Less Coffee, Better Sleep
marginalia.nu
marginalia.nu
- go to bed and get up at the same time every day. Getting up is more important than going to bed.
- no phone in bed, and limit stimulating activities (intense video games, programming, planning the vacation etc) to 90 minutes before bed. I read during that time but TV, cleaning, music, whatever works.
- a bad nights sleep will happen, often a few nights in a row. Be ok with that (easier said than done, I did CBT for this). Instead of lying in bed restless get up and watch TV, or read.
- leave the house for 30 minutes every day.
- journal as often as possible. Ideally daily, but a few times a eeek. Don’t ever read it back but just write down your feelings and the things on your mind. Do good and bad.
- exercise every other day.
- no coffee after lunch, and never more than 3 in a morning.
It’s a marathon, not a sprint and overall I have way less bad nights than I did before, and I don’t beat myself up as much for the bad nights.
If I went for an hour walk late at night I'm going to be up for hours and hours and hours.
I reserve an hour of "downturn" before bed, which includes a checks list:
* Slow activities like reading a paper book,or watching a movie
* Turning off electronics / putting them on DND
* Dimming the lights
* Shutting the blinds
* This hour can also be reserved for prayers (if you are religious) or meditation / reflections, etc. These help getting out lingering thoughts out of your head
I also have Flux / Night Shift installed on all my devices which forces me to take a break from the screens.
- a bad nights sleep will happen, often a few nights in a row. Be ok with that (easier said than done, I did CBT for this). Instead of lying in bed restless get up and watch TV, or read.
Do you have any advice for getting over the initial hump?
I concur with a lot of the original advice. I still wake up a lot during the night, but I can fall asleep again by starting my audiobook again. My brain needs to focus on just that one thing, otherwise everything else spins around.
- Exercise, exercise, exercise! I am quite willing to bet that a lot of people with sleep issues don't really exercise properly. Exhaust yourself here.
- Develop a good sleep habit, same time each night.
- Magnesium and melatonin while trying to get the sleep habit started.
- Audiobooks. Not podcasts. An actual story, like someone is reading you to sleep when you were young (if you sleep next to someone, you might need particular band headphones, or lower the volume and put a slim tablet under your pillow).
- Exercise, exercise, exercise! I am quite willing to bet that a lot of people with sleep issues don't really exercise properly. Exhaust yourself here.
- Magnesium and melatonin while trying to get the sleep habit started.
- Audiobooks. Not podcasts. An actual story, like someone is reading you to sleep when you were young (if you sleep next to someone, you might need particular band headphones, or lower the volume and put a slim tablet under your pillow).
I only had this effect when going completely zero caffeine, not when I cut down to one cup a day.
Unfortunately coffee is a vicious cycle, where I end up picking the habit back up on work trips. Before I know it I'm drinking a cup of coffee while writing a reply on HN about how great it was when I gave it up.
Incidentally, after being a heavy coffee drinker (5-10 cups per day for many years), I cut my coffee intake to zero. This happened around 3 years ago. At the same time, I started using earplugs every night. Pretty much since I started doing that, I dream several times a week. Previously I had dreams maybe once per month. I suspected that this dreaming was the effect of using earplugs, but now I wonder if it might be the caused by me not drinking coffee (for the curious, I replaced coffee with green tea).
My problem now is that if I think of anything vaguely interesting in the evening then my brain refuses to stop thinking about it. That and restless legs.
Evening if my main time for hobby projects so having them lead to disrupted sleep is really annoying. Any tips?
Not necessarily no screen time, but coding stops, and the remaining time is spent gaming or watching TV, or I go to bed early and read.
I drink half a mug (~200 ml) at ~2PM. I drink black tea rest of the day. Used to drink 2L/day at some point (it was a controlled period which required that).
> My problem now is that if I think of anything vaguely interesting in the evening then my brain refuses to stop thinking about it.
Use a notebook to take notes or ooze it out from your brain and try to learn meditation maybe? I do both, and both helps a lot to me.
Also, if doing exercise is not a very good option, try yoga. Looks serene but makes your body work.
Black tea contains a considerable amount of caffeine too. Aside from that, I know of two people whose years-long mysterious health effects disappeared (one with stomach troubles and the other with bad muscle cramps) after stopping their all-day >1L black tea consumption. The tannins in tea bind to iron, so it might cause iron deficiency anemia (although studies yield conflicting results), which especially woman are already predisposed to, and for which iron deficiency tests are often calibrated towards men .
As a disclosure, I hail from Turkey. We consume most tea per capita by a large margin, so we might have adapted to this. I don't know. I'm drinking tea regularly since I'm six, and my family is drinking considerable amount every day, too.
Let's start with iron deficiency which is the most widely touted side-effect. Regardless of the amount of the tea, I have never had iron deficiency or low-iron case in my life. On the contrary, I'm a type of person who wears t-shirt all year long, and generally pretty warm all-over. I mean, the room has AC on, and I also add a small desk fan to keep my cool right now. I'm not overweight either. Nobody from my immediate or larger family has low-iron case either (regardless of gender), and we all drink lots of tea, all day long. So there might be some genetics here.
