Coffee Nap
- Yoonjin Lee
- Mar 18, 2024
- 2 min read
Coffee is an essential drink for busy modern people. Coffee contains caffeine, which is a type of a psychoactive substance and stimulant. Once consumed, the substance is absorbed through the small intestine and penetrates through the bloodstreams and into your cells, due to its fat and water-soluble characteristics. This then follows the bloodstreams and reaches your brain, acting on the cell receptors and affecting hormones to awaken the body.
Mechanism of Caffeine
Before explaining the mechanism of caffeine, it is important to know how sleep builds up in our body. The feeling of sleepiness or drowsiness that you experience as you get closer to the end of the day is because of a neurotransmitter called Adenosine. Adenosine, since waking up from sleep, builds up in your body throughout the day and reaches its peak when it is time to sleep. Then, after the body goes to sleep, the neurotransmitter is cleared throughout the night. Caffeine has the same cell receptors as Adenosine and therefore can easily fit into the receptor instead. Caffeine has an effect of blocking the effect of Adenosine, making the sleepiness go away and giving alertness. However, in order to do so, caffeine has to compete with Adenosine which is hard when it has already built up in the brain sufficiently.
How does coffee nap work?
Coffee nap might seem unreasonable since ‘coffee’ and ‘nap’ have a countering effect on one another. However, coffee nap has proven its effectiveness when you take a nap around 15-20 minutes after drinking coffee. This is because while taking a nap, the adenosine that was built up is cleared which makes it easier for the caffeine to fit into the blank receptors after the nap.
However, it is important to note that a nap would last up to roughly 20 minutes and no more. This is because usually a person’s body takes about 20 minutes to enter the deep sleep stage after falling asleep, which counteracts the effect of coffee nap by causing sleep inertia-the feeling of grogginess right after awakening, as a response of disruption during deep stages of sleep. Also, caffeine usually takes around 20 minutes for it to enter the brain and affect alertness.
In addition, the time of taking a coffee nap is also important. The effect of caffeine on your body lasts around 6 hours. If you take a coffee nap before 6 hours less than your bedtime, it is likely that you will still feel alert when you have to sleep, resulting in disturbance or decline in quality of sleep. Also, the amount of caffeine consumed is also important; research claims that roughly 200 mg of caffeine is the most effective for coffee naps, which is around two cups of coffee.
Conclusion
In summary, the best way to take a coffee nap is to take it at least 6 hours before bedtime, with two cups, and around 15 to 20 minutes.
Although coffee napping is a useful technique, it shouldn’t be taken too frequently as caffeine can grow tolerance in our body. When caffeine is taken frequently, the brain can adapt to the function of caffeine-blocking adenosine-by increasing the number of adenosine receptors or decreasing their sensitivity. This causes the caffeine to have decreased effectiveness eventually.
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