Don’t think about having a coffee before going to bed

Common sense tells us that unless we’re trying to pull an all-nighter, then having a cup of coffee late on in the day probably isn’t the best idea in the world. Now science has got involved in the debate and has moved the coffee jar onto the top shelf in the kitchen, way out of reach.

A new study, recently published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, has looked at the effects that caffeine has on our circadian rhythms.

Circadian rhythms help regulate the sleeping patterns of animals, including the mere mortal human race. They also can control the natural fluctuations of core body temperatures, brain activity, cell regeneration and hormone production. In short, they’re pretty important things.

“Everyone knows caffeine promotes wakefulness and disturbed sleep,” said lead author Professor Kenneth P Wright Jr.

“But there’s another way that caffeine is affecting our physiology that we really hadn’t considered before.”

Over a period of 49 days, the research team looked at how caffeine disrupts these rhythms by monitoring the participants’ levels of melatonin, a hormone which helps regulate our body clocks.

Those taking part in the study were observed in a number of different scenarios and the researchers found out that caffeine threw circadian rhythms out of kilt. In some instances, they saw body clocks being unnaturally pushed back by nearly an hour.

“In this case,” Professor Wright commented, “caffeine is pushing you into another time zone.”

Wright also said that regular or chronic consumption of caffeinated products late at night will push our body clocks backwards and making it harder to get to sleep and harder to get out of bed at a normal time.

So just like watching Netflix in bed or browsing through your infinite number of social media accounts before you power down for the night, you probably shouldn’t drink coffee either.

However it wasn’t all bad news. The scientists believe that in some circumstances a late-night cup of coffee could be a good thing. In their own words, the team from the Sleep and Chronobiology Laboratory at University of Colorado Boulder said:

“Properly timed caffeine use may also be of benefit with respect to shifting circadian timing, potentially assisting with circadian adaptation to large phase delays required when flying across many time zones westward, as well as sustaining wakefulness until bedtime in the new time zone.”

In our words; caffeine may be useful helping people acclimatise to new time zones.