Hacker News Reader

Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

I have been drinking a lot of coffe my entire adult life. Many cups of really dark coffee. But a cup is small. And dark coffee doesn't necessarily mean loaded with caffeine. Nothing prepares you for the kind of watery-yet-caffeine-loaded juice you get at a US coffee shop. It's like they think someone would enjoy drinking a half liter hot beverage, and get half a lethal dose of caffeine. Even though I drink 5-10 cups a day, my body does not approve of even a medium (or whatever they call it - it's an insult to coffee sizes in any case) Starbucks coffee. I think if people just drink reasonable coffee cup sizes of reasonably coffeeine-loaded coffee, they don't need to have a rushing heart or any other bad side effects. If you have trouble sleeping then stop drinking after noon. I don't think many are reporting bad effects on sleep from drinking coffee only in the morning.

View on HN

It is customary for me to enjoy an espresso (occasionally two) with a bar of dark chocolate after dinner. I sleep well not much later. 100s of thousands, if not millions, do this as a matter of culture.

But have you ever tried stopping caffeine and then comparing your sleep?

What if you think you sleep well now, but it turns out you can sleep so much better?

I'm not saying you will (I'm neither pro- nor anti-caffeine). But I am saying that unless you've tried it, you have no way of knowing. And I know lots of people who have improved their sleep in various ways, who thought they were sleeping normally/fine, and then discovered they actually hadn't been -- they just didn't know any better.

(And even if millions of people do something as a matter of culture, that doesn't mean it's good for your health. There are tons of cultural practices that are bad for health, or bad for a subset of the population.)

I tried for a month I think.

I cut all coffeine I was aware of. Coffe, Pepsi Max, everything.

I felt no difference and noticed no change in my health tracking. The only thing I noticed was it was less social.

That said, there have been times were I had to cut down on coffee, but not because of sleep.

For lots of people, especially those with ADHD, a small dose of caffeine will help them fall asleep faster and sleep better. Instead of their brains bouncing around trying to fall asleep, the caffeine focuses it and let's them actually go to sleep relatively normally.

I personally have to make sure that if I consume caffeine in the morning, it's enough to overcome this paradoxical effect, otherwise I often end up falling back asleep.

Good point and perhaps i might improve quality of sleep if i gave up that espresso.

But this goes deeper into philosophical discussions about human life and things like art that transcend the banal “useful/useless” prism.

People process caffeine super differently. I’m pretty sure caffeine makes me crash 4-6h later which is great for falling asleep

There is a huge blind spot in scientific caffeine research around habitual use. Every article you'll have read saying "don't drink coffee after 9am or you'll never sleep again in your life pinky promise" is based on the same type of study: Take people who drink x amount of coffee, give them a large caffeine dose at a non-habitual time, and report that they don't sleep as well that night. Which is obviously not how caffeine is used in real life.

Few things have disappointed me as much as caffeine research. If we can't get something so direct properly studied, what hope does 90% of science have?

I definitely can't sleep as well if I drink coffee after say 5pm. I also have quite an extreme effect of coffee when it comes to sharpening my attention and cognitive ability. Those of my friends who say they can sleep well after coffee also don't really report any significant effect on ability after a cup. I think it's two sides of the same coin. You get the good with the bad, if your caffeine receptor-thingies are tuned.

The Italians drink single shot espresso all day. Get an espresso machine with 7g basket, and you are set to enjoy coffee all day without subjecting yourself to artificial monastic rules.

I collected some useful information in this X thread: https://twitter.com/sridca/status/1710450654500561028

> I don't think many are reporting bad effects on sleep from drinking coffee only in the morning.

The article is precisely about how drinking coffee, even just in the morning, absolutely can negatively affect your sleep.

As with anything medical, there can be outliers. But having sleep problems from a morning coffee seems like such an outlier that it doesn't make for interesting reading.

Do you have any basis for claiming it's an outlier?

Caffeine consumption is widespread. Difficulty sleeping is widespread.

That's not saying there's a clear cause and effect -- caffeine has lots of effects, and difficulty sleeping has lots of causes.

But it's just as silly to say that any association is an outlier. And given what we know about the variability of the half-life of caffeine in the body, it's an extremely plausible possibility for a significant proportion of the population.

Not "such an outlier" at all. I'm struggling to see how you could be so immediately dismissive of it.

> Even though I drink 5-10 cups a day, my body does not approve of even a medium (or whatever they call it - it's an insult to coffee sizes in any case) Starbucks coffee.

Ok, then exactly what the heck are you drinking? Starbucks is known for having more-than-average amounts of caffeine for their coffee compared to other chains, but it’s not _that_ much. Even a cup of black tea has more tea than 1/8 of the caffeine than any (on menu) medium coffee from Starbucks.

I'm drinking regular espresso coffee. So I would think it probably has 1/2 to 2/3 the caffeine concerntraition of the starbucks coffee. But after my whole day of coffee and say 5-6 cups I have had less by than 12oz tall starbucks, and probably less by caffeine content than half that. But that's also spread out over a whole day, that's the key.

The peak blood caffeine concentration is a lot less when drinking 5 normal (That's european for "tiny" or "ant size") cups than than if I would have had an 8 or 12 oz coffee at once in the morning, even if it was the same coffee.

In short: I drink one decent starbucks size cup of coffee. Slowly, from 8am to 4pm.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com