Less Coffee, Better Sleep |<br>marginalia.nuLess Coffee, Better Sleep<br>Posted: 2024-07-31<br>As an experiment, I’ve reduced my coffee-intake to a single cup a day for about a week now. It’s made an enormous difference in sleep, mood and energy. I get tired at night, fall asleep quickly, and wake up refreshed.<br>As mentioned previously in the context of morning sunlight exposure—another thing that’s aided my sleeping habits, but is somewhat less practical to sustain as it requires fair weather—I’ve always been slow to get going in the morning, active at night, bad at getting to bed at sane hours. Tired when I should be awake, and awake when I should be tired.<br>Normally I’d drink 4, sometimes 5 large cups of coffee throughout the day (I say cups but it’s literal tea mugs), and it wasn’t until the third I really could get going. Didn’t feel jittery or anything like that, mostly different shades of tired.<br>Tired of feeling tired, I decided to see what reducing caffeine would do. I’d experimented with similar things years before, with success, but not stuck with it.<br>For the experiment, I started by taking a day completely off coffee.<br>Caffeine has a surprisingly long half-life in the body, between 3-6 hours, enough so that with my previous intake, I’d plausibly wake up with up to a cup of coffee still in my blood from the previous day, so I figured this might help reset the levels a bit to kick off the experiment wit a clean slate.<br>The day with no coffee I felt more tired than I think I’ve ever felt in my life. I napped through the day, headaches, lethargy, was generally just out of it. I fell asleep much earlier than normal and slept for nine and a half hours. What I felt was how exhausted I actually was, without having enough caffeine in my blood to put down a horse masking the tiredness.<br>Next day, and going forward, I started my day with a single cup (fine, mug) of coffee. Following this, no caffeine all day, no tea, no chocolate, no soda, nothing.<br>What’s happened since is I wake up well rested. Usually after 7-8 hours of solid sleep. I’d get this number of hours before as well, mixed with 5-6 hour nights, and even though this isn’t necessarily longer than I’d get before, I feel significantly more refreshed.<br>All day my head is clear and my mood is stable, and there’s a general sense of effortless lightness to everything that’s hard to put in words.<br>At night, I get tired, way more tired than I usually do. Sometimes I’ve had a slight indication of a headache, but mostly tired. Old-man-falls-asleep-in-front-of-the-TV tired. So I go to bed. Fall asleep instantly. Rinse and repeat.<br>I was drinking coffee because I was tired, and I was tired because I was drinking coffee.<br>Can not drinking nearly two liters of coffee every day improve your sleep quality? Big if true.