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Don’t Touch That Coffee
Night-shift workers and students pulling all-nighters take note: looking for that extra caffeine fix to get you through the night will strongly hurt your ability to recuperate the next day.
That’s what Julie Carrier, a sleep researcher and NSERC grantee, found after her research team monitored 34 moderate caffeine consumers at the Hôpital du Sacré-Coeur de Montréal. The eight team members published their results in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology in August 2006.
“We already knew that caffeine has dramatic effects on nocturnal sleep. It increases the time we take to fall asleep, it increases the number of times we wake up at night, and it decreases the amount of deep sleep. What our research shows is that these effects of caffeine are even stronger when taken during the night prior to a daytime recovery sleep episode," Carrier says. “This means the effect of caffeine in keeping you awake is amplified in a situation where we already get poor-quality sleep, such as daytime sleep when your biological clock is promoting wakefulness and not sleep. I agree that in practice, some people have to stay awake at night and will take caffeine, but there is a price to pay later when it comes to sleep.” Night work has to be reduced as much as possible. Society often considers that it is more efficient to open stores at 5 or 6 in the morning, Carrier says, but the sleepy workers behind the counters will never work and sleep as well as those who are allowed a regular night’s sleep. Previous research Carrier performed showed that on average, middle-aged workers cannot shift sleep schedules as well as younger people because older people generally sleep less and wake more often. Carrier urges reducing night work as much as possible. As for that late-night coffee fix, she says to drink as little as possible – enough to get you through the night but still let you hit the sack after the night is done. For more information, contact: Julie Carrier Michael Dwyer |
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Important Notices | ||
“We often use coffee and other sources of caffeine at night to counteract sleep deprivation, jet lag and shift-work. But this habit may hurt you when you then try to recuperate during daytime,” the Université de Montréal professor says. 