Dr. Matt Walker

So the profile that you described, which is high peak early on, first thing when you wake up, and then tapering off nicely down into the sort of early afternoon, ideal.

That sounds great to me.

As for that afternoon coffee, it really depends again on when you're expecting to go to sleep.

Now, for someone like you, I would say I would love to look at abstaining from that or just switching it out to if you're using these pods or however you're brewing it.

Let's just switch it out and do an experiment for two weeks.

And we will look to see...

How much is that afternoon coffee really impacting your sleep?

And we'll track your sleep with some degree of high fidelity with a wearable.

And let's test that hypothesis because you go to sleep quite early.

You are an early bird, maybe bordering on an extreme early bird.

And we'll speak about or we have spoken about those different flavors of chronotype sleep.

I would prefer you not to be having that caffeine in the afternoon based on how early you go to sleep.

And I mentioned that preference because of what you described regarding your sleep maintenance insomnia.

One of the issues with caffeine is that not only can it make it more difficult for you to fall asleep, which you don't have in part because if you're waking up quite frequently throughout the night and struggling to get back to sleep, you're going to be carrying a sleep debt into every night.

And that debt continues to grow.

And it's almost like compounding interest on a loan.

So you will not have a problem falling asleep.

In fact...

Sometimes the speed with which people fall asleep and some of these sleep trackers will almost penalize you for falling asleep too quickly is because in sleep science and clinical sleep medicine, it should take you somewhere, you know, healthy sleep onset, you know, 5 to 15, 20 minutes.

But if you put your head on the pillow and you turn off the light and within a minute or so you're dead to the world and you're gone, I'm worried that you're A, carrying a sleep debt, not necessarily, but I would like to explore it with you.