GoKawiilA coffee-free morning is a form of betrayal. I love the taste and the ritual of coffee, of course. I also review coffee and coffee machines for a living. But caffeine is also, quite simply, a drug. It happens to be the drug I use to motivate myself in the morning.
And yet I know I should not feel strung out on caffeine at 10 am, the way I far too often do. I drink coffee in part to fuel productivity but instead often end up stretched thin. I've cut back significantly on my caffeine dose since my jittery coffee-pot days breaking stories at daily newspapers. I might instead spend ages making a single pinkies-up espresso cup. So why do I still often feel so hollow and shaky from caffeine?
It turns out that getting the most from coffee is not simply a matter of dose. It's also timing. And I'd been doing it wrong.
The best time to drink coffee always feels like five minutes before it's done brewing. But there's also such a thing as drinking your first cup too soon. I learned this after consulting a dietician and a neurologist about caffeine's effects on the brain.
Here's how to get the most productivity and pep out of your morning cup, and how to avoid anxiety and energy crashes.
Wait an Hour in the Morning to Drink Coffee
Caffeine is the original biohack and a shortcut to motivation on a gray morning. It is a stimulant that offers a potent chemical signal to your brain that the day has begun, even when you're not ready for it. By blocking a sleep chemical called adenosine, says Ellen Akkerman, a neurologist at the Virginia Spine Institute outside Washington, DC, “caffeine increases alertness and energy and decreases sleepiness and increases adrenaline.”
So it may seem a bit counterintuitive that you'd want to delay drinking your morning cup, when caffeine gets it off to such a rollicking start. The answer lies in a stress hormone called cortisol, part of the body's fight-or-flight response.
Caffeine causes a spike in cortisol, which helps give your body a surge of energy. But you know what else causes a big spike in cortisol? The mere act of waking up.
“Cortisol naturally rises when you wake, depending on the time that you wake,” says Julia Zumpano, a registered dietitian at Cleveland Clinic Center for Human Nutrition. "It typically peaks around 7 or 8 am and then gradually drops throughout the day.”
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