Basically, caffeine is bad for sleep (learning and recovery) if taken late enough and significant amounts remain in your system at bedtime. It does note that even having a coffee first thing in the morning does have a measurable effect on deep sleep brain waves. Fast metabolizers of caffeine might be different. Don't drink coffee in the afternoon is probably the take away for most people
I've never been able to fall asleep easily. When I see someone who instantly can, I wonder if they are chronically exhausted from a lifetime of bad sleep. I know it's probably not the case but it kind of makes me jealous.
Any my brother seems to function having a coffee only a couple of hours before bedtime since he was 18. If I do the same I'll not sleep at all and feel terrible the entire next day.
The question is more about would you function better in some way without that, and how much effects vary over the populace.
Caffeine in low doses doesn’t really seem to have any effect for me. Or at least not an acute noticeable effect. I drink coffee out of habit and because I like it. But if I’m on holidays and don’t have access to it, it doesn’t bother me in the slightest.
caffeine seems to accumulate though, very soon it won't matter how late in the day you took your coffee today because there is still some amount in there from yesterday too. Personally I'm trying to drink as little coffee as possible now, sleep is too precious. I cannot risk having this constant negative health impact on my life.
I am a massive caffeine drinker. Like many of us, I monitor my sleep religiously so I have an anecdote. Late afternoon espresso or hot coffee is usually quite sleep effecting.
However - I have found that cold brew does not bother my sleep! At least the brand that I drink. Very strange, but awesome. Cold brew does not have the acidity of hot coffee which is a double bonus if you get acid reflux at night from poor eating or drinking habits. Give it a whirl.
I think it will wildly vary depending on how regular your life cycle is.
As an anecdote I also tried tracking my sleep, only to realize:
- consumer trackers are wildly inaccurate (best we can do is compare them to a "medical grade" reference tracker, which might be accurate or not, who knows)
- there was so many other things going on every day, pinning it down to even two or three factors was just impossible (e.g. I drink more coffee when I have more time to make it, which is related to my stress level and work volume etc.)
- watch data were a PITA to export and analyze separately. I did it twice or thrice and didn't bother after that.
Paper suggests these changes might actually represent *worse* sleep quality. It says "increased brain entropy during sleep has been linked to hypertension and early-stage Alzheimer's disease" and question whether this represents "a deterioration of sleep quality."
As much as I like to scientifically validate my drug dependency, is the EEG work here really that much more rigorous than a polygraph?
I see a lot of domain specific terms like "FOOOF algorithm", filtering signal spectra etc. and the geist of my schooling asks me whether the elephant is wiggling its trunk.
I stopped consuming caffeine and alcohol years ago. My ADHD, depression, anxiety and sleep improved immensely.
I don't really miss em. The only times it's a problem is when other people try to get me to consume caffeine/alcohol because people are weird about it. I'd wager a lot of people don't really need caffeine but our society really pushes it on people. It's also a wicked cycle. Once you get to using caffeine regularly it gets very difficult to operate at the same level without it.
But yeah, regular exercise, good sleep and a decent diet make it not too bad.
Just an anecdote, which is probably meaningless on average but: I've found that caffeine is beneficial to me and I can still gain the benefits of caffeine by drinking very little of it every second or third day. I'm talking about 1-2 sips of a cup of regular coffee. No, it doesn't wake me up like a full cup would, but it allows me to function (especially in feeling stiff in my muscles) a little better without any noticeable downside. Just an anecdote though.
> contrasting 200 mg of caffeine against a placebo condition
Burried in the middle:
> The participants reported moderate caffeine consumption, equivalent to one to three cups of coffee per day. All participants were non-smokers and free of drugs or medicine which could influence the sleep-wake cycle. Subjects also reported no sleep complaints, night work, or transmeridian travel in the 3 months before the recording.
> The participants arrived at the laboratory 6–8 h before their habitual sleep time and left 1–1.5 h after habitual wake up time. Bedtime and wake time in the laboratory were determined by averaging each participant’s sleep-wake cycle from the sleep diary. The total dose of caffeine administered was 200 mg (100 mg per capsule) which is considered to be moderate (equivalent to 1–2 cups of coffee) and induces significant changes in the sleep of young subjects23. Two-piece telescopic hard capsules were used, allowing the ingestion of caffeine without oral contamination, in a double-blind cross-over design using stratified randomization.
