Why does coffee make me sleepy at night?
Coffee making you tired?
Did you just have some coffee little cat? (Attribution: http://flic.kr/p/9fZyGf)
We all know that coffee wakes you up and makes you alert. That’s one of the reasons people drink so much of it, forcing them to go pee all the time!
But there is one class of people, for whom this is the opposite. For them, coffee makes them tired!
Imagine the horror – both needing to pee and getting tired from drinking coffee! Why would such a person drink coffee at all then?
Why is “not drinking coffee” not a solution?
The answer is simple – the beautiful, soft, aroma covering your taste buds, making you float in heaven. The feeling of a good cup of coffee in the morning is hard to beat..
Imagine if you suddenly couldn’t do what you loved. For some people, that’s watching a good movie with their dog on their lap. For others it’s their lovers. And for some people, drinking coffee in the morning is simply the best, and not worth giving up for a bit of sleepiness.
Caffeine tiredness symptoms
- You drink coffee – suddenly your eyes feel like lead.
- Coffee is a staple diet for you – but when you stop drinking it, you suddenly feel energized!
- Your mom gets sleepy when she drinks coffee.
- Your mom gets sleepy from watching you drink coffee.
- People tell you have ADHD – until you swallow an espresso!
Why coffee can make you sleepy
When the effects wear off, you would have been tired anyway
The most common answer is simply that coffee actually DOESN’T make you tired.
Instead, what happens is that when you drink coffee, you get a buzz. After a few hours, that buzz wears off and you return to your normal state. Since it is usually evening by then, you feel kind of tired. Going from that buzz to the tiredness you would naturally feel in the evening is such a big change of state that you think coffee makes you extra tired.
It is called cognitive dissonance.
Coffee burns energy – and you have a lack of it
Coffee doesn’t have any negative health effects. But it doesn’t have any good health effects either. It is simply an “accelerator”. It makes you burn energy and vitamins faster.
Most people have enough of these things to make their little men inside their bodies go around for a long time, with or without coffee.
But some people have just enough to pass by – thus, drinking coffee takes them over the edge. They burn their energy and vitamins before the day is over, and suddenly they feel tired.
Are you one of them? [Cue dramatic music..]
Coffee makes you tired because it dehydrates you
In a previous post, we wrote about how the little men in your body use catalyst-particles from coffee to produce more energy – and more pee.
This, however, uses up a lot of the water particles in your body – making you dehydrated.
As your mom probably told you, dehydration is bad for you. It makes you tired.
(Though it is great if you just want to fall asleep quickly!)
How to fight coffee-tiredness
Nobody wants to stop drinking coffee completely – so to summarize this article, we’ll go through some easy ways to fight coffee-tiredness:
1. Drink coffee early. This way, when the effects wear off, your natural tiredness won’t have kicked in, and you will not feel like coffee makes you extra tired.
2. Eat well. Food is the primary reason why we lack enough energy-cells to take us through a full day with coffee acting as an extra energy-burning catalyst.
3. Drink a lot of water before your coffee. This way, your body-men will have enough water to experiment with the catalyst-particles in the coffee, producing more energy for you!
Category: Health
