Aug 19, 2020
Coffee Naps Are The Best Recovery For Your Mid-Day Slump
America! Land of Free, Home of The Caffeine Addicted.
Over 85% of American Adults consume a cup of coffee in the morning each day for a kick start to their morning. I would say it’s safe to assume that around the same number of college students use caffeine to help them power through long days of classes and late nights of writing papers.
I only say that because I fall into the 85% of adults that consume coffee as part of their morning routine and am a college student as well. While some of my college friends don’t use this drug to get through their college days, the Starbucks line shows different.
But let’s not just focus on us college students, many adults still consume one cup (or more) every day to survive. The average coffee drinker consumes about 300mg of coffee a day. To put that in perspective its 2–3 cups of coffee a day depending on the type, brew, blend, coffee to creamer ratio… let’s not go down the coffee rabbit hole though. I’ll save that for another article.
If you think about 2–3 cups a day, we could assume one with each meal. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. Breakfast being the most important cup of joe and sometimes the cup of joe is breakfast. Let’s focus on lunch later.
As for dinner, most people stop their caffeination in between 3–7pm. I tend to push that until 10pm and surprisingly still sleep well. But for most the cup of coffee with dinner is simply there as a companion for their sweet dessert. The cup tends to be around only 6 oz, so the caffeine content is likely less than 100 mg. For those who eat dinner early, this last cup isn’t much a problem.
Caffeine, like any drug, has what medical people call an onset of action. This is the time from consumption when a drug begins to affect the user. The onset of action for caffeine is only about 20–30 minutes which means the body can absorb the drug quickly.
In drug talk there is also what’s known as a half-life. This is the time it takes for your body to process half of the amount of the dose of the drug. Caffeine’s half-life is 3–5 hours, depending on the person and how efficient their body is. For example, if you have your morning cup of joe at 8am, there’s a good chance that at lunchtime your body only has about 50 mg of caffeine still to process. This is the science behind a coffee nap or that mid-day or lunchtime cup.
So what is a coffee nap and how can I do it and does it work, yes! Unlike that run-on sentence, this works and makes sense. A coffee nap is just essentially a well-timed cup of coffee, paired with a nap to give your body the best possible boost of energy. I gave you the why but here’s the how:
- Brew A Wonderful Cup of Joe (Your Preferred Flavor of Course)
- Drink It Black (Adding Creamer Might Change the Way Your Body Processes the Coffee)
- Set A Timer for About 20–30 Minutes
- Close Your Eyes and Relax
- WAKE UP!
And that’s it! You don’t really have to fall asleep, its just and added benefit that allows you some downtime while the caffeine does its work in your body. Either way, you’ve got more energy flowing through your system and finally have a cure for the mid-day slump!
Happy working!
-ZG
All info in this article was used from here.