I doubt someone drinking 1-3 cups per day would feel that 200 mg single-shot is "normal." That's 2-3 cups in one go. For me, it would be like drinking it around 3pm.
I would fit the cohort. If I take a 200 mg caffeine capsule at 3pm, I get pretty fucked up, and I'm wondering what the self-reported effects were at the time they went to bed. Did they feel normal?
It sounds like this is one of those studies that are meant for other researchers, not the public, because the actual evidence is about effects that don't match daily lives. This type of caffine ingestion would be noticeable, and you'd pretty quickly dial it down if it was felt the way I suspect it did feel.
Did anyone see what the interval from caffeine dose to bedtime was in this experiment? I won't claim to have read every sentence, but I did skim the whole paper, read through the procedure parts, and did a couple key-word searches, but wasn't able to find that figure.
Especially when you consider that similar studies conclude that caffeine has an overall positive effect on brain function when consumed at 200mg per sitting and 400mg per day.
100mg being equivalent to one cup of coffee or two cups of tea. I personally prefer tea as it is milder and the lower caffeine content means I can drink it all day.
Readit News
Grandpa used to wake up at about 2 in the morning to pee, and would have a cup of coffee before going right back to sleep.
So maybe the effects nullify after a certain point?
The question is more about would you function better in some way without that, and how much effects vary over the populace.
However - I have found that cold brew does not bother my sleep! At least the brand that I drink. Very strange, but awesome. Cold brew does not have the acidity of hot coffee which is a double bonus if you get acid reflux at night from poor eating or drinking habits. Give it a whirl.
As an anecdote I also tried tracking my sleep, only to realize:
- consumer trackers are wildly inaccurate (best we can do is compare them to a "medical grade" reference tracker, which might be accurate or not, who knows)
- there was so many other things going on every day, pinning it down to even two or three factors was just impossible (e.g. I drink more coffee when I have more time to make it, which is related to my stress level and work volume etc.)
- watch data were a PITA to export and analyze separately. I did it twice or thrice and didn't bother after that.
Men can comfortably get away with afternoon espresso in a way that women simply can't.
On the bright side, they're less likely to get extreme caffeine crashes for the same reason.
I don't really miss em. The only times it's a problem is when other people try to get me to consume caffeine/alcohol because people are weird about it. I'd wager a lot of people don't really need caffeine but our society really pushes it on people. It's also a wicked cycle. Once you get to using caffeine regularly it gets very difficult to operate at the same level without it.
But yeah, regular exercise, good sleep and a decent diet make it not too bad.
Burried in the middle:
> The participants reported moderate caffeine consumption, equivalent to one to three cups of coffee per day. All participants were non-smokers and free of drugs or medicine which could influence the sleep-wake cycle. Subjects also reported no sleep complaints, night work, or transmeridian travel in the 3 months before the recording.
> The participants arrived at the laboratory 6–8 h before their habitual sleep time and left 1–1.5 h after habitual wake up time. Bedtime and wake time in the laboratory were determined by averaging each participant’s sleep-wake cycle from the sleep diary. The total dose of caffeine administered was 200 mg (100 mg per capsule) which is considered to be moderate (equivalent to 1–2 cups of coffee) and induces significant changes in the sleep of young subjects23. Two-piece telescopic hard capsules were used, allowing the ingestion of caffeine without oral contamination, in a double-blind cross-over design using stratified randomization.
I doubt someone drinking 1-3 cups per day would feel that 200 mg single-shot is "normal." That's 2-3 cups in one go. For me, it would be like drinking it around 3pm.
I would fit the cohort. If I take a 200 mg caffeine capsule at 3pm, I get pretty fucked up, and I'm wondering what the self-reported effects were at the time they went to bed. Did they feel normal?
It sounds like this is one of those studies that are meant for other researchers, not the public, because the actual evidence is about effects that don't match daily lives. This type of caffine ingestion would be noticeable, and you'd pretty quickly dial it down if it was felt the way I suspect it did feel.
I think the paper is simply "caffeine before bedtime is bad for sleep".
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26677204/
100mg being equivalent to one cup of coffee or two cups of tea. I personally prefer tea as it is milder and the lower caffeine content means I can drink it all day.
I think scientists judge each other too much on their statistical analysis and not enough on their experimental design.