Comment by wccrawford | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wccrawford | Hacker News Reader

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I was strongly anti-caffeine for most of my life. Then, in my 30s, I started getting so sleep at work that I'd fall asleep at my desk.

I went to the doctor and got drugs and vitamins. One of the drugs was supposed to be for erectile dysfunction, but had the side effect of keeping people awake. I tried it anyhow. They didn't work.

I ended up drinking a little caffeine to fix it. It worked really well.

Now I drink a lot of caffeine to fix it, and if I stop, I go back to falling asleep in the middle of the day.

If I could, I'd gladly just take a nap in the middle of the day to "fix" this problem. I get plenty of sleep at night, and I have a regular schedule. I don't work overtime and my job isn't abusive on my work-life balance.

But now I just need caffeine to keep going all day. And so I deal with that instead, and I no longer tell people that I don't like caffeine.

When someone says that they need caffeine to wake up, I certainly don't tell them that they should get off caffeine... And I don't even think it anymore. They might actually need it.

I've had a similar experience. Caffeine is probably the greatest tool in my belt.

Something you may want to look into is how many carbs you are eating for lunch, and whether your blood sugar is being affected. An amazing number of people have minor hypoglycemia and a carb-heavy lunch can leave them falling asleep at their desk. When I switched to a low/no-carb breakfast/lunch it did help (tho did not cure).

In the last few years, I've started getting migraines from sugar. That caused me to look at carbs and start reducing them as well. I still consume more carbs than I'd like, but I think I'm definitely below average on that scale.

That said, you've made me think and it's worth seeing if I can't further move my intake towards proteins safely and cost-effectively. And then maybe next time I try to reduce caffeine, it'll actually work.

Thanks!

I had the same idea and tried lchf and it works great. Caffeine never did anything for me.

Have you had a sleep study done? I had similar problems until I got a sleep study and placed on CPAP

As I sometimes stop breathing in my sleep, my wife made me take a study. They determined that there was nothing that needed correcting. But thanks for the thought!

Falling asleep after lunch in your late 20s is super common as you go through "second puberty". You should consider cutting carbs out of your lunch meal. This happened to me as well, I tried fixing it with caffeine. My solution was to change my lunchtime diet and eat a 200 calorie meal around 11 and another 100 calorie meal around 1-2pm depending on when I got hungry. What was happening was I would eat a carb-heavy lunch (hamburger buns, french fries and a coke) and my blood sugar would spike to the moon. Two hours later my blood sugar would crash and the only way to stay awake would be to take a walk. Around 4:30-5pm I would finally feel ok again.

Do you think you're a representative example? As opposed to what I consider is more likely: People neglect sleep and water consumption combined with natural night owls being forced into a particular schedule.

I think most people already drink caffeine and it would mask this issue. So I have no idea how many other people are in this situation.

Assuming you have, but if you haven't, might want to get a sleep study done. It could very well be the quality of your sleep. Also, it could be the pets/plants you have as well that affect you more at night.

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