Part 3 - Caffeine: Devil & Angel

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Welcome to Part 3 of our Master Your Sleep series!

In this segment, we explore the fascinating effects of caffeine on your sleep and how to manage it for better rest. Discover why caffeine can be both a helpful wake-up call and a sneaky sleep disruptor. Watch the video to uncover valuable insights and tips.

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Prefer reading? Check out the transcript below:

So the reason you get sleepy when you've been up for a while is because adenosine is creeping up steadily the longer you've been awake. A good way to remember this and think about adenosine is to think about caffeine. Caffeine, for most people, except a very small percentage of people, wakes them up and makes them feel more alert. In fact, some people are so sensitive to caffeine that they feel jittery if they drink it even in small amounts. Other people can drink large amounts of caffeine and not feel jittery at all.

Caffeine acts as an adenosine antagonist. What that means is that when you ingest caffeine, whether it's coffee, soda, tea, or any other form, it binds to the adenosine receptor. It sort of parks there just like a car would park in a given parking slot, and therefore, adenosine can't park in that slot. When caffeine parks in the adenosine receptor slot, nothing really happens downstream of that receptor. The receptor can't engage the normal cellular functions of making that cell, and you feel sleepy.

So the reason caffeine wakes you up is that it blocks the sleepiness receptor. It blocks the sleepy signal, and this is why when that caffeine wears off, adenosine will bind to that receptor, sometimes with even greater affinity, and you feel the crash, you feel especially tired.

I'm not here to demonize caffeine; I love caffeine, and I drink it in the morning and the afternoon. But I'm one of these people that, either because of my tolerance or because of some genetic variations that exist among people in terms of their adenosine receptors, I can drink caffeine as late as 4:00 or 5:00 p.m. and still fall asleep just fine. Some people can't have any caffeine at all or can't have any caffeine past 11:00 a.m. or else their sleep is totally disrupted. All of this has to do with the relationship between adenosine and these adenosine receptors, genetic variation, things that are very hard to find out except experimentally.

Each of you needs to decide and figure out for yourselves whether or not you can tolerate caffeine and at what times of day you can tolerate caffeine in order to still fall asleep easily and get good sleep. So rather than demonize caffeine or say that everyone can drink caffeine until late, you need to figure out what's right for you. Caffeine has a lot of health benefits; it also, for some people, can be problematic for health. It can raise blood pressure, etc.

Caffeine increases this molecule that's a neuromodulator called dopamine, which tends to make us feel good, motivated, and give us energy. Because, as you may have learned in episode one, dopamine is related to another neuromodulator called epinephrine, which gives us energy. In fact, epinephrine is made from dopamine. So let's take a step back and think about what we're talking about when we're talking about sleepiness. Sleepiness is driven by increases in adenosine that happen naturally. Caffeine prevents adenosine from having its action of making us sleepy by blocking that receptor. It gives us energy and increases our dopamine levels, but some people can't tolerate caffeine very well; other people can tolerate it just fine, so you need to determine that experimentally.

All the data say there's tremendous variation, and right now, the only way that I'm aware of for you to decide whether caffeine is a good or bad thing for you, and whether you should ingest it at a given time of day or at all, is to figure that out on your own. In fact, there's a small subset of people that can drink caffeine until very late, and they have no trouble falling asleep because they actually have a mutant form of the adenosine receptor.

In keeping with the theme of science and science-related tools, this is one of those cases where I can't give you a one-size-fits-all prescription except to say you need to experiment with caffeine in a way that's safe for you and explore that and figure out what works for you, and then stick with that.

See you in part 4 of this series tomorrow! :)

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