High entails Low

Like most people, who have an addiction, I have an addiction; with coffee. I think that is not going to last for long now.

I was suspicious that it results in a formidable low after the initial high. The drinking problem was not too intense, and I was bearing a chronic mild-depression after each day’s work, typically after 3 coffees were down. For me, the chronic mild-depression would have seemed quite normal, because without that people claim, quite rightly, that I pump endorphins in my veins. But the suspicion remained a suspicion, until a friend, my partner in crime, abandoned almost sacred coffee breaks. I asked him 3 days later and he said ‘coffee makes me sad’. I didn’t think much of it. But next day I drank 3 cups of coffee in a span of 3 hours. That day evening was depressing. Later during the day, I introspected; his words struck me.

I instantly made up my mind, to not drink more than 2 cups of coffee the entire day. That was yesterday.

I realized that coffee is probably not the culprit. It just makes us more focused. That prevents my eternal happiness from desultorious thinking; instead focus on matters at hand. Working on matters at hand soon becomes tiring, and it is then that the low kicks in.

Coffee wants us to work, but we are tired; creating a cognitive dissonance. This dissonance is subliminal; hence we cannot point at the real cause of the feeling and summarily term it as depression. People have scientifically proven that insulin level goes down, hence the depression, which is analogous to the tiredness. My friend Shubham’s conjecture 2 stated that ‘I feels sad only if I do not add sugar to the coffee’. That too aligns with my subconscious observations, because it was only few weeks ago that I had abandoned sugar in the coffee, the time when the problem really started.