Hi there, it's Matt here and welcome back to the podcast. So this is going to sound strange coming from someone like me, but I'm going to suggest that you drink coffee because the health benefits associated with coffee are numerous and many of them are significant.

And I'll explain exactly why this is the case a little bit later on.

Since today is going to be the first of a two-part series all about coffee, caffeine and their interaction with this thing called sleep.

In this first episode, we'll focus on how caffeine works and then how

caffeine can impact your sleep at night in several different ways and then in the next episode we'll find out more about

exactly why coffee can offer these health benefits despite the harmful impact that

caffeine can have upon your sleep.

So let's start with exactly how caffeine works.

Now in our previous episode on sleep pressure, we learned all about how caffeine can keep you awake

during the day. Here we're going to focus on how caffeine can impact your sleep at

night.

Caffeine is in a class of drugs

that we call the psychoactive stimulants,

and I'm sure that you knew that caffeine was some form

of a stimulant. However, there are several hidden consequences of caffeine

that you may be less aware of. One of these is the duration of action.

Caffeine has what we call a half life of about five to six hours in the average adult.

In other words, after five to six hours, 50% of that caffeine is still going to be in your system.

And what that means is that caffeine will then have a quarter life of about 10 to 12 hours.

So in other words, let's say that you have a cup of coffee at 2 p.m. in the afternoon.

Almost a quarter of that caffeine could still be circulating in your brain at midnight or perhaps even more

than a quarter of that caffeine. And the probably rather crass analogy here would be that if you have a cup of coffee at 2 p.m.

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