Here's a good database of the amount of caffeine in many types of drinks. Theoretically, you could drink another caffeinated beverage, but tea and soda generally have much less caffeine than coffee, and energy drinks are disgusting. Taking a coffee nap is pretty straightforward. Twelve others, who had caffeine before their naps, managed scores roughly the same as their baselines for the entire day.
#Coffee makes me sleepy series
Twelve of them, who were given just a placebo, performed markedly worse on a series of cognition tests, compared with their baseline scores. As part of one study, 24 young men went without proper sleep for a 24-hour period, taking only s hort naps. Interestingly, there's even some evidence that caffeine naps can help people go for relatively long periods without proper sleep. They also subjectively rated themselves as less tired. Meanwhile, a Japanese study found that people who took a caffeine nap before taking a series of memory tests performed significantly better on them compared with people who solely took a nap, or took a nap and then washed their faces or had a bright light shone in their eyes. This was true even if they had trouble falling asleep, and just laid in bed half-asleep during the 15 minutes.
#Coffee makes me sleepy simulator
In a few different studies, researchers at Loughborough University in the UK found that when tired participants took a 15-minute coffee nap, they went on to commit fewer errors in a driving simulator than when they were given only coffee, or only took a nap (or were given a decaf placebo). People who took a coffee nap committed fewer errors in a driving simulator Scientists haven't directly observed this going on in the brain after a coffee nap - it's all based on their knowledge of how caffeine, adenosine, and sleep each affect the brain independently.īut they have directly observed the effects of coffee naps, and experiments have shown they're more effective than coffee or naps alone in maximizing alertness.
Experiments show coffee naps are better than coffee or naps The caffeine will have less adenosine to compete with, and will thereby be even more effective in making you alert. So if you nap for those 20 minutes, you'll reduce your levels of adenosine just in time for the caffeine to kick in. But shorter naps generally don't lead to this so-called "sleep inertia" - a nd it takes around 20 minutes for the caffeine to get through your gastrointestinal tract and bloodstream anyway. If you nap for longer than 15 or 20 minutes, your brain is more likely to enter deeper stages of sleep that take some time to recover from. Now, caffeine doesn't block every single adenosine receptor - it competes with adenosine for these spots, filling some, but not others.īut here's the trick of the coffee nap: sleeping naturally clears adenosine from the brain. It takes about 20 minutes for caffeine to hit your brain Braun writes in Buzz: The Science and Lore of Alcohol and Caffeine, it's like "putting a block of wood under one of the brain’s primary brake pedals." But with the caffeine blocking the receptors, it's unable to do so. Īdenosine is a byproduct of brain activity, and when it accumulates at high enough levels, it plugs into these receptors and makes you feel tired. There, it fits into receptors that are normally filled by a similarly shaped molecule called adenosine. After it's absorbed through your small intestine and passes into your bloodstream, it crosses into your brain. To understand a coffee nap, you have to understand how caffeine affects you. 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.
It might sound crazy: conventional wisdom is that caffeine interferes with sleep. It's drinking a cup of coffee and then taking a quick nap. It's more effective than drinking a cup of coffee or taking a quick nap. If you're feeling sleepy and want to wake yourself up - and have 20 minutes or so to spare before you need to be fully alert - there's something you should try.