Mayo clinic suggests that tea has "half the caffeine" of tea (I brew both) [0], however their effects on my body is wildly different. If I overshoot my daily coffee consumption, my heart rate increases and I feel the usual "tension" from high caffeine consumption. However, drinking ~2L of brewed tea doesn't do anything to me. Does not affect my sleep, anxiety levels or anything. It helps me concentrate, sure, but without all the bad side effects of coffee over-consumption. There's a paper about it, but it's sponsored by Unilever IIRC, so I won't share that.
Badly brewed, overly dark or stale black tea brews are not kind to the stomach. That's true. There's a kind of finesse to do it properly. From dosage to waiting times. Even if you do everything right, some people's body doesn't like tea, and that's alright.
Cramps? Now I'm hearing it for the first time, but I don't discount or dismiss it. It's just I never heard it from anyone around.
So while these effects might be true, these are not universal. I was sipping tea by 11PM yesterday and I was dead asleep at midnight, for example. If I have drank another half mug of coffee, I'd be watching sunrise probably.
Addenda: Human body can silently signal what it wants and what it doesn't. Sometimes I automatically stop drinking tea/coffee and switch to water for example. Listening to the body is essential to preserve its balance. Forcing it never ends well. Body is wiser than the mind.
[0]: https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-h...
Magnesium glycinate
I've found if I cease cannabis use by 5pm each day that it doesn't impact my sleep (or ability to dream and remember them).
I also need to be done exercising (strength or cardio) by late morning to not have an impact on sleep.
Finally, supplementing magnesium with dinner has probably made the biggest impact on increasing restful sleep, in agreement with this recent discussion:
Light, sleep time regularity, and exercise make a much more noticeable difference. That's where I should spend effort if I want to improve my sleep.
It doesn't matter if I have 1 cup in the morning or drink coffee all day. As long as I have it in my system from the previous day, it's very easy to wake up the next day.
My total sleep time is about 6 hours. deep sleep is about 1 hour and 30 min. rem sleep is about 1 hour and 20 min.
I usually go to bed around 11pm and wake up at 6 am (give or take, I'm married)
It does however warn me about bad sleep if I've been drinking, have a fever, traveling across timezones, or staying up very late for some reason. One of these things may happen every 2 months or so.
I feel mentally good, I'm in shape and in general good health according to yearly checkups. I've been drinking coffee for about 18 years now.
Used to drink one in the morning and one immediately after lunch. Couldn’t really tell the difference in sleep quality and to be fair I’m waking up more frequently in the past 2 weeks, but I guess that has to do more with heat than anything else.
Listened to many podcasts trying to learn more about this and they all seem to argue that it’s actually more important when you drink coffee. If you get your last coffee right after lunch your body will have almost no caffeine circulating in the system by the end of the day and that will make you sleep better.
Sleep changes as we age, so it’s possible that you were “fine” before.
I ultimately have to detox, which I find takes few weeks. And then I'll feel great for a few months "sober".
But I really do love cofeee - I even roast it myself in small batches. So, I inevitably end up drinking it again and the cycle continues.
Life is definitely better without it.
This behavioral pattern describes a nontrivial caffeine dependence, not the effects of standard daily coffee consumption.
I usually have coffee at Morning and a light coffee at 5 PM, it generally helps to do more work because I feel like I want to sit and work. Otherwise I'd dopamine max or play a sport.
Any tips on improving sleep? (It's simply not possible to follow a strict schedule due to multiple deadlines of so many things)
I also get up at 6 AM every day because I have to on some days.
As the saying goes, measure first, optimize later.
For me, it's:
- One cup of coffee in the morning, optional tea while it's still light out
- Sunlight exposure within a half hour of waking
- 10-15 minutes reading some fiction
- 10 minutes of meditation
Virtually guaranteed to yield a productive day with a good sleep at the end.
In the evening, both phone and overhead lights get turned off as much as two hours before bed. Reading lamps/spot lighting only. Any screens are dimmed.
Your Sunday morning ritual sounds very nice, especially if it's before or after sowmthing like a hike, bike ride etc.
Ps please dont come with studies about x glasses of wine a day. It's unequivocally a poison and shouldn't be consumed as a routine.
(I had a small glass of wine last night for the first time in weeks)
What are the issues sleeping with AC all night?
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-venn-diagram-lif...
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This is an anecdote, not an experiment. What's anecdotal evidence worth?
Yes, caffeine consumption should be appropriate and appropriately timed. Most people are well aware that you should not chug a litre of coffee before going to bed. If I were patient enough to read more of this blog I wouldn't be surprised if there's a story about the author's rediscovery of fire and the wheel.
I appreciate that everyone is having good conversations about their sleep and coffee intake, but this is a really low quality blog post to start them with. I guess we love talking about coffee and sleep just that much. Maybe we should just post a link to the wiki on caffeine periodically instead? Here you go!
I love coffee. I always have. It has anti oxidant properties. Don't drink the crap coffee. Most Americans have no idea what good coffee is. They're as educated with coffee as they are with nutrition.
Just drink less of it if you must but enjoy it. Get good coffee. Avoid it after 3 PM if you want good sleep. I found a late night cup after a dinner with friends typically sets me right for the drive home and does not damage sleep. But between 3 and 9 PM it's not great for sleep.
Finally it's important to understand that caffeine does not give you energy. It only hides fatigue. If you have trouble sleeping then avoid caffeine. You can get good decaf options today. But they still contain approx a fifth of a regular cup's caffeine.