If you’re feeling sleepy and need a jolt of energy, there’s something you should
try.
It’s more effective than drinking coffee or taking a nap.
It’s drinking coffee and then taking a nap.
it’s called a coffee nap.
It might sound kind of crazy because most people realize that caffeine interferes with
sleep.
But it takes a little while for the caffeine to affect you.
The caffeine has to go into your small intestine, pass into your bloodstream, and enter your
brain, and that takes about 20 minutes.
If you spend those 20 minutes unconscious, you’re going to wake up feeling pretty great.
To understand why, it helps to know what’s making you groggy in the first place.
So there’s a molecule inside your brain called adenosine and it plugs into little
receptors inside your brain and makes you feel tired.
Adenosine is a byproduct of brain activity, so it builds up throughout the day and starts
to slow down your neurons.
Caffeine chemically looks a whole lot like adenosine.
And when you ingest caffeine and it enters your brain, it blocks adenosine from fitting
into those receptors.
A lot of people have said that this like taking a car and putting a block of wood under the
brake pedals.
Caffeine keeps your brain from slowing itself down.
The great thing about coffee naps is that sleep naturally clears out adenosine from
the brain.
So the caffeine doesn’t even need to compete with the adenosine to fit into those receptors.
So what’s the evidence that this really works?
There’s not a huge body of work but there are some studies.
When people took a 15-minute coffee nap, they went on to commit fewer errors in a driving
simulator than when they only drank coffee or only took a nap.
As the test subjects were doing this really boring hour-long drive simulation, they were
asked every 3 minutes to report their sleepiness level.
And the coffee nap group was consistently more alert.
Meanwhile a Japanese study found that people who took a caffeine nap performed a lot better
on a series of memory tests.
The challenge of the coffee nap is to time it just right.
You want to drink it quickly, so it maybe you could do espresso shots or iced coffee
if that makes it easier.
And then set an alarm before you fall asleep to wake up before 20 minutes
because if you nap too long you’re much more likely to enter deeper stages of sleep,
and you’ll have what scientists call sleep inertia, which is basically grogginess.
If you have trouble falling asleep, the studies found that you can still benefit from the
coffee nap.
Even just drinking the caffeine and getting a few minutes of restful half-sleep is going
to make you feel more alert when you do get up 20 minutes later.