3 ms·
A few years ago I traded being permanently sleep deprived and drinking tons of coffee (which I love) for always sleeping 8 hours per night. My productivity has
by staunch 14y ago
A few years ago I traded being permanently sleep deprived and drinking tons of coffee (which I love) for always sleeping 8 hours per night. My productivity has been very consistent and stronger than ever since. No more boom and bust cycles.
- KirinDave 14y agoThis has nothing to do with coffee and much more to do with regular sleep. Neither of which are mutually exclusive.
- staunch 14y agoCaffeine can certainly interfere with one's ability to maintain a consistent sleep cycle.
- enraged_camel 14y agoYep. I used to have very vivid dreams (indicative of light sleep) and wake up often. Ever since I stopped drinking caffeine (coffee, energy drinks, and to a lesser extent, tea), my sleep has been deep and uninterrupted.
- _delirium 14y agoTrue, and I believe partly because people underestimate some time-related aspects. They seem to vary a lot person to person, but a few bits: 1. Peak blood caffeine levels come about an hour after ingestion, at least for coffee. So a 3pm coffee, for example, is really hitting its peak closer to 4pm. 2. Biological half-life is anywhere from 3 to 6 hours, and that's counting from peak blood levels, so it's more like 4-7 hours considering #1. So if you have two cups of coffee at 3pm, you might still have a cup of coffee's worth of caffeine in the blood stream well into the evening. Much worse if you had 3 or 4 cups in the afternoon. My guess is that there will be less sleep disruption if you stick to no more than 2 cups of coffee, no later than mid-morning, which should give enough time for most of it to be eliminated by evening. But not aware of whether there's good evidence on that.
- aaronblohowiak 14y agoAlso some people, such as myself, metabolize caffeine at a slower rate due to genetics. SNP rs762551
- stephengillie 14y agoRecently I switched work schedules from overnight to mornings and held my coffee consumption constant (at about 5 cups a day, gotta love the MS Starbucks machine). My productivity has since gone up, I sleep better, and my moods have improved.
- pizza 14y agoWouldn't you rather have the best of both worlds? Coffee and a regular sleep cycle?
- jsz0 14y agoThat's what I do. It's always funny to me how a lot of people want to jump from drinking tons of coffee to no coffee. There's a happy medium in-between. I drink a lot of coffee but I do ramp down my caffeine over the course of a day. Start with full caff, then down to half in the afternoon, finally to decaf in the evening though sometimes I just skip it entirely. I feel very alert consistently throughout the day except for a short period in the afternoon before I've had some half-caff. I'm asleep within about 5 minutes of my head hitting the pillow.