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I Was Drinking Too Much Caffeine, and You Might Be Too
Caffeine is everywhere. It’s offered for free at office jobs across the U.S., in waiting rooms at the dentist or the mechanic, and it’s even in chocolate. It’s so prevalent that it can be hard to remember that caffeine is a drug.
Consuming caffeine on a regular basis can create a dependency, where you rely on that caffeine to provide reliable energy. You can also build up a tolerance, and need to consume more caffeine over time to feel the same effects.
Recently, I learned how caffeine is processed in the body. A common misconception (one that I believed for years) is that if you drink a mug of coffee, that caffeine will be out of your system “in six hours”. That’s the number I’ve heard thrown around most, six hours.
In reality, that’s not how the body processes caffeine. Instead of working through caffeine in a constant time (after six hours) or a linear time (X milligrams of caffeine processed every hour), it processes caffeine and many other drugs in terms of the drug’s half life.
This means that when the “half life” has elapsed, half of the drug has been processed and half is still in the body. As another half-life elapses, half of the remaining amount of the drug is processed, and so on, until the last little bit is gone.
