy, helping you feel more alert and productive rather than sluggish and frustrated. Caffinated coffee can make you feel happier and more sociable, and can improve your ability to concentrate and focus.
Good vs. Bad Temper
Coffee's effect on your temper -- whether it makes you grumpy or improves your mood -- depends on two main factors. First, the amount of coffee you drink will influence what affects you feel. Elmhurst College's Virtual Chembook specifies that drinking one or two cups a day usually has a beneficial effect on your mood, whereas drinking more than three cups will usually lead to irritability and other unpleasant feelings.
Second, your personal sensitivity to caffeine regulates how the coffee will affect your temper, even apart from the dosage, reports Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center. If your body reacts to caffeine more strongly than other people's, then you may start feeling irritable and agitated after only one cup. If you have a short temper normally or have a sensitivity to caffeine, avoid drinking coffee.
Indirect Effects
In addition to coffee's direct effect on your mood, it can also cause a bad temper in two other ways. First, caffeine can interfere with your normal sleeping patterns by causing insomnia or restless sleep or simply by postponing your body's natural sense of bedtime. As a result, you may get less sleep or lower quality sleep, cautions MedlinePlus. Failing to get sufficient sleep has a significant effect on your mood.
Second, if your body gets used to having coffee every day, you may begin to experience caffeine withdrawal. This can happen even if you drink only moderate amounts of coffee, and it can happen every day, reports Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center. Technically, while you sleep through the night, you deprive your body of the drug -- caffeine -- that it has depended on all day. By the time you wake in the morning, your body has entered into withdrawal, causing a perpetual morning grumpiness that only another cup of coffee can cure.
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