I think I’ve heard it said, I just never believed it. Sure for some people, caffeine can make them jittery, agitated, and restless — But not me. I even had my genes tested and it literally said in the report that I’m immune to the effects of caffeine and can – and I quote “have as much as I want”. (It didn’t say that exactly) as MUCH as I want!

Anyway I have always had pride in my ability to consume vast amounts of caffeine, and even famously, (it’s not famous) drank a red bull and had 2 shots of espresso right before going into a dreamless, catatonic 8 hour sleep. This feat (this part is true), stunned the people who witnessed it (just my father in law). Who later asked me how it was possible.

If we lived in a world where society valued how much caffeine a person could ingest and still fall asleep, I’d be that world’s Kobiyashi, their Michael Jordan, their Dale Earnhardt Sr, their — you get the idea.

My dad drinks a lot of coffee late at night, he tells me our Swedish forebears always drank coffee late into the evening, and these people were tough as nails, and helped settled the West – I don’t see them as sleep deprived, jittery, weaklings ok?

When I visit with my dad in the evening he always offers me a cup, even if it’s an hour from midnight. It’s just customary in my family to not only drink coffee late but to also stay up until 2am working on stuff. We’re night owls.

Now I admit, nobody should be up to 2am, but I have until now refused to accept that coffee usage may be disrupting my sleep even a little bit. I always was pretty confident that I was just different than other people. For sure I March to the beat of a different drum, but apparently not in the amount of caffeine I can consume. Despite being genetically enhanced for this very purpose, there are still limits to human physiology, and I can only conclude after my long running experiment that I have breached them.

My coffee consumption has been pretty high for probably a decade, but once covid put me into a remote work situation and I’ve had unlimited access to hot water and coffee grounds, I’ve been drinking probably 600-1000mgs of caffeine every day. Most days probably on the lower end of that but occasionally exceeding it. I never feel jittery or over stimulated, even if I have a 300mg dose or take a caffeine pill with it. I mean sure maybe if I take 400 or 500mgs at once by drinking a reign and popping a caffeine pill, but I rarely did that.

If I drop my daily dose suddenly – I get a massive headache that sometimes lasts 3 days. I’m virtually always able to sleep even when I drink a cup right before bed, but my sleep quality is often sun optimal. Lots of tossing and turning, lots of racing thoughts, about nothing.

Caffeine doesn’t seem to keep me awake but it keeps me in a higher state of alertness that causes problems sleeping. If a cat walks on my roof, or the local police station on the corner goes ripping out of their driveway with their lights and sirens on, or I just feel too hot, I wake up.

I started to suspect my caffeine intake recently and decided it was time to go back to a normal amount of caffeine and to stop drinking it late in the day. I downloaded an app called Caffeine++.

This app was $6 for a lifetime. It lets me put in the amount of coffee I’ve had and set my caffeine half time – being a fast metabolizer, (that’s what my genetics test actually told me), I set it to 4.5 hours. Throughout the day it shows me an estimate of how much caffeine is left in my blood. I’m guessing under 200mgs and I’ll sleep alright as last night before bed I was down to about 130 and was out cold.

The developer makes it pretty clear he wants feedback. It’s weird but we’ve been chatting over the last two days about how to improve it. His name is Boris, he’s an upstanding gentleman. I recommend his app, without hesitation. It is a little buggy, I did let him know about that.

So anyway this app lets me estimate how much go-go juice is still pumping through my blood stream over time.

I started cutting back and my sleep last night was amazing. It was so deep, coma like sleep. So I’ve woken up this morning and decided to kick caffeine.

Now like I said I freaking love coffee. It had tons of health benefits and I’m not going to give that up. I am going to experiment with drinking decaf. Giving up caffeine for my sleep is a tough call to make, I’m not sure I’ll stick with it, but I already gave up alcohol years ago and don’t miss it. I don’t think I’ll miss caffeine either but we shall see.

So that’s it. That’s my big revelation about caffeine. Apparently people can have too much and over time it can do some serious damage. One study says improperly doses caffeine can shave an hour of sleep time, but it also damages the most important phases of sleep – and those phases may only be an hour long to begin with. I think it’s difficult to measure how bad losing an hour of sleep is over a period of 10 or 20 years, but Matt Walker, the scientist who wrote Why We Sleep says caffeine causes people to sleep as if they’re 40 years older than they really are. Meaning the quality of sleep that a 20 or 30 year old person becomes geriatric.

That is frightening, and part of the reason I’ve decided that I need to improve my sleep scores.