After doing countless hours of homework, you glance at the clock and see the time. It’s 4 a.m, and you have to get up in just two hours. Crashing into your bed, you wonder how you’re going to stay awake during school, and here is where caffeine appears most glamorous. All it takes is the crack of a can, and you’re awake.
According to an article entitled “Secondary School Students and Caffeine: Consumption Habits, Motivations and Experiences,” published by Nutrients on Feb. 17 of 2023, 94.9% of high school students consume caffeine to some extent per day. The caffeine they consume ranges from sweets like chocolate, beverages like tea and coffee, or the more expected energy drink. The issue faced with today’s high schoolers is a potential overreliance on caffeine, using it as a crutch to stay up late at night to do the work they procrastinate doing during the day.
Because students are allowed to use caffeine as a crutch, this only encourages them to continue doing the same thing. Needless to say, this isn’t good. Staying up late at night over and over again leads to increased stress and anxiety, as well as issues with sleeping once it is time to fall asleep.
Caffeine is a stimulant that increases activity in the central nervous system and the brain. This can result in people feeling wide awake or alert, but the increased activity can also lead to general discomfort. Roland R. Griffiths, Ph.D at the John Hopkins University School of Medicine, ascertains that caffeine can change how a person feels, with dosages of 20-200 mgs mostly producing subjectively positive results, and higher doses of 300 mgs producing subjectively negative results. A single can of Monster has around 150 mgs, whilst a single can of Bang has 300 mgs.
According to BetterHealth, having too much caffeine can result in headaches, heart palpitations, anxiety, and issues with sleeping and staying asleep. This lends itself to a cynical cycle where someone fighting to stay awake now finds it hard to fall asleep. I can personally speak on these issues, as a caffeine-fueled panic attack ended up landing me in the emergency room after three days of no sleep and issues breathing, with a heart rate of over 250 beats per minute.
As it stands, caffeine has zero restrictions in the BPS district, although here at West you won’t find Red Bull, Celsius, or other energy drinks being sold in the snack shop at lunch. However, the nearby vending machine sells Mountain Dew Kickstart, an energy drink with 69 mgs of caffeine. However, we cannot be okay with this. The harms of caffeine are too potent to have such a prevalent usage in schools.
Energy drinks are not something we should allow at schools. This is compounded by a clinical report from Pediatrics vouching that adolescents should refrain from the consumption of energy drinks. The only way this can be done is adding energy drinks to the exhaustive list of things that aren’t allowed at school.
