One Way to Reduce Anxiety: Check Your Caffeine Intake
Feeling anxious, trouble sleeping? Reduce your hidden caffeine intake.
Posted February 2, 2026 | Reviewed by Michelle Quirk
Feeling anxious? Is your heart racing? Are you having trouble sleeping ? Are you taking a long time to fall asleep, thoughts zinging? Once you finally fall asleep, do you toss and turn and wake up frequently during the night? Besides any other events in your life you may be experiencing that might be making you anxious, check your caffeine intake. If you’re taking in too much, that’s something you can easily remedy to take the edge off your anxiety .
Too much caffeine can certainly speed up your heartbeat and interrupt your sleep and make you nauseous. Some people even experience panic attacks when taking in too much caffeine.
There are many hidden or half-hidden sources of caffeine that can add up throughout the day to tip you over the edge from an energized buzz to full-on anxiety. It’s not just the cup (or cups) of coffee or tea you drink in the morning, but also those energy drinks, colas, soft drinks, and even chewing gum, which contain caffeine. Then there’s chocolate, another source of caffeine, especially dark chocolate. While some caffeine is good for you, and other ingredients in dark chocolate are, too, too much is deleterious.
When it comes to coffee, the roast makes a difference in how much caffeine is present in a drink, and so does the way you brew it. The lighter the roast, the more caffeine is left in the beans, while the darker the roast, the less caffeine is present. The longer you brew the coffee, the more caffeine you will extract from the grind. In general, tea has less caffeine than coffee, and green tea has less caffeine than black tea. Teas, especially green teas, also contain components that counter some of the activating effects of caffeine, like flavonoids. This produces a more calming drink, in which the effects of caffeine don’t peak as quickly and take longer to wear off, making for a smoother ride.
Some people are particularly sensitive to caffeine’s effects. This is because some have genes that break down caffeine quickly, and others—the ones who are more sensitive to caffeine’s effects, the “slow-metabolizers”—take longer to break it down, so it stays around longer in their systems. Hence, the trouble falling asleep even if your last cup of coffee was in the morning. Other genetic variations make some people more susceptible to caffeine’s sleep disruption and cardiac effects. Slow metabolizers are more prone to myocardial infarction (heart attacks) and high blood pressure at lower caffeine doses (more than three cups of coffee per day) than fast metabolizers.
One beneficial effect of caffeine is enhancing endurance performance, like exercising on a treadmill to VO2 max. This sounds like a good thing, but here too, your genes and whether you are a slow or fast metabolizer make a difference. Studies show that endurance is enhanced optimally in fast metabolizers if the caffeine is taken one hour before exercise, while in slow metabolizers, it needs to be taken two hours before exercise to have that effect. Timing makes a difference for side effects, too, like anxiety, rapid heartbeat, and sleep disturbances.
Another beneficial effect is keeping you awake and alert if you need to be on task, feel sleepy, or are sleep-deprived. Caffeine can keep a person awake to a certain point, but after that, they crash, making errors in judgment and nodding off to sleep without realizing it. Caffeine also enhances mood through feel-good dopamine reward pathways. It also enhances cognition , learning, and memory . Finally, caffeine is thought to be neuroprotective and may protect from neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson's and dementia .
So how do you manage your caffeine intake to help you perform when you need it, while not causing those anxiety and cardiac side effects?
A good rule of thumb is daily dosage. Whereas 200 mg per day of caffeine will produce positive effects and be energizing, more than 400 mg per day will result in deleterious effects and anxiety in most people. To put that in perspective, one cup of filtered coffee contains 60 to 135 mg of caffeine. The same cup of instant coffee contains 35 to 105 mg, while decaffeinated coffee contains only 3 mg, and tea contains 20 to 45 mg of caffeine. A dark chocolate bar contains 20 to 120 mg of caffeine, and milk chocolate only 1 to 15 mg. Energy drinks can contain as much as 120 mg in one can. So, if you’re drinking a couple of cups of coffee in the morning, a can of energy soda in the afternoon, and a chocolate bar or two, you may have exceeded the amount of caffeine that is healthy and may have tipped you into the zone that makes you anxious.
This will vary not only with whether you are a slow or fast metabolizer but also with age (children and older adults are more sensitive), your size and weight, your sex and gender (women report more caffeine insomnia than men), your ethnicity , whether you are pregnant , whether you are taking other stimulants, whether you are consuming alcohol , and other factors.
How do you know if it’s the caffeine that is making you anxious? One “tell” is if you notice a tremor in your hands when you try to pour that coffee or lift the cup to your lips. If your caffeine intake has tipped you over the edge, try cutting back when you've reached your limit: Substitute a cup of decaf for that regular coffee, or cut out a cup in favor of that piece of dark chocolate.
So, while there may be many things going on in your life that might make you anxious, cutting back on your caffeine intake, especially if you're a slow metabolizer, is one simple fix to bring you down from that jangling high and help you sleep better at night.
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Esther Sternberg, M.D., is the author of Well at Work: Creating Wellbeing in Any Workspace, Healing Spaces: The Science of Place and Well-being, and The Balance Within: The Science Connecting Health and Emotions.
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