Everyone has a morning routine.

Some people need to get up early and do a little bit of cardio before doing anything productive. For others, it might be a breakfast pastry and the New York Times on the subway.

For you, however, it’s always revolved around one specific — at times magical — entity: coffee.

Before your first cup of coffee, you cease to exist. Your eyes are barely opened — your thoughts are about as scrambled as the eggs sitting dormant on your plate.

You don’t even know where to begin. That said, once your lips touch your coffee cup, it’s like — bam! — suddenly, you’re enlightened.

At this point in time, it’s safe to say coffee saves your life on a daily basis.

Here’s why you’re not even a real person before you have that first cup.

1. Because you’re in a haze before your first cup.

Before that first cup of coffee, you’re just kind of existing semi-consciously, but you’re not necessarily awake, per se.

In the time leading up to 9:15 am, when you finally throw back that first cup of joe, you’re pretty much a zombie with a large accumulation of eye boogers — and an attitude problem — to go along with them.

That said, after your system is re-introduced to the magic of caffeine, suddenly, you’ll begin to feel your senses return.

Your eyes start to widen. Your body starts to loosen up — your memory from last night starts to come back to you. Without coffee, your day just never seems to begin.

 2. And because you’ll fall back asleep if you don’t have a second one shortly after.

In college, you learned that not one, but two cups of coffee were necessary each and every morning if you had any hopes of functioning on a given morning.

You’ll usually pour out one black cup — and throw it back like a shot of cheap vodka — simply to get the juices flowing.

Then, after your first cup, you’ll order a second one, likely with milk and sugar, to “chill out” for the rest of your morning, as you progressively wake up a little bit more with each swig.

 3. Because it’s “good for you.”

It’s something of a controversial topic, whether or not coffee provides any “real” health benefits or not.

It feels like every other month the New York Times is publishing a different study on coffee, and each time it comes up in the news, it’s either extending your life or killing you slowly with each ground bean.

Whatever the case, you’re pretty undeterred in your consumption of coffee. In your mind, it keeps you regular, which really provides all the evidence you could ever want for why coffee should be an integral part of your daily diet.

 4. Because it’s your hangover cure.

There are a lot of voodoo, wives’ tale, bullsh*t methods of curing hangovers — none of which truly get the job done more efficiently than a good old cup of Starbucks (and maybe one of those scones, too).

After a long night of hitting the bottle, rest assured you’ll need an extra large mug the next morning just to bounce back — but you always do. Caffeine and Advil are like the Bonnie and Clyde’s of curing hangovers.

5. Because you physically won’t get out of bed without it.

Whether you have to walk to Starbucks, around the block, to your kitchen or down the hallway to get coffee, the whole process of obtaining coffee in the morning requires you leaving your bed.

Unless, of course, you have someone around serving you breakfast in bed, which, at that point, I wouldn’t advise leaving bed anyway.

But for the rest of us, it’s important that coffee requires a walk SOMEWHERE because without that walk to actually get coffee, you probably wouldn’t have an actual motivation to leave bed at all throughout the day.

Coffee is essentially the human equivalent of the cheese that lab mice will chase feverishly until they somehow get their fix.

 6. Because it gives you something to do while avoiding people in the wee hours of the morning.

Whether you’re on the subway or walking down a busy metropolitan city, in a perfect world, you really wouldn’t have to come across any human life until, like, after 11 am, at very the least.

As we all know, however, this world is far from a perfect one, and you’ll likely be forced to endure a few stop-and-chats during your morning commute, regardless of what you have to say about it.

Yet when you’re struggling to clutch a large cup of coffee — along with the rest of your work paraphernalia — you create a very difficult target for acquaintances to approach (and shoot the sh*t with), and that bodes extremely well for you.

Throw in a pair of earbuds, and people won’t even look your way (except the creepies — they’re always lookin’).

 7. Because you’re not real until you’re slightly jittery.

Be real — what’s real life without stress? Coffee gives you those morning jitters that make you feel at home and comfortable with your own anxiety. Without the morning jitters, you’ll go about your day waaaay to laxly to ever get any work done.

Those jitters remind you that you have shit to do — they’re what keep you alert. If you were actually comfortable at your desk, throughout the course of the workday, you’d probably fall asleep on your keyboard.

[via EliteDaily]