Why are Americans so obsessed with being wired? Between coffee, energy drinks, and now even “enhanced” diet soda staring you in the face every time you walk into your local gas station, I’m starting to get the impression that I’m supposed to be on a caffeine high all day long. I admit the caffeine high feels pretty good. After a nice Venti Cafe Mocha I can move faster, think clearer, and feel happier. It’s great! The “sleepy-blahs” are gone and, usually, so is my bitterness about having to spend my next eight hours teaching customer service to people who need a Venti Cafe Mocha themselves. As a matter of fact, I’M DRINKING COFFEE RIGHT NOW! (Whoa, sorry about that, lol.)

I naturally thought that the American obsession with caffeine was because we work more and sleep less as a culture. This Newsweek article, however, says this is not the case and we either just feel more stressed or enjoy the caffeine high itself. That is a very interesting finding. The more I think about it, the caffeine high isn’t just about clocked work hours versus sleep hours. I think that, as a culture, we have higher expectations for ourselves… and for others. We are under so much pressure to succeed — and the way to succeed is to do things faster and better that we did them before, using less resources of course. Yikes! No wonder we need so much energy.

If you don’t believe me, look at today’s kids. Ask them what they do after school and on the weekends. I am willing to bet that a majority play sports or are involved in some other kind of extra-curricular activity — and probably half of those kids have more than one activity that they participate in. This isn’t including homework — I’ll bet a huge hunk of that “extra-curricular activity” group gets straight As, too. We’re breeding them, folks!

The pressure we put on ourselves doesn’t just make us stressed — it makes us depressed too. We get depressed because we can’t live up to our own expectations. Look at the percentages of people on anti-depressants these days — the numbers are probably almost as high as the self-proclaimed “caffeine-addicts.” And, since society states that successful people aren’t allowed to be depressed, what do we do? You got it… we drink more caffeine!

Regardless of my obsession with success, I will say that I love my coffee whether society tells me I should or not. I’ll close with this: Newsweek checked with the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and it confirmed that a caffeine addiction is not necessarily unsafe as long as we don’t exceed 200-300 milligrams per day. See you at Starbucks!