It might sound crazy: conventional wisdom is that caffeine interferes with sleep. But if you caffeinate immediately before napping and sleep for 20 minutes or less, you can exploit a quirk in the way both sleep and caffeine affect your brain to maximize alertness. Here's the science behind the idea....
September 2, 2014
There is a such a thing as a coffee nap!
I'd thought I was weird, drinking coffee in the afternoon, when I'm groggy and trying to perk up, and soon falling asleep anyway, and getting a pretty nice nap. But science says this is a thing:
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Some people's brain chemistry is affected differently by caffeine. I don't become wakeful from caffeine, though it doesn't make me sleepy.
I had an old friend who told me coffee put him to sleep. He also told me that when he was doing drugs with friends in college in the '60s, he would take the LSD first. If it put him to sleep, they knew it had been cut with amphetamines.
this is true!
During exam week, my med school served coffee at night to perk us up. Twenty minutes later to the amazement of my classmates I was sound asleep. When I woke up I was able to focus so much better.
@Rich I suspect it's not that the coffee makes you sleepy, but that you drink it when you are sleepy, and it doesn't interfere but enhances the sleep.
Maybe I've drank too much coffee, but I can drink coffee at midnight and then be asleep 10 minutes later. I think at this point I just drink it for the taste.
This is true. After a decent lunch, I have been getting sleepy. I stop for a coffee on my way home and in about 1/2 hour I am snoozing in my lazy boy. The best part is after a short nap, I have perked right up.
I do this pretty frequently, so I would have believed this if the link hadn't been to Vox.
interesting. and I thought I was going mad. go figure
I just watched "Christmas In July", in which Dick Powell wins (prank telegram), loses (prankers confess), and actually does win $25K for a coffee company slogan: "If you can't sleep, it's not the coffee, it's the bunk!" (He'd read a new study that said coffee does NOT cause sleeplessness.)
If this works, imagine how you'll feel if you do a Red Bull Nap. drink three cans of Red Bull. Take a nap. When you wake up you will be so alert you'll see in infrared.
When I couldn't sleep at night I used to get up and have coffee and fall right to sleep. And wake up early in the morning, very alert and put in hours of work. Everyone said that was crazy and coffee was keeping me up and so I stopped having coffee at night. But I am going right back to it - "studies show"
- and get up and have bacon for breakfast and dark chocolate for lunch and steak and potato with salted butter for supper with red wine. Cause I care about healthy foods.
I to can attest that this works.
Throughout the 1970s, I was pretty addicted to large amounts of caffeine, from drinking a lot of coffee. In college, the dummy in the bridge game got coffee, and I would often be fairly buzzed by dinner after an afternoon of playing. Then, as a programmer, we had a coffee club, and I got my money's worth. By about 1980 I noticed splitting headaches Sundays, after not drinking caffeine on the weekends, and fond I had to have a cup or two both days just to survive. Not good. Gave up coffee, tobacco, and red meat in 1983, due to what I thought was an ulcer. The red meat went first, followed by drinking tea, instead of coffee. And, my stomach never has acted up like that since then. The problem with tea though was that I was still programming at the time, and needed the caffeine, and so switched pretty quickly from herbal tea to black tea. And, that is where I am, some 30 years later. Bit scared of getting back on coffee, given that I do get the shakes on rare occasion when combining too much tea with some emotion. Most noticeable when trying to type, esp. when commenting on a controversial subject at blogs like this one.
Back to the original subject - I have long taken short caffeinated naps at my desk at work, and partly because I would wake up so much more productive. And, it often has the advantage of solving the problem that had me stumped. That was esp. true when I was still in programming, and I would take those quick naps sometimes just for that reason.
I also get wicked caffeine withdrawal headaches, and periodically stop all intake. That's where I am right now -- no coffee, no tea, no soda. I'm drinking chocolate milk instead (Yum).
Does Iced Coffee also cause naps? Or is it the warmth of the coffee also important? The article says Iced Coffee works. I wonder.
They've known this in the trucking industry since at least 1997. Sounds like some folks are streets behind ...
"I just watched "Christmas In July", in which Dick Powell wins (prank telegram), loses (prankers confess), and actually does win $25K for a coffee company slogan: "If you can't sleep, it's not the coffee, it's the bunk!" (He'd read a new study that said coffee does NOT cause sleeplessness.)"
This is true. The joke is no joke no more.
Believable. I often drink a cup of coffee late afternoon and promptly pass out in the "old-man-on-the-couch" position (you know it).*
On the other hand, I can drink two cups of coffee right before bed and still sleep fine. The flip side is, in the morning I don't get any "boost" from coffee.
*This coffee is to have while reading the paper, the one I still have delivered to my house every day, like in the olden days.
I've been using this for years on long road trips. When I start feeling sleepy, I grab a cup of coffee at a gas station or McDonalds and when I've finished it, I pull over as soon as I find a good spot for a 30 minute nap. Then I'm much more alert to drive for a few more hours.
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