Coffee naps are better than coffee or naps alone

This works well because we often take lunch at home. But, now that I have lunch at the office, I do the same. I have a 1 hour pause. The first half hour I have lunch, then I take the coffee and I go to the office to sleep on the floor, on a very thin mattress. If my brain is too active, I listen to a foreign radio station with my iPhone. I like to listen to ICI Radio Canada (in French). When I have lunch here, they broadcast the morning news and commentary. The news are about stuff happening in Quebec. It is interesting enough for me to forget the work stuff, and dull enough to induce me into a deeper relaxation state, which allows me to fall sleep fast. Being the broadcast in a foreing language, also helps to fall sleep. I often dream during this 20-30 minutes naps.

An interesting detail is that I had to learn this habit. I remember being a child and being pissed off because I wasn't allowed to make noise after lunch. Now, that I'm a father, the roles are changing and I'm the one sleeping after lunch.

By the way, at night, in order to fall sleep, I never take phones, tablets or computers to my bedroom. Instead, I take a shortwave radio and I tune the BBC world service news (fortunately, in Spain we can hear the broadcast directed to Africa). I put a 30 minutes timer on the radio and I almost never hear it stopping, because I fall sleep before. The day that the BBC will shut the SW broadcast, I guess I will take a bluetooth headset or speaker to my bedroom, but not the iPhone. It is very important to avoid computers in the bedroom.

When I manage to take a nap it's usually involuntary by falling asleep in front of the TV.

But I don't recommend this kind of nap all the time - because after a while it's not that effective.

So, after years of napping (I'm an expert - I became so good at napping, that I can fall a sleep in 1-2 minutes, and wake up without alarm after 15-20 minutes), my advice would be: take a nap after lunch, between 1 and 3pm, without coffee before nap. Only in special situations, when you are under high pressure and lots of work, take "coffee nap" as they call it in the article.

Although I guess to some extent if you're going to ignore the sleep signal otherwise, there likely isn't much harm in feeling alert while doing so, except inasmuch as the alert feeling causes you to tax your brain more than you otherwise would.

It can also attempt to time your nap based on your latest sleep patterns. No idea how effective this is.

I love this thing just for it's nap mode.

I think this could do really well in Soma or the Financial District in SF. Just gotta enforce one-person-one-rule so that it doesnt become a place for prostitution.

This isn't really true, right? On an empty stomach a strong coffee seems to get me high as a kite in about two minutes.

I've been doing this coffee+nap thing for a long time. It definitely works for me. My trick for falling asleep reliably and quickly is listening to an audiobook.

It's also got emotional benefits. If you are feeling down, then simply waiting for the medicine to do its job can make things worse, as your mind goes in a negative spiral. Taking a nap can give you peace that you're just putting everything aside and going to concentrate on the warmth of the nap and a dream. And before you know it, bam - everything's perfect again.

Caffeine is best used strategically, which means not every day. Save it for days where you're feeling particularly low energy, or need a boost to tackle a problem you're not particularly excited about doing.

That said, the half-life of caffeine is around 6 hours, which means if you have a coffee at 3pm, at 3am you still have a quarter-cup's worth of caffeine in your system, preventing you from entering deep sleep. So even then I'd keep caffeine as a first-thing-in-the-morning type of deal.

Naps I'm a big fan of. I take one every day after lunch. The trick is to simply lay down and close your eyes for 20 minutes. Don't worry if you fall asleep or not - just give your eyes a rest. For the first few days/weeks, you might not fall asleep. But eventually your body grows accustomed to the ritual and it becomes easier to actually fall asleep at hat time.

The studies likely involved mostly habitual users rather than unindoctrinated subjects, but from the abstracts' documentation it is difficult to be sure. Perhaps the researchers did not recognize the distinction and just selected random participants, therefore likely to include mostly habitual users.

When I was a caffeine addict (habitual user) I could also sleep after ingestion.

In fact without a fix right before bedtime it was more difficult to get to sleep because nominal concentration level was unsatisfied, resulting more in agitation than identifiable craving. A nice hit would actually help me relax. I was not the only one who could relate to this as an indication of true addiction, where you need the substance just to be normal.

Complete withdrawal took a few weeks (of hellish tiredness, achiness, and irritability) but after this it was even easier to more alertly conduct high-stamina activities and out-perform my still-addicted colleagues without the toxic load on my system.

Sleep & nap much more productively without it after kicking the habit too.

Sure can write a lot better code when drug (addiction) free as well.

When I do feel it's necessary (never for marathon coding), a single cup of coffee (after I have already been awake 24hrs and need a little boost) naturally keeps my otherwise drug-free system awake for the next 24hrs easily which can be helpful for things like long-distance driving once or twice per year. As an addict I would have needed two or three times my nominal habitual doses to feel as alert on those same lonely roads.

To me coding does not benefit from this type of non-stop alertness, even if you are working to exhaustion, when tiredness truly comes a plain nap is better whether it is after 6hrs, 12hrs, 20hrs, whatever, then freshly go into another session, exahustion relieved.

Same with driving too, but if the schedule is too tight, a couple times a year will not make you a habitual user like everyday dosage does. I'd rather drive slow for long hours than exceed the speed limit, waste energy, and prematurely wear out my machinery.

YMMV [0] but just because everybody does caffeine won't make it good for you, especially in the long run.

[0] depending largely on body weight, metabolism, and dosage, and for driving, road speed

I disagree. Monsters in particular I find delicious. (I try not to drink them often though... they tend to really hype me up then wear me out not long after).

The article says the test subjects used it to good effect for 24 hours. I wonder if the following day was a compete productivity waste.

This is in a university setting, so I have no managers to worry about. The only problem might be noise (I often sleep with earplugs anyway), and weird looks.