Dr. Michael Grandner

The amount of adenosine

that that caffeine is blocking is still very low.

You haven't produced enough yet to really have much of an effect.

But if you drink caffeine as soon as you wake up in the morning and you feel more alert, it's probably your sleep inertia naturally coming down and your melatonin naturally getting blocked and you're feeling the effects of it and you're attributing it to the caffeine when actually you could have skipped the caffeine.

You probably would have felt mostly the same.

It's just the caffeine is still having effects later, but you've missed the caffeine peak

So like actually you tighten the caffeine a little bit later.

Yeah, use the caffeine.

So adenosine builds across the day and you're at your lowest levels as soon as you wake up.

Why are you going to block something that you're, you know, if caffeine works mostly by blocking adenosine and your lowest levels of adenosine are first thing in the morning,

Why would you recommend someone block it first thing in the morning?

Wait till it accumulates a little bit, especially if you, for most people, that natural sleep inertia will wear off within 10 to 60 minutes as soon as they wake up.

And my favorite way to tell this story is like, you know how you wake up and you smell the coffee and then even that kind of perks you up a little bit?

They say, yeah.

And I say, did you know that there's a term for that?

And they're like, oh, there is?

And I say, yes, it's called placebo.

And then so they laugh and like, what do you mean?

I'm like, coffee doesn't work olfactory.

It doesn't work through the nose.