For about a week from 6/14-6/21 I tracked my impulses associated to my coffee drinking. I found that, overall, I used coffee as a replacement, a substitution for when I don't want to work out, or when I want to eat chocolate, or when I crave emotional foods such as carbohydrates late at night. In using coffee as a replacement for other things I felt more comfortable in many life situations such as getting my homework done or being able to breeze through a conversation with a friend or co-worker. I see things very clearly when I drink coffee, so clearly it helps me slow down and enjoy life because I feel more alive.

However, it can often make me more impulsive, actually, it does compel me to think in a manner that often gets me in trouble due to lack of patience, or aggressive attitudes towards others, but it's also the kind of thinking that makes get out of bed every day.

I traced the source of this coffee habit to my childhood. To a late morning at home when I was about 7 or 8 years old. I remember barely being able to reach the counter, but still, I was forcing myself to get into the habit to drink coffee. I used milk and sugar to balance out the awful taste. My rationality was quite simple: "well, if I'm going to do it someday, I might as well do it now." I found that some days coffee was the only thing that got me out of bed. I used coffee to stay up and watch the World Cup at 3:00 AM -- and missed class one morning because my goal for the day was to not drink a single cup all day. I woke up without a sense of purpose, so I just slept in. I won't bore you with the many details of the pattern I just mentioned. Every day I crave coffee in the morning, before or after a workout, and when I'm with people who make me nervous. I drink out of habit some days, because I have to not because I want to.

My goal is to not exceed 2 cups per day. Someday I would like to eliminate coffee as a daily habit. I'd like to view coffee as less of a substance to take into my system, but as something to be valued and enjoyed. When I began tracking my behavior, I'd been drinking 4 or 5 cups per day. I've never been injured while drinking coffee, but I think that I would be less hyped, my metabolism would be slower, less cortisol would be released and I would be less hungry if I drank less. I'm trying to make good habits around my coffee use, and am trying to move farther away from dependency by identifying exercise, or talking to people, or working on projects that I love, as being similar to my association to coffee.

I don't know why, at such a young age I needed to drink coffee habitually. I don't know why I began running in the morning at age 11 or 12, and I'll never know why I started smoking when I was 17 and quit when I was 21. But I recall these habits were centered around getting myself to do something because, for some reason I felt that it was something I needed to do. Probably peer pressure.

Abigail L. Stanwood