Energy drinks, cannabis, alcohol, borrowed pills. What students in Nepal actually use to cope with study pressure, why it backfires, and how to stop safely.
Bhatta Psychotherapy7 min read
Share only if you are comfortable — general information, not personal medical advice.
It rarely starts as a decision. It starts as a third coffee, then an energy drink at midnight, then a friend who says this helps him focus and offers you one. Or it starts in the other direction — a drink to switch your mind off after twelve hours of revision, then two, then most nights. Nobody sets out to develop a problem. They set out to get through the week.
This article is not a lecture. It is written for students who already know something has drifted and want to think about it clearly, without being told they are ruining their lives.
More common than the silence around it suggests. In a study of 169 Nepalese medical students, a standard alcohol screening tool was positive in 14 percent, and 11 percent described illicit drug use. In the same group, 64 percent named academic study as their major source of stress, half screened positive for some mental health problem, and 85 percent showed disengagement on a burnout measure.
Read those numbers together and the picture is clear enough. A large proportion of students are under sustained pressure, and a meaningful minority are using something to manage it. If that describes you, you are not an aberration among your peers.
Three or four energy drinks a day is a pharmacological intervention, not a habit. At that level it reliably produces racing heart, tremor, irritability and disrupted sleep — a symptom list nearly identical to an anxiety disorder. Students often then seek help for anxiety while the cause sits in the fridge.
Widely available in Nepal and widely used to wind down. The difficulty is that it impairs the exact functions studying depends on: working memory, motivation and consolidation of new learning. It also degrades sleep architecture even when it makes falling asleep easier, so rest becomes less restorative. For someone already struggling with attention, regular use makes the underlying problem harder to see and harder to treat.
Effective at producing short-term relief and unusually good at building dependence quietly, because it is social and normalised. It fragments sleep in the second half of the night, which is where memory consolidation largely happens. A student drinking to manage exam stress is, in effect, trading tomorrow's recall for tonight's relief.
Taking someone else's ADHD medication is genuinely risky. Dose is not matched to you, interactions with other medication are unknown, and cardiovascular effects are real. It also produces a specific trap: if it seems to help, people conclude they must have ADHD — but stimulants improve short-term focus in almost anyone, so the response tells you nothing diagnostic. If you suspect ADHD, that is a reason for a proper assessment, not for a friend's prescription.
Also read: How ADHD assessment actually works in Nepal →
Every substance above works in the short term. That is precisely the difficulty. Relief that arrives quickly teaches the brain a very efficient lesson: this is what you do when you feel like that.
Over weeks the amount needed rises, and the state you return to between uses becomes slightly worse than your original baseline. Anxiety is a little higher on the days you have not used. Sleep is a little worse. So the substance is now treating a problem it is helping to create, and that loop can close long before anyone would call it addiction.
Several yes answers do not mean you are an addict. They mean the pattern has developed momentum of its own, and that stopping is now harder than it was — which is a reason to address it sooner, not to panic.
This matters for safety. Abrupt cessation of heavy, regular alcohol use can cause serious withdrawal, including seizures, and should be managed medically rather than attempted by willpower. If you drink heavily every day, speak to a doctor before stopping.
The substance is downstream of something — usually anxiety, sleep debt, or pressure that has exceeded what one person can carry. Remove the substance and leave the cause untouched and it tends to return. This is the part therapy is genuinely useful for.
No caffeine after two in the afternoon for two weeks. Or no cannabis on weeknights. One specific change, observed honestly, tells you more about the role it is playing than any amount of resolve.
Secrecy is the main thing that allows a pattern to grow. One person who knows the real amount changes the dynamic more than most interventions.
Most Nepali students who consider talking to someone stop at the same thought: will this get back to my family or my college. What you tell a psychologist is confidential. It is not reported to your institution, and it is not passed to your parents. The limits are narrow and standard — a serious and immediate risk to your life or someone else's — and they would be explained to you at the start.
Using something to get through a hard stretch is a human response to genuine pressure, and the pressure on Nepali students is documented and substantial. The problem is not weakness of character. The problem is that these particular solutions degrade sleep, memory and mood — the exact resources you need to study — so the strategy consumes the thing it was meant to protect.
If you recognise yourself here, you do not have to decide anything today. You could simply read about how we work, and consider whether talking it through with someone might be easier than continuing to manage it alone.
