What you doing during the day can have a major impact on how well you sleep at night. Learning how to boost your daytime can help with that.
Here at Rested Health, we want to teach you the habits that have the least effort with the most reward. So, without further ado, here is one of the most important changes you can make to better your sleep!
LEARN HOW TO ENJOY YOUR BREW AND SLEEP GOOD, TOO!
Action Plan
The Problem:
Coffee takes 8-14 hours to leave your body and while it’s being metabolized it can keep you buzzing into bedtime
How to do it
Try to get in your last dose of caffeine before 2pm
Limit your intake to 400 mg of caffeine a day (4 cups of coffee)
The Science
Caffeine works rapidly but it also has a long half-life (the time it takes your body to get rid of half of the active ingredients). Caffeine has a half-life of four to seven hours, which means caffeine can take 8-14 hours to fully leave your body.
Caffeine interrupts your sleep drive by acting on adenosine. Adenosine acts as an important neuromodulator in the central nervous system that decreases excitatory action (i.e. it calms things down in there). Caffeine binds to adenosine receptors, blocking adenosine from doing its job of slowing things down. As a result, nerve cells speed up and blood vessels constrict which results in increased neuronal firing. This begins the cascade of effects that stimulate our central nervous systems and create a caffeine buzz. This is great for work but not ideal for sleep as it can dysregulate your sleep drive.
"If you have 200 mg of coffee at 4 pm, by 10 pm there’s still 100 mg kicking around inside of you"
Caffeine also amps you up in other ways. The activity of caffeine on your brain causes your pituitary to send out hormones telling your adrenal glands to produce more adrenalin. Adrenalin is our “fight or flight” hormone that boosts energy, heart rate, and attention. Adrenalin is a great friend when you’re pumping iron but a terrible companion during sleep time.
Caffeine reduces melatonin
Melatonin is an important hormone that peaks during sleep. Consuming coffee causes a decrease in melatonin levels during the night.
Research shows that only one cup of coffee is needed to get positive benefits like increased focus, fat burning, and athletic performance.
Drink strategically with
Coffee + L-Theanine
Cut down the easy way! Taking a dose of 50 mg of L-Theanine with 100 mg of caffeine can significantly improve attention and cognitive performance, better than just coffee alone! It also reduces the impact of caffeine on your stress response.
Health Benefits
- Lowers stress response and allows for relaxation
- Boosts sleep quality (better immunity, skin, cognitive function, and more)
- Helps regulate your sleep drive
Tips
- Take regular breaks from caffeine so you don’t need so much to feel alert
- Watch out for sneaky caffeine in sodas, supplemental, chocolate, and OTC meds
- You can’t build tolerance to coffee’s sleep-disrupting effects. Learn more about how caffeine impacts your sleep.
