87% of the adult Spanish population drinks coffee and 70% every day. The average is 2.2 cups a day, and consumption is focused at breakfast time: up to 76% of people take it at this meal. These are data from the Study on coffee consumption habits in Spain, carried out in 2022 by Cafès Novell.
Many people associate morning and waking up with coffee, and pouring yourself a cup can be as automatic as putting your foot down when you get up. How many times have you heard the phrase “until I have a coffee, I am not a person”? Well, according to some specialists on the subject, if we want it to really have the effect of waking us up and clearing our heads, we should not take it right after getting up.
The reason would be that first thing in the morning there is a spike in cortisol, the hormone that helps us feel awake and alert. It would be better, according to this, to wait to drink coffee when a while has passed and we have the lowest cortisol.
“Caffeine helps us stay awake because it activates adenosine inhibitors. When we wake up, the adenosine load is not important, but increases as the morning goes by. Therefore, inhibiting some receptors when you don’t have the substance they really need would be illogical,” says Odile Romero, a specialist in clinical neurophysiology, an expert in insomnia, a member of the insomnia group of the Spanish Sleep Society and coordinator of the Sleep Unit. Dream of the Vall d’Hebron Hospital and the Quirón Medical Center.
“Adenosine is what causes our homeostatic sleep pressure to take place, the increase in adenosine throughout the day,” explains the specialist. To understand us, adenosine is related to the need to sleep. While we are awake, the level of adenosine in the brain increases. Rising levels mark a change in sleep. Caffeine and certain drugs can interrupt this process by blocking adenosine.
Taking all this into account, the coffee that we can drink mid-morning would have a more stimulating effect than the one we drink just waking up. A few years ago, neuroscientist Steven Miller collected this data in a study, who determined that the ideal time to drink coffee would be between 9:30 and 11:30 in the morning, depending on the rhythms of each person.
It must also be taken into account that “after 12 hours of drinking coffee we still have 25% of the active caffeine in our brain”. The sleep specialist doctor Javier Albares explained it in RAC1.cat. “We have very intrinsic caffeine in our DNA, it does not let us perceive tiredness, and it disconnects our body and mind. The recommendation, if you have sleep problems, is not to drink more than one or two coffees, and concentrated in the morning, not in the afternoonâ€, added Albares.
Read the original RAC1 article here.
