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Luciana Mendy
Freshman Nico Henry walked into school after checking in at the attendance kiosk. It was far past 7:40 a.m. and there was no doubt he’d already missed his first hour English class to sleep an extra hour, just like how he missed his math class the day before. His missed assignments are yet another thing he’ll have to add to his to-do list which will probably carry over into tomorrow.
He’ll have to stop at CVS after school to get a few Monster Energies to help him get through the night and just push through the spikes of anxiety that the caffeine in the Ultra Peachy Keen Monster drinks can cause. He knew he was just repeating a similar pattern that has warped his skewed sleep schedule into a never-ending cycle. But he couldn’t stop.
“I’ll end up having more stuff to do and I get really anxious, so I stay up a lot later, and I can’t get myself to sleep,” Henry said. “Then when I finally sleep, I sleep for too long, which leads to me missing class and needing to stay up again to make up for that. It never really catches up.”
Teenagers are often warned about the dangers of consuming addictive drugs like nicotine and fentanyl, but one of the most consumed drugs in the U.S. is often overlooked — caffeine.
Though caffeine consumption among teens has been normalized and its effects are often reduced to simply preventing healthy sleep, its addictive properties can lead to teenagers heightening their mental illnesses and becoming susceptible to physical effects from headaches to heart arrhythmias.
Despite these effects, retail sales of energy drinks totaled $10.43 billion in 2015 and are projected to nearly double to $19.15 billion in 2025, according to Mintel.
Henry has relied on caffeine since middle school, where he would have two to three Monsters a day, despite warnings from his psychiatrist.
“I’d probably be a lot better off [without caffeine], and I think I should stop drinking caffeine because a lot of it isn’t healthy,” Henry said. “But it’s just hard because if I were to stop, I would have to get motivated on my own, which right now would be difficult.”
Overconsumption of caffeine in children especially, can lead to negative physical and mental health effects, according to Dr. Kaystin Weisenberger, a resident studying internal medicine and pediatrics at Children’s Mercy Hospital. From an Instagram poll of 230 students, 36% have consumed a “dangerous” amount of caffeine to the point that it caused side effects.
But despite these admissions of caffeine’s harmful effects, the coffee shop still sells about $100 worth of coffee every day and seeing a kid walk into school, iced coffee in hand, is the norm.
Freshman Margot Fair was also introduced to caffeine in middle school. Fair had been struggling with sleep throughout her childhood, and she turned to Alanis Nu since her friends were “obsessed” with the new energy drink.
However, after immediately experiencing side effects of extreme hyperactivity and shaking, she cut her caffeine consumption to the occasional Starbucks drink.
“I feel like there’s a lot of people in school that would never say they’re addicted,” Fair said. “They’re scared of the term addictive because when they hear it they think addicted to cigarettes or addicted to vaping so they would never really accept being addicted to caffeine even though some of them definitely are. So, they just continue what they’re doing.”
According to Weisenberger, most of caffeine’s negative effects stem from the fact that it’s a sympathomimetic, which activates our bodies’ “fight or flight” response. Toxic doses of this can cause elevated heart rates, high blood pressure, nausea, and in extreme cases seizures, heart arrhythmias and death.
While 100 milligrams is often the recommended maximum amount of caffeine for children, there’s actually no proven “safe dose” of caffeine, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. So, if a teenager has a Celsius — which contains 200 milligrams of caffeine — they have then consumed a “toxic dose” of caffeine and are susceptible to its negative effects.
While Henry may not have heart palpitations or seizures, his consumption of caffeine has heightened the overstimulation — physical and mental — he experiences due to his autism.
“It feels like my skin is boiling, and I feel warm,” Henry said. “I can feel my heartbeat in my ears, and I get really stressed out. I feel like I’m going to cry and sometimes I have cried and it’s kind of stupid, but it’s just like feeling overwhelmed. It just feels like all too much.”
Henry’s caffeine consumption also affects him mentally by worsening his anxiety. The “drops” of his bipolar disorder are more frequent as well because of the stress he deals with due to his fluctuating sleep schedule and lack of attendance.
According to Weisenberger, caffeine influences mental health, specifically anxiety, because it’s an “upper” drug — raising your heart rate, blood pressure and fight or flight response. Caffeine being an “upper” drug also means it reacts poorly with other “upper” drugs such as Adderall and Amphetamine since their similar functions heighten the effects.
Weisenberger also warns about the dangers of mixing caffeine with a “downer” drug, specifically alcohol because the drugs send two opposite signals to your body causing serious cardiac issues.
A few months ago, Henry began to take one of the “upper” drugs called Aripiprazole— a mood stabilizer that balances the levels of dopamine and serotonin in your brain — to assist with his BPD. However, since it’s an “upper,” it reacts poorly with caffeine and further worsens his mania. Henry has had to reduce his Monster consumption to two to three a week.
