how to use caffeine

During my research on Biphasic sleep techniques, one simple tip about caffeine consumption caught my eye and has proven helpful since.

Quite simply; use caffeine when you’re waking up, rather than trying to use it in place of sleep.  If you’re nodding off when you shouldn’t be; go to sleep for an hour and a half, wake up, and THEN brew your coffee.  Its impact will be increased ten fold.

Leave it to bonafide scientist types to take the technique one step further; conducting a study that suggests small, incremental doses throughout the day may be an even more powerful approach.

..sleep is governed by two opposing but interacting processes. The circadian system promotes sleep rhythmically—an internal clock releases melatonin and other hormones in a cyclical fashion. In contrast, the homeostatic system drives sleep appetitively—it builds the longer one is awake.

Caffeine’s effect seems to be the result of blocking the receptor for adenosine; a chemical messenger involved in the brain’s drive for sleep.

To test their hypothesis, the scientists studied 16 male subjects in private suites, free of time cues, for 29 days. Instead of keeping to a 24-hour day, researchers scheduled the subjects to live on a 42.85–hour day (28.57-hour wake episodes), simulating the duration of extended wakefulness commonly encountered by doctors, and military and emergency services personnel. The extended day was also designed to disrupt the subjects’ circadian system while maximizing the effects of the homeostatic push for sleep.

The subjects were given either a placebo, or a caffeine pill upon waking up and once every hour afterwards. 

The strategy worked. Subjects who took the low-dose caffeine performed better on cognitive tests. They also exhibited fewer accidental sleep onsets, or microsleeps

Caffeine did not however, prove a substitute for sleep:

Despite their enhanced wakefulness, the caffeine-taking subjects reported feeling sleepier than their placebo counterparts, suggesting that the wake-promoting effects of caffeine do not replace the restorative effects gained through sleep.

via Future Pundit