22 Years in Scrubs Telling Patients to De-Stress. Here's What Finally Worked for Me.

Karen Alvarez, RN | 22 years in the ERLast updated: August 2026

I told patients to manage their stress and ran on energy drinks all night. Wired and exhausted at the same time.

For 22 years I told patients to manage their stress. I was a hypocrite in scrubs. I ran the ER on energy drinks, one after another all night, then couldn't sleep when I got home. I snapped at my kids and cried in the supply closet more than once and told no one. Here's what finally changed.

Here's what changed, in the order I noticed it.

1

The 2pm crash just… stopped

This was the first one, around day five. There's only 40mg of caffeine in a stick, about a third of a cup of coffee, but it's paired with oat straw so the energy stays level instead of spiking and dropping. I didn't hit the afternoon wall. I didn't reach for a second anything. I just kept going, calmly, which I hadn't done in years.

2

Turns out the "energy" I loved was mostly panic

Someone explained it and I couldn't un-hear it. The 200 to 300mg of synthetic caffeine in an energy drink reads to your body like a threat. Heart up, jaw tight, wired. That's not drive, that's a stress signal, and the crash is the bill coming due. YES leans on saffron instead, 30mg, the exact amount used in published mood studies, so I feel awake and clear without the alarm-bell feeling.

3

I started sleeping through the night

I didn't connect my mornings to my middle-of-the-night wake-ups until they went away. Once my body wasn't braced all day, it actually let go at night. I fall asleep faster and I stay asleep, and I stopped dreading bedtime.

4

No jitters, no shaky hands, no random dread

I used to get this wave of nervousness in the afternoons that came out of nowhere. It scared me. Since I swapped, it just doesn't show up. Calm and clear is a weird thing to get used to when you've been wired for a long time, but I'll take it.

The thing I keep getting asked about See what I switched to →

5

Zero sugar, 10 calories, and it tastes like lemonade

My energy drinks were loaded with sugar or fake sweeteners. YES has neither. It's real lemon-lime, 10 calories, and it honestly tastes like a treat, so the daily habit stuck without any willpower.

6

It's cheaper than the habit it replaced

I added it up once and I don't recommend doing that to yourself. Between the cans and the coffees and the stuff I bought to fix the crashes, I was spending a couple hundred dollars a month to feel worse. YES runs about a dollar a day on the bigger supply. That math alone should've woken me up sooner.

7

I stopped crying in the supply closet

The wired-and-exhausted thing that any nurse will tell you is real just eased. I have patience left at the end of a shift now, for my patients and for my own kids.