More Than Anxiety

Ep 112 - How To Enjoy Coffee When You're Anxious

• Megan Devito • Episode 112

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Join Megan Devito, your go-to coach for breaking free from the anxiety cycle, as she shares practical tips, relatable stories, and actionable steps to help you overcome stress, build resilience, and embrace your ambitious self.

In this episode, we dive deep into the complex relationship between coffee and anxiety. Discover why coffee might not be the villain you think it is and learn how to manage your anxiety while still enjoying your favorite coffee drink - even if you're sensitive to caffeine.

Key Takeaways:

  • Understand the connection between coffee and anxiety
  • Learn practical tips for managing anxiety and enjoying coffee
  • Discover mindfulness techniques for reducing stress
  • Explore the benefits of working with a coach

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Megan Devito:

Welcome to the More Than Anxiety Podcast. I'm Megan Deito and I help ambitious women break out of the anxiety cycle that keeps them frustrated and stuck. Get ready for a lighthearted approach that will change what you think, how you feel and what you believe about yourself. This podcast is full of simple steps, a lot of truth, talk and inspiration to take action. So you walk away feeling confident, calm and inspiration to take action. So you walk away feeling confident, calm and ready to live. Let's get to it.

Megan Devito:

Hey there, welcome to episode 112 of the More Than Anxiety podcast. My name is Megan Deito and I'm feeling really good, really excited to be back here to talk with you this week again about all things stress, anxiety, overwhelm, confidence, resilience, everything that makes you be the amazing, ambitious woman that you are, and the things that kind of hold you up and get in your way. And this week, I think it's really important that we talk about pumpkin spice lattes, because I hate them. I do not like them at all. So if you love them, stick with me, because if you are a person who is anxious, who is missing your pumpkin spice lattes or your peppermint coffee, which is really what I like I'm going to help you feel okay about being somebody who struggles with anxiety, who also loves coffee. So I'm going to teach you how to enjoy coffee when you are anxious, in this episode, I swear it's totally possible, as a woman who had 30 years of generalized anxiety disorder and I drank coffee through the whole thing. Coffee was never the problem, and I'm just here to offer kind of maybe it's an unpopular opinion that coffee is still not the problem. So have you ever been in the middle of your latte or your coffee and you notice that all of a sudden, your heart is beating a little too fast and your hands are starting to shake, and maybe your head even feels like it's swimming around, because all of a sudden, you notice that something just doesn't feel right? Have you been there? I know you have, because I have.

Megan Devito:

I sometimes drink way too much coffee, and I would venture to say that on most days, I drink at least three, if not four, cups of coffee, sometimes more. It's worked out for me. There are days, though, especially if I have certain brews of coffee, if I have certain blends of coffee, if I have certain places where, like, say, Dunkin' Donuts, where the coffee seems to be a little bit stronger, I definitely get shaky and it feels pretty wonky, but I know that I overdid it. If that sounds like something that you've experienced and you're like, yes, but that's when I crumble. That's what we're going to cover today. So I want to talk about really what the whole problem is and then go into some of the details so that you understand where I'm coming from and why I can tell you with confidence that you can enjoy coffee even when you are anxious, without letting it turn into an anxiety attack or a panic attack or having to give it up, because I did that once just to see what it was like. To be honest, it wasn't worth it. I'm going to talk about that too. So if we talk about coffee and how it makes you feel and why, most people will tell you whether it's a doctor or a therapist or your best friend or anyone else hey, less coffee means less anxiety. In my experience, that has not been true. Especially, you might notice that if you are someone who's very, very sensitive to how your body feels. That's really the premise of what I want to talk about this week.

Megan Devito:

Let's talk about what coffee does inside your body. Coffee is full of caffeine. Caffeine is a stimulant, just like ADHD medicine. Maybe that's why I drank so much of it for so many years. Maybe it's just because I love the taste and the smell and it has really good, warm, fuzzy feelings. Maybe it's all of it, but for whatever reason, when you drink coffee, it can cause you to have all of those same physical symptoms that you have when you are anxious.

