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Coffee Stats – Maximize Caffeine Intake and Get to Bed at Night

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11–20 of 148 posts

Re: Coffee Stats – Maximize Caffeine Intake and Get to Bed at Night

#11

This is such a foreign way of looking at caffeine to me. I've got no problems falling asleep. My constraint is that the more caffeine I have today, the more I will need tomorrow morning to even get started feeling like a person.

This is called tolerance. You require more caffeine just to reach baseline and it no longer confers any stimulation.

Re: Coffee Stats – Maximize Caffeine Intake and Get to Bed at Night

#13

This is such a foreign way of looking at caffeine to me. I've got no problems falling asleep. My constraint is that the more caffeine I have today, the more I will need tomorrow morning to even get started feeling like a person.

same here.. i can consume a caffiene ladened drink and go to sleep no issues.

idk what other quirks you've got but this one turned out to be an adhd symptom for me lol

Coffee actually works on me now I'm on stimulant medication haha

Re: Coffee Stats – Maximize Caffeine Intake and Get to Bed at Night

#14
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And there are at least 3 different metabolic rates for caffeine, rapid, standard, and slow. As a holder of the slow gene, none of these calculators work for me since for me caffeine has a ~9 hour half life. Caffeine after about 11 am is a bad plan.

Pretty sure there's some age related effects too. Over the last ~20 years I've gone from being happily able to drink coffee after dinner, through not being able to drink it after 5pm or so, and now to having the espresso machine automatically shut off at 2:30pm - otherwise my sleep quality plummets. I'm 57 now, I started noticing poor sleep related to late night coffee in my mid 30s. I do got fairly hard earlier in t…

Yeah it's well known that liver enzyme efficiency declines slightly with age. Also you may unknowingly run into medications that inhibit it, which gets more likely as you age and accumulate chronic issues requiring medication.

I'm envious of your 100 grams of beans a day consumption - if I have more than about 10g / one single espresso I'm a wreck for the entire day! The area-under-curve for slow metabolizers is 9 times larger - 3x the duration, 3x the concentration.

Re: Coffee Stats – Maximize Caffeine Intake and Get to Bed at Night

#16
post #15

Does this work to assess each individual'd actual caffeine half life? Every individual is metabolizing caffeine at a different rate...

Line 6 of readme.md:

   Assumptions  
   The script works on some generalized assumptions that would be difficult to take into account.

Re: Coffee Stats – Maximize Caffeine Intake and Get to Bed at Night

#17
post #15

Does this work to assess each individual'd actual caffeine half life? Every individual is metabolizing caffeine at a different rate...

As long as you're consistent enough, if you use this tool for a while could you learn how to tune the value it gives you? E.g. if you know you need extra time, or less time you can take that into account when reading this.

Re: Coffee Stats – Maximize Caffeine Intake and Get to Bed at Night

#18
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And there are at least 3 different metabolic rates for caffeine, rapid, standard, and slow. As a holder of the slow gene, none of these calculators work for me since for me caffeine has a ~9 hour half life. Caffeine after about 11 am is a bad plan.

Pretty sure there's some age related effects too. Over the last ~20 years I've gone from being happily able to drink coffee after dinner, through not being able to drink it after 5pm or so, and now to having the espresso machine automatically shut off at 2:30pm - otherwise my sleep quality plummets. I'm 57 now, I started noticing poor sleep related to late night coffee in my mid 30s. I do got fairly hard earlier in t…

It's so funny but encouraging to read this. I started drinking coffee in college and could easily finish a whole pot, or have 3 Starbucks venti drip coffees in a day, but I was not sensitive to caffeine at all and could sleep right after. It also didn't seem to have that wake-up alertness effect either

Then something changed, and now I am sensitive to it like a normal person. It does wake me up after a sip or two I can feel it, and I can easily have 'too much' if I have 2-3 cups in too short of a timespan, so I've had to learn to slow down.

Having said all of this, my personal 'last call' is 6pm, with the idea that I will be able to sleep at 12-1am. But if I drink coffee after 6pm I might be delaying that bedtime a little.

It will be interesting to learn more about the effects of how much, and how long. Should I be tapering off hours before 'last call'? What is the best 'last call' time in the day and should it be earlier? I'll have to track some of this and figure this out!

Re: Coffee Stats – Maximize Caffeine Intake and Get to Bed at Night

#19
post #15

Does this work to assess each individual'd actual caffeine half life? Every individual is metabolizing caffeine at a different rate...

Indeed, and the variance on this number is surprisingly large. From [1]:

> The mean half-life of caffeine in plasma of healthy individuals is about 5 hours. However, caffeine's elimination half-life may range between 1.5 and 9.5 hours, while the total plasma clearance rate for caffeine is estimated to be 0.078 L/h/kg (Brachtel and Richter, 1992; Busto et al., 1989). This wide range in the plasma mean half-life of caffeine is due to both innate individual variation, and a variety of physiological and environmental characteristics that influence caffeine metabolism (e.g., pregnancy, obesity, use of oral contraceptives, smoking, altitude).

On the one end of the scale, it'd be nigh-undetectable within a few hours, and on the other end, significantly present for 24 hours+. I suspect estimating this number is also fairly difficult. I mean, I have some idea of the _outcome_ of what happens if I drink coffee at say 6PM, but I have little way of reversing this into a half-life number.

[1] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK223808/

Re: Coffee Stats – Maximize Caffeine Intake and Get to Bed at Night

#20
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And there are at least 3 different metabolic rates for caffeine, rapid, standard, and slow. As a holder of the slow gene, none of these calculators work for me since for me caffeine has a ~9 hour half life. Caffeine after about 11 am is a bad plan.

Pretty sure there's some age related effects too. Over the last ~20 years I've gone from being happily able to drink coffee after dinner, through not being able to drink it after 5pm or so, and now to having the espresso machine automatically shut off at 2:30pm - otherwise my sleep quality plummets. I'm 57 now, I started noticing poor sleep related to late night coffee in my mid 30s. I do got fairly hard earlier in t…

Given caffeine has a half life in the body, couldn’t you have less coffee but drink it for longer in the day and have the same result?
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