Professor Renata Riha, at the Edinburgh Department of Sleep Medicine, released new data about how coffee can balance short term cognitive impairment – as experienced by sleep deprived people, or shift pattern workers
The Institute for Scientific Information on Coffee (ISIC) published a new report today (4 February) on ‘Coffee and sleep in everyday lives’.
The anxiety and depression that have been cultivated in populations by COVID-19 have led to a lot of sleepless nights. People are still largely facing their grief, uncertainty and fear. This bundle of negativity follows many into their sleeping patterns.
This report looks at how coffee really works on the human brain.
It answers the questions that we all have about the substance that is drunk by 80% of the world’s population. For instance, is coffee bad for you? By now scientists have established that too much coffee is bad for you. So then, how much coffee is too much coffee?
Coffee can help people with restricted sleep
Professor Riha looked at coffee’s impact on sleeping patterns. It seems that drinking coffee early in the day can help support alertness and concentration levels, especially when “sleep patterns are disturbed.”
Making sure that you drink your coffee six hours before you sleep is another well-known tip that has been confirmed in this research.
A study found that 300mg of caffeine, which is roughly three cups of coffee per day, can help to improve vigilance, alertness, reaction-time, accuracy and working memory for the first three days of poor sleep.
This is especially useful for people who are working nightshifts, as this dose of coffee can improve psychomotor performance and vigilance. This was the impact of coffee as seen im emergency medical teams, whose performance is one of the most crucial things.
But this is not meant as a genuine fix to sleeping problems. The researchers emphasise that this short term solution could start to impact sleep quality soon enough.
The author, Professor Renata Riha commented: “Caffeine is consumed daily by roughly 80% of the world’s population, often for its benefits in promoting wakefulness and concentration. Its effects can last for several hours, depending on how quickly or slowly it is metabolised by the body.
“Those who find that drinking coffee later in the day disrupts their sleep patterns may wish to swap to low caffeine drinks, or decaffeinated coffee during the afternoon and evening.”
