I started drinking coffee when my grandma bought my mom a Keurig machine for her birthday right before I turned 13. As soon as my dad finished setting it up, I was instantly hooked. Using the smallest button, I would make myself a cup each morning before school. Eventually, I worked my way up to a medium sized cup, then large, and eventually to drinking a cup every single day.

When I started high school, I quickly found myself dependent on coffee. With my busier schedule, earlier mornings, and later nights, I found myself drinking coffee more and more to stay awake, sometimes drinking multiple cups a day. If I didn't have some, I would be half asleep the entire day. Things took even more of a turn for the worse when I started college last year.

To put it simply, college turned my whole world upside down, and adjusting to my new lifestyle was really hard. I felt like I was in a constant state of being tired and that the only thing that could get me through it was coffee.

My daily routine began to revolve around coffee. I need to make sure I had coffee each morning and had enough time to make or get it. Having a Dunkin' steps outside of my resident hall did not help my case, especially when Perks members got $1 medium hot or iced coffee whenever the Eagles were playing or when the 76ers and Flyers had home games. I was drinking and buying coffee more than ever before.

If there was a morning that I did not get coffee for whatever the reason was, my day was over before it even began. I would be beyond irritable, more than half-asleep, unable to focus, and get a terrible headache. It was so unhealthy. You should have seen me the week that my coffee machine broke and I had to wait for my new one to be delivered. I think it safe to say that I was addicted to caffeine.

While on summer break, I decided that I didn't want to be so dependent on coffee this upcoming school year. So, I slowly started to back off on my daily cup of coffee and limited myself to one cup of Dunkin' a week. I went from no coffee a day here and there, to every other day, to a few days in a row. It was difficult at first, but it got easier. I just recently went an entire week without a single cup of coffee, and it's been about three weeks since I had Dunkin'.

Since I've cut back on the caffeine, I physically feel a lot better and healthier. I feel more awake. I've had less headaches. I'm in better moods. I've been drinking a lot more water. I don't bloat as much, and I even lost a little bit of weight because of all the sugar that I had cut out of my diet by not drinking coffee everyday.

This is not to say that coffee is bad for everyone and that everyone should give it up. It was having more of a negative impact on my life than I initially realized, and I decided to make a change for the better. I look forward to seeing how I do when I go back to school in three weeks. But I do know that I am not the only college student with a caffeine dependency. If you are someone who struggles like me, it won't hurt to try to cut back a little and see if you can also benefit from it.