Without the medication though, Henry doesn’t believe he would’ve been able to cut back or make a change to his original caffeine consumption due to his reliance on it for the cycle of work it’s created.
Even with his new medicine, there are times where Henry “relapses” due to the stresses of an upcoming test or homework piling up and ends up at the store buying 450 milligrams of caffeine to drink in one sitting.
“It really is an addiction because physiologically, it’s addictive and mentally it’s addictive,” Weisenberger said. “You have to try to cut back and [then] not have that work. You have withdrawals [and] it requires impairment in your daily life, like if you don’t have caffeine, you don’t feel like yourself, and you don’t have the ability to do what you need to do.”
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders lists caffeine as a disorder that can have withdrawal symptoms, such as fatigue, depressed mood, difficulty concentrating and irritability, but the most common symptoms are headaches.
Junior Lyla Weeks typically has a Celsius during her first hour to help her stay focused and awake at school. Without her regular dose of caffeine, Weeks begins to experience withdrawal symptoms.
“I just get really tired easily,” Weeks said. “I’m less motivated, and I just want to go home and sleep. I can’t get through my whole day and the stuff I have after school, if I don’t have [a Celsius].”
She’s relied on Celsius since eighth grade, and though she tried to decrease her caffeine intake during the summer of last year by sleeping in more, Weeks inevitably returned to caffeine.
She found that even during vacation when visiting Europe — a place where Celsius is not readily available — she then turned to Red Bull to meet her caffeine needs.
“I guess it’s not necessary over the summer to stay awake,” Weeks said. “But it was just like, I was so used to drinking something else in the morning that wasn’t water that I just assumed that I needed it.”
According to Weisenberger, when an individual has enough caffeine to become agitated or experience headaches they’ve consumed a toxic dose of caffeine, which can lead to damaging side effects later in life such as heart palpitations or seizures.
As a school counselor, Susan Fritzemeier works with students who consume lots of caffeine, and although a few come to her to talk about it, according to Fritzemeier most don’t draw connections on how their consumption is affecting them.
Fritzemeier believes that teenagers are especially vulnerable to caffeine addictions due to the aesthetic marketing — bright colorful designs, and fun names like “Sparkling Tropical Vibe”— and their attractions to brands that energy drink companies tend to exploit.
“I see a lot of students walking around with a [Celsius] in their hand, or even a coffee [from the] coffee shop, which the coffee shop is amazing, but I almost feel like [energy drinks] have become an accessory. I don’t think they’re realizing the impacts until it’s like, gone on for several periods of time.”
Just like the vaping industry attracted teenagers with unique flavors and sleek designs, Celsius has over 27 different flavors for teens to choose from and each Alani Nu can has cute and aesthetically pleasing packaging. Fair said this marketing makes it easy for teens to get wrapped up in advertisements.
“I get it if you wake up late or having a cup of coffee or something small,” Fair said. “But I don’t like how they’re advertising drinks with 200 grams of caffeine, and they are tasting so good so people are not looking at it as an energy drink, they’re looking at it as a soda, that happens to make [them] not tired.”
According to Weisenberger, caffeine in energy drinks is technically an over-the-counter drug so the FDA doesn’t require any warnings to be displayed, leading to Celsius advertising how their drinks “accelerate metabolism” and “burn body fat” in bold lettering, while the “caffeine: 200 grams” sits between the nutrition information and ingredients in 5-point font.
This is yet another example of advertisement strategies energy drink brands use to draw in teens. According to Weisenberger, caffeine should never be a primary tool for weight loss and the amount of caffeine needed to sustain weight loss will cause nutrient deficiencies.
School nurse Stephanie Ptacek believes the advertisement energy drink brands use has contributed to the average teenager’s caffeine intake. Ptacek recognizes that asking teenagers to simply cut out caffeine would be a challenge due to the dependence it creates, but she advises them to start by reducing their intake slowly, even by just reducing their intake by one-fourth.
Both she and Weisenberger also advise students to keep track of their caffeine consumption in the first place.
“It’s important that you recognize and acknowledge how much caffeine you’re putting in your body and when it’s a problem for you and that you’re experiencing toxicity and withdrawal,” Weisenberger said. “Bring that up to people that care and say ‘Hey, I’ve started to have these headaches, and I don’t really want to be addicted to this, I need some help.’”
For any student who believes they may have a caffeine addiction or any other form of addiction, and would like help, Fritzemeier and the other counselors along with social workers are available. The counseling office also provides a resource list of local therapists that students can obtain by request.
“If you haven’t drunk caffeine, like Monster Energy, or anything like that, then maybe just try coffee at the very most,” Henry said. “It makes me really anxious when I drink Monster, but at the same time, once you’ve already started, it’s just kind of frustrating, because you know you’re gonna do it again despite the cost.”
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