WHY DO I ALWAYS HAVE A MORNING COFFEE?

I don't know if I am the only person who always grabs a coffee as soon as I wake up in the morning? It is something I have done now for a few years and I have never actually thought about why, or possibly the psychology behind the reason that I never forget to have a coffee. Personally, these kinds of ideas really interest me. Things like - why and how do we associate negative moments in our lives with situations, and why do they make us feel anxious, even when the situation happened years ago? I could spend so many hours researching about so many crazy and mind-blowing theories and ideas that I would just get stuck in a world of over complicated websites, hopelessly wishing that I understood all of the sophisticated wording.

We live in a world where we are all controlled by one part of our body. Isn't that just crazy? Our brain, just that one thing, controls everything we do, everything we see, smell, taste, hear, it all happens because of our brain. I find this so fascinating. Although all of the parts of our body are vital for different things, the brain is vital to life. The slightest damage causes us to not function properly. It's almost like we are machines. But, we cannot always be fixed. But of course, we are a lot more than that. There's hundreds of chemical impulses that jolt around our body constantly. Hundreds of reactions that are constantly happening. And hundreds of tiny blood cells flowing through our bodies in the blood, fighting off diseases and carrying oxygen, while we are living completely oblivious to it all. For most of us, our brain hasn't even stopped developing yet. It is not actually fully developed until our late 40s. That just goes to show the utter complexity of our brain.

I suppose there are so many ideas around why we repeat the same things every day possibly without even knowing or realising it. I suppose they could be called habbits. Now, I am no psychologist and I have never studied psychology sadly, but I have gathered a few reasons from my research that I find quite interesting. It is said that we form a habit with a psychological pattern called a "habit loop" which has three stages. Stage one is a cue or a trigger that tells your brain to let a behavior happen. Then comes the thing that we do (the habit), followed by the 'reward' - something that your brain likes, helping it to remember the habit in the future.

So I guess this means that grabbing a coffee every morning has become a habitual behavior for me - without actually realising. That must mean that my brain likes the caffeine fix right? Not necessarily. It definitely does make us a lot more alert though. Caffeine increases levels of Dopamine in the brain which gives a feeling of happiness and liveliness. This is why many people tend to jump for a coffee in the morning - it wakes us up when we would so much rather remain in bed for the day! It's like an addiction but we just don't realise. It is actually a lot easier to get addicted to coffee than it seems. As you keep drinking coffee, you liver compensates for the extra chemicals in your diet, enabling it to metabolize the caffeine. Adjustments are also made in the brain. Ultimately, you require more caffeine every day to get to the same level of alertness. Once again, the brain is changing. It's changing at a constant every day.

So ultimately, I suppose the reason is a lot more complex than I had originally thought. Beyond the need for caffeine to wake me up, and beyond the cravings for coffee, there's actually a lot more of a reason. My brain actually expects a caffeine fix every morning as a habit. It is interesting, intriguing, and I guess okay in a way. I don't excessively drink caffeine throughout the day which could cause damage, so I am not quite in the danger zone. However, this would definitely prove to be a hard habit to break. Let's hope I don't have to do that any time soon.