It’s no secret that college students consume an insurmountable amount of caffeine. Maybe it’s the long nights studying or the long days of classes- whatever it may be, one thing is for sure…college kids are addicted.

If you ask any person on this campus, I am almost certain they will say they have at least a cup of coffee a day- at least. Most people will have triple that. It’s honestly kind of crazy how dependent everyone has become on it. It could be a comfort thing, or it could be a performance thing, who knows. Some people have said that they just need to have some sort of caffeine in their day to feel normal. Other people have said that they don’t perform well without it. 

As someone who used to drink an obscene amount of caffeine, I can say it was because I felt like it boosted my performance. In reality, it just made me one sleep-deprived-looney. I won’t say that taking any amount of caffeine is bad because it’s not. I still drink coffee in the morning and a V8 energy drink in the afternoon, which contains less caffeine than coffee. It has just become part of my everyday routine. I think having a routine is a prominent thing for a lot of people. The structure of the thing helps keep people calm and disciplined. When caffeine becomes a part of that routine, it is hard to break the habit of how much you are truly ingesting. 

Now, if you didn’t know, 400 mg of caffeine is the recommended maximum for a person. In a cup of coffee, you reach around 100 mg or less, which means you could have four cups of coffee a day and still be okay. However, these numbers are the recommendation for healthy adults. It alters and changes depending on what your health looks like. Most people I know are already aware of the maximum caffeine number, which is quite telling of how concerned they are with getting some sort of caffeine buzz. Most of the time, people who know the maximum daily value of caffeine only know it because they don’t want to exceed it, which means they are taking enough to where they might be close. 

If you look around during finals and midterms, you’ll see that not only will the percentage of people who consume caffeine go up, but so will the overall amount of caffeine a person on average consumes. It’s crazy to think about how influential like at a university can be on someone’s overall habits and lifestyle.

I’ve talked about this so many times, but I truly believe that real life can not be as hard as college life. Now, I’m not saying that this is applicable in every aspect of your life because the adult world comes with new challenges; however, I think that college students live and breathe their education. By this, I mean that not only are we going to classes, but we are spending hours upon hours doing homework afterward, working a job, playing sports and being involved in extracurriculars. 

It’s honestly not hard to understand why college students consume so much caffeine. The workload alone is stressful. Tack on real life and learning how to be an adult, and you get one caffeinated crazed college student.