Most coffee drinkers are lying to themselves about alertness, and they don’t even know it.

Ask a coffee drinker why they need their morning cup and you’ll get different versions of the same answer: “It wakes me up!” “It makes me more alert!” “At this point, I just can’t function without it!”

Sure. It was a cute and quirky narrative for a while, but now it’s getting tiring. Because it’s just…so deeply untrue for most of ya’ll. What pretty much none of you will admit is that for most avid drinkers, what you call a “boost” is really not a boost at all, but your brain going back to normal after a night of withdrawal from caffeine, just because your body is so used to it by now.

And I hate to say it, but researchers have compared caffeine’s effects in habitual drinkers against people who don’t consume caffeine in any shape, way or form, and repeatedly found that people who are regularly caffeinated aren’t actually any more alert or sharper than the non-drinkers were the whole time. It’s just that they’re no longer suffering from withdrawal. Psychologist Peter Rogers has spent years defending this exact idea, calling it the “withdrawal reversal”; your 7am iced americano isn’t making up for your lack of sleep, it’s making your nervous system far too accustomed to an unhealthy external intervention.

Look, I’m not saying caffeine has the same effect on everybody. Clearly, the chemical does something to your brain, and if it’s your first time, it might genuinely sharpen you up, especially if you have a low caffeine tolerance. But the truth is…if coffee was genuinely a performance enhancer for regular drinkers, non-drinkers would be worse off than caffeinated people all day, every day, right? And to absolutely nobody’s surprise, they’re not!

What’s more: most people who tell you coffee makes them anxious and jittery are actually doing it wrong to begin with. Videos online show that you’re supposed to take a small nap after your caffeine intake for the effect to truly kick in. Those people who claim it affects them immediately after? Yeah, it’s probably just placebo effect.

So next time someone insists their midnight Nescafe “helped them lock in for the exam,” ask them if they’d be saying that without ever having touched coffee in the first place. Chances are they would’ve functioned better with proper sleep, better understanding of what they’re supposed to do, a good diet, and most importantly, without all this peer influence and pressure to conform to a trend.