Make your cup of coffee work for you: learn how and when to enjoy it during the day for better quality sleep at night.
Is Caffeine Affecting Your Sleep?
I have always enjoyed the aroma of a good coffee more than its actual taste. I have never been a big coffee drinker, but, like many of us, I had used coffee to get me up in the morning or keep me awake when I needed to pull an all-nighter. Although coffee became a “fix.” over time, I found myself excessively sleepy during the day, and caffeine wasn’t helping anymore: a sign I was getting sleep-deprived from extended caffeine use and had developed caffeine dependency. Such habits tend to create an unfavorable environment for sleep, resulting in insomnia, headaches, or even unexplained anxiety during the day. Troubles during the night, like frequent awakenings, inability to fall asleep, and nighttime anxiety, may also indicate that caffeine is interfering with restful sleep.
How Does Caffeine Affect Sleep?
Caffeine has many health benefits. Yet, a good cup of coffee consumed at the wrong time can mess up your sleep cycle and deprive you of good quality sleep. By blocking adenosine receptors in the brain, coffee can impact sleep onset and reduce sleep time, efficiency, and satisfaction levels. Even when caffeine is consumed as far as six hours before bed, it could still reduce sleep time by as much as one full hour per night. Moreover, caffeine notably minimizes the time of slow-wave sleep, which is the stage of deep, restful sleep that leaves you feeling refreshed and alert in the morning. On the other hand, caffeine-interrupted sleep can lead to feeling fatigued and having trouble with learning, memory, problem-solving, and emotional regulation.
Why No Coffee First Thing In The Morning?
Your body’s cortisol production naturally surges and transitions you into wakefulness in the early morning. The peak production of cortisol occurs between 8:00 and 9:00 am (under normal circumstances). Once you have woken up, the cortisol surge continues for another 30-45 minutes before returning to its baseline after an hour or so. This means that your body is “naturally caffeinating” effectively; it does not require extra caffeine to wake it up! By consuming caffeine when it is not needed, your body will become dependent on it to replace natural cortisol. Increased dependence on caffeine can disturb circadian rhythms and have many other damaging effects on your health.
For Better Sleep, Take A “Coffee Break”
The traditional idea of a “coffee break” makes sense when we understand that cortisol takes a couple of dips during the daytime. Consuming coffee can supplement our natural energy boosts during these breaks driven by our circadian rhythms. In other words, when we drink coffee during cortisol dips, it will no longer interfere with our sleep!
- Delay your first-morning coffee to at least one or two hours after waking up, preferably not before 9:30 am.
- Create your optimal “coffee break” time during the day and protect it as a time when you can rest, socialize, or have fun for a few minutes while enjoying a good cup of coffee.
- The best time for your “coffee break” is when cortisol levels naturally dip, which occurs twice during the daytime: between 10:00 am and 12:00 noon, also between 2:00 and 5:00 pm.
- Limit your coffee intake to 2-3 cups a day at the said times.
- Make sure not to consume any type of caffeinated beverages at least 6 hours before your usual bedtime.
“I no longer drink coffee to wake up. Now, I wake up to enjoy drinking my coffee!”- Nada Tawil
