The people who say they need 3 cups of black coffee to start their day are just addicts with a high tolerance that experience mild withdrawal symptoms each morning.
If you feel like that, it’s your body crying for you to take a break.
If you like an occasional cup of coffee or energy drink to get through something, then that’s fine. But if you ever feel like one isn’t working like it used to, you should take a break from caffeine to reset your tolerance, not up the dosage like an addict.
Coffee actually is an effective medication for my depression. It has similar effects to buproprion on me (which is a amphetamine replacement class drug, though not an amphetamine itself), but to a lesser degree. This is good, because bupropion causes me to have tachycardia and hypomania. This is independent to any addiction, since I’ve gone years without having any. That there are tolerance levels to it, like any drug, doesn’t mean it’s not an effective self medication for some folks. And that correlation has been proven in scientific studies.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9751366/