Does anyone know what a “critical regime” is in regards to neuroscience?

Did anyone see what the interval from caffeine dose to bedtime was in this experiment? I won't claim to have read every sentence, but I did skim the whole paper, read through the procedure parts, and did a couple key-word searches, but wasn't able to find that figure.

Can somebody eli5? Coffee good or coffee bad?

Paper suggests these changes might actually represent *worse* sleep quality. It says "increased brain entropy during sleep has been linked to hypertension and early-stage Alzheimer's disease" and question whether this represents "a deterioration of sleep quality."

Basically, caffeine is bad for sleep (learning and recovery) if taken late enough and significant amounts remain in your system at bedtime. It does note that even having a coffee first thing in the morning does have a measurable effect on deep sleep brain waves. Fast metabolizers of caffeine might be different. Don't drink coffee in the afternoon is probably the take away for most people

As much as I like to scientifically validate my drug dependency, is the EEG work here really that much more rigorous than a polygraph? I see a lot of domain specific terms like "FOOOF algorithm", filtering signal spectra etc. and the geist of my schooling asks me whether the elephant is wiggling its trunk.

I avoid drinking coffee 12 hours before bedtime, because I read from multiple sources this is the time it takes for caffeine to be cleared from the body.

For example, if my bed time is 11pm, no coffee later than 11am.

It's been working for me so far to prevent caffeine interfering with my sleep.

Just an anecdote, which is probably meaningless on average but: I've found that caffeine is beneficial to me and I can still gain the benefits of caffeine by drinking very little of it every second or third day. I'm talking about 1-2 sips of a cup of regular coffee. No, it doesn't wake me up like a full cup would, but it allows me to function (especially in feeling stiff in my muscles) a little better without any noticeable downside. Just an anecdote though.

Women metabolize caffeine slower than men. Hormonal birth control slows caffeine absorption down even further.

Men can comfortably get away with afternoon espresso in a way that women simply can't.

On the bright side, they're less likely to get extreme caffeine crashes for the same reason.

Maybe you could sweat out the caffeine.

> contrasting 200 mg of caffeine against a placebo condition

Burried in the middle:

> The participants reported moderate caffeine consumption, equivalent to one to three cups of coffee per day. All participants were non-smokers and free of drugs or medicine which could influence the sleep-wake cycle. Subjects also reported no sleep complaints, night work, or transmeridian travel in the 3 months before the recording.

> The participants arrived at the laboratory 6–8 h before their habitual sleep time and left 1–1.5 h after habitual wake up time. Bedtime and wake time in the laboratory were determined by averaging each participant’s sleep-wake cycle from the sleep diary. The total dose of caffeine administered was 200 mg (100 mg per capsule) which is considered to be moderate (equivalent to 1–2 cups of coffee) and induces significant changes in the sleep of young subjects23. Two-piece telescopic hard capsules were used, allowing the ingestion of caffeine without oral contamination, in a double-blind cross-over design using stratified randomization.

I doubt someone drinking 1-3 cups per day would feel that 200 mg single-shot is "normal." That's 2-3 cups in one go. For me, it would be like drinking it around 3pm.

I would fit the cohort. If I take a 200 mg caffeine capsule at 3pm, I get pretty fucked up, and I'm wondering what the self-reported effects were at the time they went to bed. Did they feel normal?

It sounds like this is one of those studies that are meant for other researchers, not the public, because the actual evidence is about effects that don't match daily lives. This type of caffine ingestion would be noticeable, and you'd pretty quickly dial it down if it was felt the way I suspect it did feel.

To be honest, I haven't read the whole article, but from my own experience, if you drink coffee in the morning, you're usually fine at night. But if you drink it in the afternoon, you can't expect to sleep well at night. Strangely, my family members are not affected by drinking at any time, and they still sleep soundly. So I think caffeine may affect everyone differently, just like it has signed a private agreement with everyone's nervous system.

I stopped consuming caffeine and alcohol years ago. My ADHD, depression, anxiety and sleep improved immensely.

I don't really miss em. The only times it's a problem is when other people try to get me to consume caffeine/alcohol because people are weird about it. I'd wager a lot of people don't really need caffeine but our society really pushes it on people. It's also a wicked cycle. Once you get to using caffeine regularly it gets very difficult to operate at the same level without it.

But yeah, regular exercise, good sleep and a decent diet make it not too bad.

200mg caffeine is kind of a lot for me. I've dialed it down to one diluted cup (~80mg) 6 days of the week mixed with MCT, ghee, etc. I've tried bumping it to 200mg and can definitely feel slightly increased alertness late at night, even if I have it before 2pm. Gonna definitely try to have it all by noon now... since half-life is 12 hours and I sleep 10ish...