Does this work to assess each individual'd actual caffeine half life? Every individual is metabolizing caffeine at a different rate...
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Assumptions
The script works on some generalized assumptions that would be difficult to take into account.Here's the thing: never mind getting to bed, that will happen when you are tired enough.
How about sleeping through the night? A different function with different math.
My model is caffeine is well-known for having a half-life, from three to six hours depending. That means a geometric fall in effective caffeine in your system after you go to sleep (you don't continue ingesting caffeine in your sleep do you? Sleep-brewing?)
What is the function for 'tired enough'? That is, how does 'sleepiness' decline over the sleep period? Because, when the functions cross (sleepiness drops below the caffeine line) then Awake! That's often about 3AM for me.
If the sleepiness function is a different time-constant, or is more nearly linear (as I suspect, as long as you get enough cobbled-together hours of sleep you are functional which sounds like a simple unweighted sum) then inevitably sleepiness will fall faster (cross the caffeine-left-in-system curve).
At that point you can get up, knock around doing whatever, getting sleepier again. Once caffeine drops below your remaining sleepiness you can get a few more winks.
And wake up shortly after, another hour or half-hour, whatever. Repeat the rest of the night in ever-shorter cycles as your curves both approach the x-axis.
Anyway it describes my sleep behavior nearly perfectly.
And there are at least 3 different metabolic rates for caffeine, rapid, standard, and slow. As a holder of the slow gene, none of these calculators work for me since for me caffeine has a ~9 hour half life. Caffeine after about 11 am is a bad plan.
Pretty sure there's some age related effects too. Over the last ~20 years I've gone from being happily able to drink coffee after dinner, through not being able to drink it after 5pm or so, and now to having the espresso machine automatically shut off at 2:30pm - otherwise my sleep quality plummets.
I'm 57 now, I started noticing poor sleep related to late night coffee in my mid 30s. I do got fairly hard earlier in the day though, I've usually had 4 double espressos (somewhere between 17-21g of beans) by mid morning, and usually another one or two before my current self imposed 2:30pm cut off.
Yeah it's well known that liver enzyme efficiency declines slightly with age. Also you may unknowingly run into medications that inhibit it, which gets more likely as you age and accumulate chronic issues requiring medication.
I'm envious of your 100 grams of beans a day consumption - if I have more than about 10g / one single espresso I'm a wreck for the entire day! The area-under-curve for slow metabolizers is 9 times larger - 3x the duration, 3x the concentration.
This is such a foreign way of looking at caffeine to me. I've got no problems falling asleep. My constraint is that the more caffeine I have today, the more I will need tomorrow morning to even get started feeling like a person.
Tolerance was my only issue for the longest time too. But in the last few years I started to get mild insomnia in the beginning of the night if I had coffee late in the day. It wasn’t making me feel active or awake but just unable to fall asleep even if I was tired. So I’d spend about 2-3 hours unable to fall asleep while tired. Now my cutoff is actually 11:00 and I try not to have any after that
This is called tolerance. You require more caffeine just to reach baseline and it no longer confers any stimulation.
Well said. I find starting the day with hydration helps me understand where I actually am in terms of rest before caffiene.
The advice going around to try and delay coffee for the first 90 minutes after waking seems to make a difference for me too, any unprocessed adenosine can be handled by my brain, and then caffeine is ready.
One explanation: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/maximizing-your-morning-coffe...
same here.. i can consume a caffiene ladened drink and go to sleep no issues.
idk what other quirks you've got but this one turned out to be an adhd symptom for me lol
Coffee actually works on me now I'm on stimulant medication haha
Question, how old are you? I lost the ability to be able to drink coffee late at night and still sleep well in my mid/late 30s.
Also, coffee power naps are totally a thing, I get a real boost if I drink a coffee and immediately lie down to sleep, then get woken up 25-30 mins later when the caffeine is doing it's thing. Definitely end up feeling better and able to concentrate deeper into the afternoon when I do that round lunchtime, compared to taking a nap without first having coffee.