Megan Devito:

Coffee makes you feel shaky. Anxiety makes you feel shaky. Coffee increases your heart rate. Anxiety increases your heart rate. Both of them also can really increase the level of energy that you feel, so that you feel like you have to go faster. That's incredibly, that's probably the thing that's hardest for me is that I'm already a fast person. Sometimes, if I'm having a day where I'm not so scattered, it kind of slows me down and makes me be able to think clearly. Other days it just turns into shaking craziness. But either way, it's never turned into an anxiety attack or a panic attack for me, and that's what's important, because what we want to be aware of is the feelings that coffee causes you to feel inside your body and how those really crisscross with those feelings of anxiety, even though we know it's just the effects of caffeine. So the way that the anxiety cycle works is that when you feel anxious in your body, your brain, because it is a meaning-making machine, will try to figure out, by coming up with all kinds of BS stories, why you feel that way. If you are really sensitive to the way your body feels, that can become a problem. Now here's what's crazy and here's why I really swear that coffee isn't the problem.

Megan Devito:

I had my health anxiety, or my generalized anxiety was largely focused around my health, and when you have health anxiety, a lot of times it can be focused on how your body feels. For example, if you are someone who has a stomach ache and you think you've got cancer, or if you have a headache and you think you've got cancer, or you get the shakes and you think that you've got a neurological disease. I was that person. I was absolutely that person. I thought I had every disease under the sun and I drank a ton of coffee, and that was never what triggered it. Mine came from thinking about other things that maybe someone had said. You know when you hear about somebody that has something wrong with them and suddenly you're like, oh no, now I have it. That was me.

Megan Devito:

So there is a crisscross there, though, because once you start to feel anxious and your brain has gone down that path of trying to figure out why it will cause you to feel more anxious, the more anxious you feel, the more you start to shake, the more your heart speeds up, because now not only does it have caffeine in your system from the coffee, but now it has adrenaline and it probably has a little bit of cortisol too, because you're starting to stress out. All of those hormones combined with the caffeine can cause you to feel more anxious. And that will continue unless you create a stop or unless you realize that you just drank coffee. And for me, knowing that, oh, the reason I feel this way, the reason I'm so shaky, the reason I'm like whoa, like kind of sweaty and my heart's beating really fast, I must have had way too much coffee, and that was always my thought. But if your thought is something's wrong, oh gosh, I hate this feeling. Now I'm terrified. I'm getting this whole secondary anxiety situation where suddenly my body feels really anxious and I don't know what to do with that. That's what can cause the coffee to be the problem, but the coffee in and of itself is not actually a problem. The reason we know that is because there are a lot of people out there who drink a ton of coffee to where they vibrate. You can create that pause. I can help you do that.

Megan Devito:

One of the things that I work on with my clients when they come to me and they say I don't know, I'm just so anxious. Every time I feel this way, I'm terrified. It's okay, let's recognize what's normal inside of your body so that you know what to do with those feelings. Whether it's coming from too much cortisol in your system, too much adrenaline in your body, or from that giant latte that you just downed, it doesn't matter. It's just knowing what's normal for you. Whether it's from stress, whether it's from anxiety or whether it's from coffee, it doesn't matter, it's all about the thoughts.

Megan Devito:

So I want to tell you this story about me trying to do an experiment, really to quit coffee. You know, when you just start reading things on Pinterest and everybody's like my earth shattering experience of giving up caffeine and how my life was completely different. So when I tried this, I was already pretty well into recovering from anxiety. Like it hadn't been too long, I want to say maybe it had been two years or three years. But I was feeling good and I was like, wow, maybe I'm missing out on something, like maybe it can be even better, maybe it really is the coffee. And I will fully admit you guys, I started drinking coffee when I was about me I was probably like five.

