No coffee lover can imagine a day without having a cup of coffee at its start. But hey coffee lovers, have you heard of caffeine overdose? Well, its something that happens when you drink too much coffee. We all heard too much of anything is bad. The same goes with coffee. This article discusses about caffeine overdose, and on what to do if you just drank a lot of coffee.
Coffee is an amazing, energy restoring, magical potion. It makes those long flight delays tolerable, makes you work seamlessly into the night and tastes great with any kind of pastry or dessert.
It's pretty fathomable in these cases, that you might have to drink too much depending on the situation. Well, yes it tastes so good and it's a great pick me up for when you are tired, but if you add up those lattes to all the foods that you consume on a regular basis that contain caffeine, you could end up with serious instances of anxiety.
What are the side effects of too much caffeine?
Basically, caffeine stimulates your central nervous system, making you feel more awake and alert, says women’s health expert Jennifer Wider, M.D. It can also trigger the release of the hormone adrenaline, she says, making your heart rate increase.
It is however, fine in moderation. But consuming too much caffeine can make you feel high-strung, edgy and, of course, very very tense.
The safest consumption limit of caffeine, is no more that 400 mg per day according to USDA. Different people have different tolerance levels for caffeine, you are going to feel really uptight if you go over the 400 mg limit. So it's best to limit our caffeine consumption.
An eight-ounce cup of instant coffee has about 92 milligrams of caffeine, according to the USDA. So you could drink 4 cups of that and be okay. But if your choice of coffee is a grande Starbucks Pike Place coffee, just one of those has 310 milligrams of caffeine in it!
I definitely feel I just drank a lot of coffee. What do I do?
It can take up to 9.5 hours for the caffeine levels in your bloodstream to even decrease by half, says Beth Warren, R.D.N., founder of Beth Warren Nutrition and author of Living a Real Life With Real Food. But just because you accidentally had loads of coffee doesn't mean you're totally fried.
First, start drinking water. “Staying hydrated can ease some of the symptoms caused by an overdose and help the body efficiently eliminate it,” says Wider.
Another thing you could do, says Warren is mild exercise to help your body metabolize the caffeine faster.
Eating foods with potassium or magnesium (like bananas) is also helpful, Warren says. Caffeine wipes out your body's potassium and magnesium, which can cause the tremors and jitters of caffeine overdose.
How to figure out if it's actually a caffeine overdose?
Although a caffeine over dose is not very common, it can however happen when a person consumes a ton of products that contain caffeine within a short period of time. A teenager from South Carolina, died from a caffeine overdose in 2017 after drinking a large cola, an energy drink, and a latte in under two hours, according to USA Today.
You should definitely go to a doctor if you experience any of these overdose symptoms, Wider says:
Difficulty breathing
Confusion
Chest pain
Vomiting
Irregular Quick heartbeat
Convulsions
In extreme cases such as these, doctors use laxatives or activated charcoal to try and draw out the caffeine from the system. This should however only be done under a doctors care.
The best thing to do in order to avoid a situation like this is, to monitor your caffeine intake on a daily basis. If you are unable to curb the coffee temptation, staying hydrated, regular exercise and munching on bananas would come of much use.
