Renting your Coffee

The alarm is ringing. You smack it with hopes of another 5 minutes of snoozing. Yet, you really don’t have the time. You must get your lazy butt out of bed and start the day. Although you hate getting out of bed, the thought of a fresh pot of brewed coffee makes it all the better. It is like a dash of sunshine in a dark world. It is the popsicle on a hot day. It is the cool breeze that pushes you from behind when you go for a run.

Okay, so maybe I am being a little melodramatic here. What can I say, I love coffee. Every morning when I get out of bed, coffee is the first thing on my mind. I have my favorite cup; I have my favorite creamer; I even have my favorite spot to sit and drink the coffee. In fact, I am almost positive that I will be unable to start my day if I don’t have my cup of joe! It brings a tear of joy to my eye and a smile to my face.

I am pretty sure there are other coffee drinkers out there agreeing with me right now. In fact, they are actually drooling over the thought of a nice hot cup of coffee right now. Because of that, we probably need to take a small break to go refresh our cup.

So now that you are back from your break, I am going to try to get on with my point before you must excuse yourself again to either use the bathroom or fill up another cup of coffee. Have you ever noticed drinking a cup of coffee seems to have you using the bathroom frequently throughout the day?

While I have drank my fair share of coffee, it seems to it make the bathroom my destination of choice. Even with only a quarter of a cup out of the way, I find I must pee again and again… and again in another five minutes. While this is irritating, it isn’t nearly irritating enough to get me to stop drinking coffee all together. However, it does make me wonder why coffee always makes us have to pee.

Now it is common knowledge that caffeine is a diuretic and a stimulant. And coffee, well, has a ton of caffeine in it. (At least the coffee I make!) This being said, caffeine has two major effects on your body.

First off, caffeine is a stimulant. That means it will bring up your heart rate, cause your blood vessels to dilate, and will probably give you energy… and lots of it… which might be why people get jittery when drinking a lot of coffee.

It is also a diuretic. This causes your kidneys to put more water into the urine than normal, causing your bladder to fill faster. In addition, diuretics also slow the body’s release of ADH, “anti diuretic hormone.” ADH tells the body that you don’t have to pee. The purpose of the ADH is to conserve body water by regulating the amount lost through urine. It is pretty much the “green” hormone in your body, not allowing your own body to be wasteful.

These two aspects of caffeine can make for a jittery, nervous and peeing person. Does that sound like the person that you want to be? Before it even hits noon, you have probably already emptied your bladder at least a dozen times. Yet, don’t be sad. It doesn’t mean you have to give up your coffee. After all, caffeine does have some good effects on the body.

Caffeine can help alleviate your headaches and it can also increase your sense of well-being and your mood. It will literally make you a happy, headache free person because not only does it restrict blood vessels (which will decrease blood flow to your head), but it also increases the levels of dopamine in your brain. This controls our pleasure.

So, the next time you are enjoying a nice big cup of coffee (or maybe you are running to the bathroom for the umpteenth time), you can truly understand the effects both coffee and caffeine has on your system. Whether it is good or bad for you is irrelevant. Knowing that the cup of coffee will dehydrate you and make you jittery is nothing to lose sleep over (unless you have finished off a couple pots yourself), especially when you know that it will put a smile on your face!