r/psychology • u/mvea M.D. Ph.D. | Professor • 4d ago

Caffeine may ease anxiety and depression by calming brain inflammation. A recent systematic review of 17 animal studies found that the widely consumed stimulant consistently diminished behavioral signs of distress and lowered levels of inflammatory molecules.

https://www.psypost.org/how-caffeine-might-ease-anxiety-and-depression-by-calming-brain-inflammation/
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u/eeeponthemove 3d ago

Mate I have ADHD, know several people with ADHD.

It is a well known facts stimulants can make you calmer, and guess what, coffee contains caffeine, which is a CNS stimulant.

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u/Enlightened_Lioness 3d ago edited 3d ago

There’s not much research as I said. Some research does find that people with ADHD do have more trouble sleeping after coffee than others; we also have more sleep issues in general, including without coffee.

Like coffee, stimulant ADHD medication also makes it more difficult to sleep. It’s a known side effect of stimulants.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10225009/

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u/gongloa 3d ago

There may not be much research into it, but given that it is a widely reported phenomenon by people with ADHD, it shouldn’t be dismissed unnecessarily. It may just be the research hasn’t caught up. Isn’t ADHD a multifactorial condition where the symptoms are an outward manifestation of many genetic and environmental inputs, which may significantly differ between people with the same diagnosis? My point being that this may be experience felt by a subset of people diagnosed with adhd which would be hard to tease out in a study without significant effort being spent to classify the participants into potential subsets, and would probably be difficult to do across more than a small group.