Science. First the studies say one thing and next day they contradict themselves.

So here is the headline….”Tired Science Says Don’t Just Take a Nap or Drink Coffee…Do Both,” by MacLean Fitzgerald and published in Brain Foods on January 15, 2015.

Huh??? Scientists have found that a  “coffee nap, “which means drinking coffee and immediately follow with as short nap may be the best solution to beating fatigue. They think that the timing and interplay of caffeine molecules with adenosine receptors in the brain and introducing sleep causes the caffeine to work better at keeping you alert once you wake up.

I thought caffeine kept you up and not put you to sleep. The article continues…”But the benefits of the coffee nap may not end there. For people who are chronically poor sleepers, coffee naps have been shown to help them perform better on cognitive tests despite being sleep-deprived overall.”

I always thought the idea was to get poor sleeper to be better sleepers.

The nap needs to be short, only 15-20 minutes max. The article also said that if you don’t fall asleep it’s ok as long as you rest in a calm, tranquil, quiet environment and the effect will be the same. You just have to drink the coffee relatively quickly or it will mess up the timing of the reaction.

I know that caffeine keeps me awake. I limit myself to one cup of coffee in the morning or a caffeinated soft drink at lunch. Then it is water the rest of the day. Even caffeine too late in the afternoon results in my having problems falling asleep at night. What about you? And what about the researchers? I’d love to find out about their sleeping patterns