If you drink coffee every day, you almost certainly have a coffee addiction.

Or, to be more accurate, you have a caffeine addiction. Which means that your addiction could just as well be to tea or cola. But for the purpose of this article, we'll talk about coffee.

Recent research suggests that drinking even a small amount of coffee each day can result in addiction.

How can you tell?

One way is to monitor how you feel when your regular coffee routine is interrupted.

For instance, when you stay over with friends, or spend the night at a hotel, how do you feel in the morning when you can't automatically reach for your coffee brewer?

Or how about when you're running late for work and can't stop off and pick up your usual brew?

When you have a coffee addiction, the effects of withdrawal can be quite noticeable. Here are just some of the symptoms people feel when suddenly deprived of their caffeine fix:

- Headache

- Fatigue or drowsiness

- Depression or irritability

- Difficulty in concentrating

- Flulike symptoms including nausea, muscle pain, and stiffness

According to one researcher, "With regard to severity, 13 percent of people had clinically significant distress or functional impairment. At its worst, caffeine withdrawal involved missing work, canceling social functions, and going to bed with the belief that they had the flu."

For most of us, the symptoms manifest themselves as a sense of irritability and a loss of focus and concentration when at work.

But here is the good news.

If you decide to quite caffeine and kick your coffee addiction for good, then the withdrawal symptoms generally last only between seven and nine days.

Of course, I for one have no desire to kick the habit. Drinking coffee every day must be one of the most benign addictions ever. By all accounts, coffee is good for your health. In fact, it's very good for your health in all kinds of ways. 

And if you think about it, being a regular coffee drinker, even an obsessive coffee drinker, is probably the only addiction people have that is overwhelmingly positive in its effects.

Brew on!

Finally, for your amusement, we have put together some social media comments from coffee drinkers sharing some their more desperate coffee moments.

Learn more about coffee and your health...

About the author: Nick Usborne, aka Coffee Detective, is a writer and long-time coffee enthusiast. Read more…