![]() That’s because you’ve missed your Melatonin Window. We’ve covered more on how long caffeine lasts here.īut even when caffeine wears off, you may still struggle to fall asleep and meet your sleep need. Everyone metabolizes caffeine at different rates, but it could last for 12 hours, meaning your lunchtime latte could still be lingering around midnight, pushing back when you feel sleepy. Caffeine has a half-life of three to seven hours - this is the amount of time it takes for your body to break down half of the caffeine in your system. With less sleep, your sleep debt will only get worse, meaning you’ll feel more tired the next day and be tempted to increase your coffee consumption even more - and the vicious cycle continues.Īnd caffeine lasts in your system much longer than you think. Light sleep also increased at the expense of deep sleep. With caffeine temporarily blocking your adenosine receptors, you may not feel sleepy until much later, and therefore you’ll likely stay up much later than your body naturally wants you to.Ī 2023 meta analysis on the effect of caffeine on subsequent sleep found caffeine consumption reduced total sleep time by 45 min and sleep efficiency by 7%, with increases in sleep latency and time spent awake at night. If you have too much caffeine too close to bedtime, it’ll hugely impact your sleep. But caffeine may actually be making this worse. The RISE app can show you your ideal bedtime each night.Īs we explained above, high sleep debt may be the reason why you’re feeling so sleepy. This is made worse if you repeatedly reach for caffeine instead of catching up on sleep. So, if you’re finding yourself feeling more tired after a coffee, it may simply be your sleep debt catching up with you. But it also simply makes you feel tired throughout the day - and no amount of coffee can fix high sleep debt.Ĭaffeine can work as a pick-me-up, of course, but it only temporarily masks how tired you feel. This sleep debt affects everything from your mood to your productivity to your mental and physical health. If your sleep need is 8 hours and 30 minutes, but you’ve been getting less than 7 hours a night, you’ll have built up quite a bit of sleep debt. What does that mean in real world terms? Let’s look at an example. It’s measured against your sleep need, the genetically determined amount of sleep you need. Sleep debt is the measure of how much sleep you owe your body over the last 14 nights. Once caffeine wears off and adenosine can do its job again, you’ll feel a rush of tiredness and the strong urge to grab another coffee. However, research suggests people who regularly consume caffeine have an increased number of adenosine receptors and therefore become more sensitive to the sleepiness adenosine makes you feel. ![]() ![]() It’s your body’s natural build up of sleepiness. It’s not the caffeine causing it, though. This is why you may feel more tired when caffeine wears off compared to when you first consumed it. ![]() So, when your body metabolizes all the caffeine you’ve had, and adenosine can bind to those receptors again, you’ll not only feel all the tiredness you had before, but all the extra tiredness that’s been building up, too. But the buildup of adenosine continues all the time you’re awake. It binds to the adenosine receptors in your brain, meaning caffeine blocks adenosine from doing its job, so you won’t feel the drowsiness effects of the chemical in your system. This is one way our sleep-wake cycle is regulated.Ĭaffeine changes things, however. When we sleep, it’s purged from our system, so we wake up with much lower adenosine levels, starting the cycle over again. ![]() Its rate of production outpaces its rate of removal during the time we’re awake, eventually reaching the point where it makes us feel drowsy and we feel the urge to sleep. You Can Feel the Effects of Adenosine AgainĪdenosine is naturally made in the body and acts as a neurotransmitter, depressing the central nervous system and telling the brain when to rest. Tired (pun intended) of wondering what’s causing your caffeine crash? Here’s why caffeine may be having the opposite effect you’re looking for. ![]()
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