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Caffeine: The Invisible Addiction
How Certain Habits in Our Society Escape Scrutiny
A time is marked not so much by ideas that are argued about as by ideas that are taken for granted. The character of an era hangs upon what needs no defense. Power runs with ideas that only the crazy would draw into doubt. The “taken for granted” is the test of sanity; “what everyone knows” is the line between us and them.
- Lawrence Lessig in The Future of Ideas (2001)
As I look back on my life and all the times I went to therapy for anxiety, it astonishes me how no one — neither the doctors nor the therapists — asked me this one question: “Boy, do you drink coffee or tea?”
I would have said, “Yes, sometimes a lot of it,” and maybe then I would have been asked to stop for a month or two and see how that went.
That never happened.
It was only now, after a whole adult life of drinking coffee and later tea, that I discovered the link between caffeine, anxiety, and panic attacks. Not through a doctor’s advice, but by reading comments under YouTube videos which led me to search for scientific articles and realize just how harmful caffeine can be for some people. Yet nobody talks about it. Why is that?