Megan Devito:

Honestly, my grandparents always had this thermos on their counter. They lived in this little farmhouse and they had this thermos on their counter and a pot of coffee, so they would just dump the coffee in the thermos. And they also had those really cheap sandwich cookies like fake Oreos, and y'all probably dumped them in milk, but I didn't. I liked them in coffee. I loved the way it smelled, I loved the taste of it. I loved everything about it. So when I was five years old, my grandma would get me a little teeny cup with a little bit of coffee in it and let me dunk the cookies in the coffee. And I'm just here to tell you, if you've never done that, go buy yourself some of those cheap, nasty sandwich cookies from Walmart or Target or Kroger or wherever and get a cup of coffee and just dunk them, because it is like perfection. So at five years old, that's what I was doing.

Megan Devito:

I wasn't an anxious five-year-old. I wasn't anxious until I was in about third grade, and so I had already been drinking coffee. I probably drank a couple cups of coffee every weekend, maybe. I mean, I used to drink it, like my dad would make coffee and I would drink it. I love it.

Megan Devito:

So I decided, though, that, because this has been going on for so long, I probably ought to check out what this is about, like, what am I actually missing out on here? So I decided I'm done, I'm going to stop drinking coffee and see what happens. And that was a mistake, and I thought this is going to be fine. This is not a big deal. I can do this. I've already I mean, I've already figured out how to not be anxious. Surely I can just do this. I mean, it's just coffee, it's not a problem.

Megan Devito:

No, it was a horrible problem, you guys. It was awful. I remember I was teaching, and I was so tired, like so so incredibly deeply tired, that I could barely stay awake. I mean, I was ridiculous. My head throbbed like cannot even describe to you how bad my head hurt, and those two things weren't the worst of it. The worst, the thing that nobody tells you when you quit caffeine is how bad your legs are going to hurt. And I thought, no, there is no way that my legs hurt from quitting coffee. It was like a deep ache down the backs of my legs, from my butt to the backs of my knees, of like throbbing hell. It was so bad so I stuck with it.

Megan Devito:

I took a lot of Advil, I drank a ton of water, I took a lot of naps. I didn't cheat, I actually did it. And so I got about six weeks out. I had no coffee in six weeks, no caffeine in six weeks, and I'm like is something supposed to happen? Am I supposed to feel different? Because I didn't. I did not feel any different. So here I am I gave up coffee. I really, really did it, and it wasn't worth it at all because I didn't feel any better or any different than I did when I was drinking gobs of it all day long. But I did it, which is just another justification to me that it was never the coffee that was the problem.

Megan Devito:

I drink coffee again and it's still not a problem for me. I can drink coffee on my most anxious day and not feel any more anxious and I can drink coffee on a day where I feel fine and I don't get anxious, and there's no correlation at all for me, and that just tells me that there doesn't have to be for you either, when you learn to know what to do with it. But if we can just go ahead and acknowledge how much coffee we are surrounded by most days anyway, and if you are a coffee drinker and I would even go so far as to say if you are a tea drinker, if you're like I don't know why she's so obsessed with coffee, I just miss my tea this can work for you too. This can go for anything with caffeine. I'm not ever going to promote people to start drinking soda because that has a bunch of sugar and that is something that I know will wreck your gut so badly. Yes, I know there are a lot of people that would argue that coffee would, but I would say sugar would be worse. But caffeine in general, if this is a thing for you whether your little red cup that's coming up at Christmas time is full of a peppermint latte or black tea, if you miss that hot drink in your hand the way that I did, let's talk about how we can get you to a place where you can actually have it again and not crumble, because I want you to enjoy your life, I want you to be able to enjoy the food and the drinks that you like and to know that you've got this, no matter what.

Megan Devito:

So let's talk about how that anxiety cycle starts. I mentioned it just a minute ago, but it starts with the physical symptoms, because anxiety itself is just a feeling inside of your body. Yes, it feels very much like if you've had too much caffeine, and that is actually good news, because once you know what's going on, you can choose to say oh, I know what that is and that creates a space for it not to go there. But if coffee isn't your thing or if tea isn't your thing, and you're like, yes, but those feelings are scary, have you felt them before? Because, unless it's the first time in your life, you've ever been anxious, the answer is yes, you have.

