Who doesn’t want that energy boost in the morning? Well, experts say that morning coffee won’t make us more productive. Instead, we should drink coffee later in the day.
The report was written by the United States Army and published in the Journal of Sleep Research. Scientists created an algorithm that can help us stay more alert.
The principal investigator of the study and also its senior author, Jaques Reifman, stated that their algorithm would determine “when and how much caffeine a subject should consume, we can improve alertness by up to 64 per cent, while consuming the same total amount of caffeine.”
He added that caffeine consumption can also be reduced by up to 65% “and still achieve equivalent improvements in alertness.”
The authors conducted the study to later implement the favorable findings for soldiers. The authors explained in the study that the algorithm “takes a user-provided sleep/wake schedule and maximum allowed caffeine as inputs and provides a caffeine-dosing strategy as the output.”
Coffee in the Morning is a Bad Idea
A lot of people have high levels of cortisol in their bodies and caffeine will interfere with the production of cortisol. Coffee consumed in the morning can also increase the person’s tolerance to caffeine and make them hyper.
“The combination of caffeine and high cortisol could make you feel more tired later on,” when they both wear off, explains registered dietitian Anar Allidina.
The best time to drink our coffee is 2-3 hours after waking up, meaning we could start drinking it between 9:30 – 11:30 a.m. and later between 1:30 – 5 p.m., “to take advantage of the dips in your cortisol levels when you need an additional boost.”
Allidina also said that the recommendations from Health Canada are for an adult to consume no more than 400 mg of caffeine a day (three eight ounce cups of coffee).
We should avoid drinking coffee up to six hours before we go to sleep, as some of us are more sensitive to caffeine and it can keep us awake at night.
Allidina concludes that we must drink one glass of water for every cup of coffee we drink so that we stay hydrated.
Doris’s passion for writing started to take shape in college where she was editor-in-chief of the college newspaper. Even though she ended up working in IT for more than 7 years, she’s now back to what he always enjoyed doing. With a true passion for technology, Doris mostly covers tech-related topics.