Coffee: The Glorious Solution to The Coffee–Sleep Cycle

The genius of coffee: it’s the solution to a problem of its own making.

Too much coffee leads to poor sleep, which leads to waking up tired, which leads to craving that glorious coffee fix to make the tired go away. An ingenious self-reinforcing cycle.

Few other substances or systems seem to manage the elegance and simplicity of this cycle. Imagine if wine cured the effects of drinking too much wine.

The stark clarity of this coffee-sleep cycle was made clear to me in Michael Pollan’s recent This is Your Mind on Plants , which has one-third of the book devoted to caffeine.

Before coffee and tea made their way to Western Europe with their doses of caffeine, Michael explains, it was common to drink ale and beer throughout the day, starting at breakfast. The result surely being that many people must have been going about their duties in a light haze. The replacement of the fuzziness of alcohol with the clarity, focus, and alertness that caffeine brings may genuinely have played a major part in human progress since. Intriguing.

Although many people—though not me—can fall asleep after a late coffee, there’s evidence that it still affects sleep quality.

However, despite knowing what coffee is doing in perpetuating my need for it, I, and millions of others, happily rejoin the cycle each day.

As I sketched this, I wondered if it were clearer simply as The Coffee-Sleep Cycle (prints ). What do you think?

Right. About finished this. I’m off for a coffee.

More Coffee-related Ideas

Also see:

• Kaffikok: the distance you can go before you need a cup of coffee
• When drinking tea, just drink tea
• Half caff: adjust your daily caffeine intake
• Nappuccino
• The Half-life of caffeine
• Clear the fog with a redeye
• American - Long black
• Make an Irish coffee
• Make Vietnamese coffee
• Microlife: the unit of life
• The virtuous cycle of exercise and sleep
• Painkillers and vitamins
• Addiction