#10: Sleep & Caffeine Part 1

If you have a cup of coffee at 2 PM, it would be the equivalent of getting into bed at midnight, and just before you turn the lights out, you swig a quarter of a cup of coffee and you hope for a good night of sleep. And it tends not to happen.

Some people will tell me, 'Look, I am one of those individuals, and I can have an espresso with dinner, and I fall asleep, and I stay asleep. So, no harm, no foul.' Well, yes, and no. Even if you fall asleep easily and then you stay asleep across the night, caffeine will still decrease the amount of deep sleep that your brain can generate.

Caffeine has, what we call, a half-life of about 5-6 hours in the average adult. In other words, after 5-6 hours, 50% of that caffeine is still going to be in your system. And what that means is that caffeine will then have a quarter-life of about 10-12 hours.

Your sensitivity to caffeine is due, in part, to your genetics, and different people will have a more or less efficient version of an enzyme that breaks down caffeine.