Caffeine Essay

The way we observe and interact with our world happens through our nervous systems. It is how we learn about our surroundings and how we function within those surroundings. But what would happen if something was affecting our nervous systems in ways that could both help us and harm us? Truth be told, there is.
Caffeine is renowned for being the world's most widely consumed psychoactive drug, but it is also known for literally shaking up our bodies by affecting our nervous systems. The drug can be good for us in some ways, but also bad in other ways. This makes it tricky and debatable whether caffeine is more helpful or more harmful.
Inside the neurotransmitter, caffeine causes receptors to receive more dopamine chemicals by blocking off adenosine chemicals from getting through. Adenosine is known for preparing the body for rest, whereas dopamine is known for muscle control, pain, pleasure, and emotions.
In addition, caffeine affects involuntary responses in the body by raising the person’s heartbeat, worsening essential tremors, exciting the small intestine, promoting bowel movements, increase in blood pressure, and causes the person to take short, rapid breaths of air. The Autonomic Nervous System goes berserk when a person’s body is on caffeine. Even just a little caffeine makes the heart begin to beat faster than normally. An experiment performed by Kenny Howell, Samuel Lopez, Tiffany Marshall, and Maggie Peters, which was titled Caffeine’s Effects on Heart Rate, proves that the heart rate can be affected by caffeine. In their experiment they gave their subjects 300 milligrams of caffeine. “Our results indicated that caffeine consumption does have a significant effect on heart rate.” As stated by Howell, Lopez, Marshall, and Peters (2003). Their results were significant enough to the point where the subjects’ heartbeat rates added ten extra beats per minute, as compared to the control group (who was given no caffeine at