Megan Devito:

So what I help people do is I help them learn how to recognize those feelings and to just know that when those feelings happen, when you have those physical signs whether they're from caffeine or stress or cortisol or anything else you can notice those and choose to stop thinking, "oh no, what next? Why am I so anxious? What if it's because of this? What if it's because of that? And that's where we create that pause. We're going to learn where that feeling came from. And if you're like, yes, megan, but I feel this way and I haven't had coffee, that's okay too, because we can still use those feelings inside of your body, the shakiness, the rapid heart rate, the confusion like the brain fog, the feeling like you need to go faster. All of those feelings. We can use those to your benefit, because those feelings, even though they feel terrible, even though they feel awful, are familiar and you have survived them countless times. They have caused you to think a lot of different scary stories.

Megan Devito:

I remember looking back and saying, "okay, I felt this feeling before. I know how awful it is. And this time I think it's probably because my liver is failing or something. And the next time I would be like no, it's because I'm having a heart attack, it's because I have some horrible disease, some horrible tumor, some horrible whatever. And every single time I was wrong. But if I could have gone back to the fact, back when I was still in the middle of that disorder, of saying wait a minute. I know what this is. I know what this feeling is. That would have changed the game for me so much faster than waiting until I was 40 years old.

Megan Devito:

I'm going to teach you how to do that. I'm going to teach you to have confidence that you can trust yourself and resilience for when you do feel that way, knowing that you can go at it again because you are safe and you are strong and you know yourself so well, even when your brain wants to make you think that you're wrong, because it is very sneaky and very loud. I know that. I'm not going to lie to you. I still have anxious thoughts and there are days where I'm like good God, these thoughts are relentless today. But I can also go to a place where I'm like I know this is anxious overthinking, and I know how to stop it. In the past I did not have that skill. So what we want to do is we want to be mindful. We want to just notice.

Megan Devito:

Have I had too much coffee today? Did I have one cup? Have I not drank coffee in a long time? And I was like "Megan said, I could do it and I went and drank a whole pot. If you did that, hang tight, sis, because you're going to feel it. You're going to feel really, really shaky. You know what it feels like when you've had too much. I had a little bit too much earlier this morning where I'm like, oh, my arms are kind of like fizzy and it was really because I had too much coffee, and once it got out of my system I went right back to feeling normal.

Megan Devito:

If you don't know what coffee feels like, you'll make it mean something entirely different, you'll make it mean that you're having a stroke or something. You'll make it mean that you're about to have a panic attack. I've seen Ted Lasso. You've seen Ted Lasso and if you've ever had a panic attack, you know how real that scene is, where he's standing there on the soccer field, or on the pitch, and he's just shaking and all of a sudden he's closing his eyes and you know what's coming and you know that is the most accurate description of what it feels like to fight off a panic attack. It is real. I think that's why that show is so good and why I love it so much.

Megan Devito:

But let's just get mindful, be very mindful of how your body feels and what might be causing it. Was it caffeine? Was it too much stress? Was there an advertisement on the TV? Or did you overhear a conversation in the elevator on your way up to the office, where somebody talked about something that triggered you, because that's usually what it was for me. Did you hear about somebody that you know that has something happen to them and now you are absorbing it and making about you? Mindfulness is being able to step back and look curiously at what's going on around you that caused you to feel anxiety.

Megan Devito:

I help people figure out how to be mindful without falling down that rabbit hole and turning into just a puddle on the floor. So if you want to continue to drink coffee or tea and you are an anxious person, I'm going to give you some really quick things that you can do right now to help you either add it back or to cut back to make it more manageable for you. The first thing is don't feel like you have to quit. First of all, the withdrawal symptoms are terrible and you don't want to go there. If you're already sensitive with your body, do not go cold turkey, because going cold turkey is going to give you a headache, it's going to make your legs hurt, it's going to make you foggy headed, it's going to make you tired and you're going to think something else is wrong. That is not the solution. If you're like, yes, but maybe I should cut back, that's totally cool. The goal is just to learn how to handle those feelings inside your body without spiraling into anxious thoughts. So if coffee is part of your life and you're trying to find a way to balance it, maybe cut back by one cup.

