Monday, April 02, 2007

coffee lows

i've been a coffee drinker for most of my life. i used to never start my day without a large, steaming mug of caffeine spiked milk. i study best at night, and as the exams draw closer, i usually end up taking regular doses of black coffee throughout the night, till i give up and finally go to sleep. it seemed like coffee really had a simulating effect on me. then recently, i read an article in BBC's "science and nature" newsletter about coffee not being the boost it was thought to be. i was skeptical, but thought it was worth a shot.

before that, some background info:
ever since i've started working this january, i've had this problem where i start feeling extremely sleepy (even dozing away at my desk) in the afternoon. strange thing is that it doesn't seem to have much correlation with the amount i've slept the previous night (i usually get 7 hours, which used to be adequate during my college years). i also didn't correlate that with the fact that my average cups per day had gone up from 1 to 3, and i had started drinking much stronger coffee that the one my dad used to make at home.

back to my experiment. i decided to eliminate my coffee consumption for a short while, to see what effect it had on me. i decided to start on a weekend, as i spend my most of my weekends lazing in bed anyway. in retrospect, the effect could have been purely psychological, but the fact remains that i've almost stopped feeling sleepy during the day, and i've started waking up earlier too. i don't feel sleepy in the afternoon anymore (except after a heavy lunch), and dozed off only once (after catching only 3 hours of sleep the previous night, so i guess it doesn't count). i now also sleep an average of just 6 hours a day, and that goes down to 5 hours once in a while. i haven't had a sip of coffee for the last 2 weeks (actually 3, but i had coffee once by mistake - force of habit), and my life's actually improved ever since.

anyone else wanna try this out, tell me what happens...

2 comments:

Apurv Kulkarni said...

Hmm.. Something worth a try...

I probably have a worse sleeping disorder which no amount of coffee has ever made me get over. Yawn!

Why, I am sipping ma' coffee right now and I am not getting any better!

You have inspired me to try that experiment.

Slurrp!

My Foot? said...

life without coffee :O
the horror the horror ! ! !

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