There are all sorts of opinions on when you should, and shouldn’t, drink coffee. Dentists want you to brush your teeth before having your morning coffee. Which, not thanks, I’m not into toothpaste coferments. Healthmaxxers want you to wait two hours after you wake up; something about cortisol spikes and other words I don’t know the meanings of. But as far as the dreaded caffeine crash is concerned, a study finds that it doesn’t matter, so whatever: drink coffee whenever you want.
As reported by Inc, the study was published in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, an international cadre of researchers from America, Canada, England, and Chile examined over 200 previously-released studies on the subject of caffeine, looking to get to the bottom of a range of questions like: does caffeine dehydrate you, is it addictive, can too much caffeine kill you, and does waiting 1.5–2 hours after waking to consume caffeine help you avoid the afternoon crash?
This question in particular looks at the dreaded cortisol spike, the claim being that cortisol, a stress-causing hormone, spikes an hour after you wake up and adding caffeine to the equation prolongs that spike, which in turn leads to the afternoon caffeine crash as the caffeine passes through the body.
They found that elevated levels of cortisol from caffeine ingestion may actually be blunted by regular coffee drinkers, even those who drink just 200mg caffeine a day, or roughly two cups of coffee. For those 300–600mg caffeine daily, there may be no additional spike whatsoever. Were there to be some sort of caffeine crash, the research shows that it can, in most cases, be remedied by more caffeine without having any negative impact on the sleep cycle. If anything, delaying caffeine would only delay the crash and need to re-up the caffeine, which could actually affect sleep.
They also note that physical exercise in the morning produces additional cortisol, and many of the folks espousing caffeine delaying wouldn’t extend the same theory to working out.
So wake up, drink your coffee whenever you want. The crash most likely isn’t coming, and if it is, it has little to do with when you consumed caffeine, only that you did.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
