Coffee: Think Before You Drink

There is a drug circulating that alters your delicate internal chemistry for up to 10 hours at a time. Once comfortable with consumption, you become irritable if you don't get access to it, and in its absence, you may experience headaches, irritability, and lethargy. It is not regulated by the FDA, and it is not illegal - possibly because it is the second-most traded commodity in the world (behind only oil). It is traded on the streets around the world and in your neighborhood, and some people even let children have access to it, despite the abundance of scientific evidence of its harm to growing brains.

Why is coffee so effective at altering our brain? I use a puzzle piece analogy when I work with my clients to describe this phenomenon. The puzzle pieces are synonymous with adenosine - a byproduct of cellular metabolism. The more active you are, the more adenosine you build in your brain. As you move throughout your day, adenosine binds to receptors in your brain, like puzzle pieces. Once you have reached a critical capacity, and the puzzle is full, you feel a sleep drive that is so strong your body knows it is time to fall asleep. During the night, the stores of adenosine are washed away and the process starts over the next day. Caffeine has the same jigsaw connecting features as adenosine, and thus will bind to your brain and block adenosine from filling in the puzzle. As a result, your brain does not experience the familiar signals that result in a feeling of fatigue. Adenosine must wait until the caffeine is released from the binders, and only then can it attach and create sufficient sleep pressure. This is how caffeine works to fake your brain into feeling less tired - and why it is in such high demand.

When you first awaken, your body automatically goes through thousands of complex chemical reactions that promote alertness. You have internal mechanisms that produce cortisol and adrenaline/epinephrine in relation to sensing sunlight and as your brain processes stimulation of senses, muscle activation, and you transition out of sleep. This is an amazing and natural process that does not need external substances, like caffeine - ensuring that internal chemicals and neuromodulators are released naturally like they are designed to do. 

Meanwhile, your brain has basal ganglia in a deeper subcortical region, and these basal ganglia are responsible for planning what you need to do. Basal ganglia follow a looping system with your cortex that utilize dopamine to produce decisions to “go” or to suppress these signals for a “no go” reaction, depending on the circumstances. This is critical for survival and has been sharpened through evolution as a means to observe and react to potential dangers associated with leaving a protected space of sleep and transitioning to more exposed environments. 

Caffeine too early in the morning (in relation to your wakeup timing) can cause you to be very prone to “go” to action, but also can impair your “no-go” signals, causing your ability to not suppress action to be diminished. In other words, when you are too alert, you might find it hard to avoid actions you want to suppress. Excessive autonomic arousal from early caffeine can create a phase of pseudo-high alertness, which can have a buzz of energy that might feel slightly out of control. 

The morning post-wakeup “sweet spot” is when we are cool and calm, we have energy and focus to pursue action and also the energy and focus to suppress action. We are able to naturally maintain longer concentration on tasks and are less easily distracted by things in our environment. In this state, basal ganglia and the cortex are in a balance with the back and forth of the signaling. When allowed to act naturally, these systems are most efficient. 

When you are overly fatigued in the morning, even if it shows up as a mental fatigue, the go/no-go pathway recruits a lot of energy to maintain balance. This is often a reason you might use caffeine to find alertness, but ultimately you are ignoring internal signals that you need better sleep. If you feel like you can't go without coffee immediately after waking up, please consider talking to me about sleep; I can help you get notable results in 6 weeks of consistency.

Hydration is also a key component to waking up, and there is often a lack of balance with caffeine and hydration. Caffeine has a disturbing side effect where you might experience symptoms of a headache or the potential trigger of a migraine by not drinking morning coffee. This effect goes to show how powerful the substance of caffeine is on your nervous system. Early hydration is not only great for your body to prepare for movement, lowering joint pain, gently waking up the balance of your GI tract, and regulating your naturally warming temperature, but it also decreases the risk of headaches related to abstaining from caffeine. Though all humans are different, and these recommendations vary throughout scientific literature, it is generally recommended to consume 2 cups of water prior to having caffeine or consuming caloric substances. 

The optimal timing and dosing of caffeine varies by person to person. Through controlled observation of your lifestyle and how your body responds to caffeine, it is fairly simple to follow trends and make adjustments - assuming all other variables are consistent. This is a service I provide, and if you are open-minded to trying this, coffee (or other forms of caffeine) can be used as an excellent tool to power through your postprandial dip of energy you notice after lunch. There is often a prime time to introduce caffeine in the day and an inevitable window where use of coffee should be shut down to avoid any sleep disturbances. These variables depend on many factors from person to person, though there are general guidelines that offer clarity. First, as mentioned earlier, there is such a thing as having coffee too early. Instead, consider allowing your nervous system to wake up naturally. Your brain has an amazing capacity to produce hormones and modulators like cortisol, adrenaline, epinephrine, acetylcholine, and dopamine (to name a few), and the nervous system is designed to use these chemicals to produce alertness in the morning. Second, coffee can be successfully integrated into a plan to avoid a mid-afternoon crash, if used with intention. Third, if you are a biphasic sleeper, and use naps as a form of recharging, which has been proven to be effective for learning and recovery, caffeine can be used in various ways to build napping structure into your routine. Fourth and finally, there is a point when caffeine intake should stop or it will have deleterious effects on your body and nervous system. There are people that have genes that mask these debilitating effects of caffeine, but your odds of possessing these genes are less than 1 in 15,000.   

As far as drinking coffee later in the day, I like to start with the question “why?”. There are many reasons you behave in the ways you do, and often this becomes part of your subconscious thinking patterns. Coffee is a cultural phenomenon, and it is wonderful to travel the world and witness the unique experiences of coffee drinkers to the geographic region where they are located. Drinking coffee looks different in Egypt compared to Fiji, Spain, Ecuador, or New York, and each place offers a nuanced perspective. No matter where you are in the world or how you feel connected to a culture, coffee still impacts your ability to fall asleep if used too late. If you are noticing you feel tired in the later afternoon or early evening, and you rely on a caffeinated beverage to make it through the day, you are ignoring the underlying stress and fatigue. Patching it up with a caffeine-laced band aid is just delaying or prolonging the inevitable need for repair. Worse yet is the correlation to caffeine impairing your body’s ability to be in health-generating slow wave deep sleep. Even when you do fall asleep despite coffee being in your system the caffeine inhibits the growth and repair offered by slow wave deep sleep. Finally, if you are a coffee drinker that is just consuming coffee habitually - because you always have, this can be an opportunity to consider a reframe. Changing habits does not need to be a debilitating practice; instead, it can be used as an opportunity to add something you have been craving at a controlled time of day where space can be created. I love talking about potential and helping with goal setting, and I have some fun tools to integrate into places like this. Though every nervous system is different, I would start with a generalized recommendation to close the coffee window 8-10 hours before bedtime. These details are teased out throughout my sleep consulting practice for an individualized format. 

Now that you have digested this material, you may notice that part of you is resistant to this information or you want to debate this. Contact me and let's talk more. fI fully acknowledge that every human is different, and I understand that the work I do must be built around your core needs to feel safe and understood. Your inherent wisdom is the primary guide to every step of my process, and I choose to celebrate imperfections as part of the norm. Coffee is a very personal subject, and so is your sleep.