Megan Devito:

Here's a really simple trick that I learned because I do get pretty caffeine sensitive. My caffeine sensitivity is actually pretty high for somebody who's been anxious in the past. But I know if I drink cold brew I'm going to have way too much caffeine and I'm actually just going to feel kind of nauseous because it's too much for me. But if I drink iced coffee, the caffeine level is lower. So if you're like, yes, Megan, but I love cold coffee, that's okay.

Megan Devito:

Switch from cold brew to iced coffee. I know that cold brew is smooth and it tastes so good. Switch from a grande to a tall. You still can have it. But if you look at caffeine levels in different coffees, iced coffee has less than cold brew. Dark roasts have less than light roasts. I know that seems backward to a lot of people. Don't drink the light roast coffee. It has more caffeine. Drink the dark roast If you don't like heavy coffee. I don't understand that, but I also know that some people don't like I'm in it, like I want it to be like dirt. I want it to be really heavy, black. I don't. Don't put sugar in my coffee, please. Maybe a tiny, tiny bit of cream. But I'm a black coffee girl, so I like it dark, I like it heavy and that actually has less caffeine.

Megan Devito:

So there's a couple of simple switches that you can do right now. Another thing that you can do is just realize that some days your body is going to produce more cortisol, and that is okay, especially if you are a woman in your forties where you're like something is wrong. My hormones are wonky. There will be days where your body has more cortisol, where you are more tired, where you're more emotional. Just recognize that on those days you might feel more anxious anyway and you might not need quite as much coffee because you're already riding a little bit higher on other energy. But recognizing where it's coming from again goes back to that mindfulness that allows you to enjoy what you want to enjoy.

Megan Devito:

Also, remember that you can use coffee as a treat and it doesn't have to be something that you have to have every single day unless you want it. It is special cup season. For me, that red cup is so, so there's something about that red cup. I know it's silly, it's just a red paper cup, but I love it. Maybe it's like that holiday feeling that I love. I love peppermint. One pump of peppermint in my black coffee is a dream. So being able to find enjoyment in that and finding ways that you can actually use that coffee, even with the caffeine, to bring some peace and some calm into your life. This

Megan Devito:

is so silly. I feel like I'm doing a giant commercial for Starbucks. I'm not trying to totally promote Starbucks. If you like Bigby or you like Duncan or you love your sweet little local coffee shop like Brewha, where I live, is amazing. I go there and work every once in a while. It's a great spot to be, but wherever you're getting it, it can be a treat. It can be something that actually brings relaxation and connection with other people into your life, and those things also can help you lower anxiety. So I hope this was hopeful and I hope this gave you a little bit of excitement and help you understand that it's really not the coffee. It's actually what you're thinking about how your body feels.

Megan Devito:

If you would like to learn more about how you can manage anxiety, how you can lower your stress levels, how you can navigate perimenopause and start feeling more confident and resilient, talk to me. It's so, so simple. My DMs are always open. You can shoot me a message or jump over to my website and schedule a time to talk with me. We'll get on the phone, we'll have a conversation about what you want that you can't have right now and maybe that is coffee or maybe it is something else entirely and we'll come up with a way to help you get closer to having what you want. I'm gonna tell you exactly what you need to do. That's different than what you're doing now and what's keeping you stuck.

Megan Devito:

All right, you guys, I hope this was helpful. I hope this kind of kicked off November for you in a way that you can go get the red cup or whatever color cup your coffee place has pink, maybe a pink cup if you're a Dunkin' fan and that you feel a little bit excited, a little bit more hopeful and a little bit more joy. All right, take care. Thanks for listening. I'll be back next week. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the More Than Anxiety podcast. Before you go, be sure to subscribe and leave a review so others can easily find this resource as well. And, of course, if you're ready to feel calm, to stop overthinking and have a lot more fun, you can go to the show notes, click the link and talk to me about coaching. I'll talk to you soon.