Sipping Coffee or Chasing Sleep?

How caffeine works on affecting your sleep

I don’t drink coffee every day. Not because I don’t like it, but most of the time I can’t feel the power of caffeine in a cup of coffee to keep me awake.

Some people need caffeine to boost their energy and hold back their sleepiness. Unfortunately, it often fails to affect me. When I am sleepy, the only way to deal with it is to take a nap, instead of grabbing coffee.

It made me wonder, why does coffee have different effects on different people? What does coffee do to our bodies?

Photo by Candice Picard on Unsplash

Before talking about caffeine, let me introduce you to adenosine, one of the key players in triggering our sleep.

What is adenosine?

Adenosine is a chemical in our brain that forces neurons to slow down their activity. As a result, the more our brain holds, the sleepier we feel.

In every minute that passes when we wake up, the amount of adenosine increases. It keeps accumulating until we can’t hold it anymore and fall asleep.

However, there is a stimulant that can ruin the sleep signal from adenosine. It is what we call caffeine.

It actively seeks out and binds to areas in our brain that contain adenosine. It hijacks the…