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Comment by rongenre | Hacker News Reader

After hearing Michael Pollan's interview on NPR and hearing about caffeine's 6 hour half life, I stopped cold turkey. It really has done wonders for my middle-aged insomnia.

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It depends on how fast a caffeine metabolizer you are. I've been classified in genetic testing (whatever the reliability of that is) as a fast metabolizer, and I can have a full cup of coffee 2-3 hours before bed and not stay up. Other folks who I know that got slow metabolizer on the test can't have caffeine after noon without it affecting their sleep (maybe this is the case for you).

Drug metabolism is often better modeled by two (or sometimes more) different half-lifes for different stages of metabolism. So typically plasma concentration will diminish quickly but be followed by a long tail. In the case of caffeine I think this is due to enzymatic saturation.

It seems that this second half-life must be the difference for people who have more trouble sleeping long after caffeine intake. I wonder if this implies that their bodies have different maximum attainable amounts for the proper enzyme. I'm curious if anyone knows more detail about how the interplay between enzymatic saturation and genetics / gene expression works here.

I used to be able to do this - take a double espresso, wait an hour, and sleep through the night. But as I've gone through my 40's, insomnia's been a problem.

Further, Pollan's interview suggested that even if I could sleep, caffeine was interfering with "deep wave sleep" - so I gave it a shot. I consider myself lucky that none of the headaches or [extra] irritability kicked in, so there's that.

sleep through the night is not the same as quality sleep. Just like after drinking alcohol many people can fall asleep, but it blocks REM(?) sleep.

So, while you might sleep all night. It's low quality sleep.

I've drank my first coffee of the day and immediately suffered an intense desire to nap. Coffee just isn't a very intense tool for the job.

I've read that one of the symptoms of ADD is the reaction to stimulants. Specifically, they tend to have a calming effect instead of the typical jolt of awareness.

Oh, that would explain so, so much.

Yeah me too. Occasionally I get clarity but rarely energy. The warm soothing drink makes me sleepy.

Raw coffee or did you have sugar/cream/whipped cream in your coffee?

I'm not the parent, but I drink light or light-medium roast coffee only, black, and I can take a nap (edit: or just go to bed for the night!) any time after it with no problems. The only thing caffeinated coffee does for me at this point is make me poop and keep me from blinding headaches.

I think the awake/alert factor I get from having my morning coffee at this point is a learned response, not a chemical one; a decaf coffee is just as good at perking me up in the morning as a non-decaf. If it weren't for the headache spikes hurled straight through my brain by satan himself I wouldn't even bother.

Edit: That's not true, I actually do love the taste and ritual of making coffee too; it's a whole thing to me. It's like a Japanese tea ceremony, but with coffee.

Im just like you minus the headaches. I could drink coffee and nap right after and the morning jolt is a learned experience since decaf and non decaf has the same effect. I drink coffee to enjoy its taste manly. Acutally i used to drink 5 coffees a day and at the 5th i’d feel the unpleasant jitter in my body so cafeine does seem to have an effect in large quantities but I could still nap in those conditions as well

I feel that, I've gone through entire pots by myself before and that's when I started seeing colors and smelling shapes (not really, but it was a distinctly disorienting and uncomfortable experience). I tend to limit myself to 2 cups a day since I know I do have a caffeine dependence and I don't want to spend the entire day strengthening that - it would mean EVERY day would have to be like that, and I don't want to be that much a slave to my bodies caffeine requirements for a baseline, you know?

But sometimes, when no one is looking? I make a third cup.

this is me. ritual induced learned responses aside, keeping "regular" is the only noticeable outcome from drinking coffee. but I very much enjoy the taste -- the lighter and funkier the better. I'm ADD inattentive, as are some of my kids. Kid's doctor actually suggested we start giving black coffee to one and I kinda got excited to introduce the ritual to them.

I'm struggling with this myself, both for myself and for one of my kids and I'll try the tea trick on the kid right away :-)

Michael Pollan is one of my favorite authors, I would highly recommend any of his books!

Here is the link to that interview for anyone interested: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/02/10/8033940...

I'm getting there fast. As a young man I could drink caffeine any time, and it didn't really seem to have any effect on my sleep. Nowadays I'm seeing a very strong, definite correlation. Just this morning I told myself that it might be time to pull the trigger and drop caffeine altogether. Getting old sucks ;-)

Reducing coffee helps for sure. Some of the best sleep of my life has been the week I went off coffee.

But the best sleep by far has been the last month, when I've reduce alcohol to 0 for 6 nights a week, just once on the weekend.

Using AutoSleep on Apple Watch you can see the insane differences. My deep sleep is often over 2 hours, which is when I literally feel like my brain has been rinsed. Got 4 hours of deep sleep last night which is a bit high.

When tracking on nights after alcohol, deep sleep is often just 15-30 minutes. Focus is all out of whack the next day after alcohol too.

Interestingly, if drinking during the day and I stop drinking alcohol by like 5pm (day drinking) such as on the weekend, the impact is not nearly as bad.

How do you like AutoSleep? I’ve been interested in finding a decent Apple Watch solution for sleep tracking but it’s been a few years since I’ve tried those apps.

AutoSleep is game-changing because you don’t have to do anything, it just tracks.

With SleepCycle I only used it 10% of the days because I had to consciously choose to turn it on!

Yeah I think most people should either take all of their caffeine right upon waking up and then stop or not take it at all.

I don’t suffer from insomnia but I imagine it to be torturous. I have to say I find it shocking that cutting out stimulants like coffee isn’t one of the first things people try when suffering insomnia with or without a doctor telling them too.

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