Sleeping (Again)

Hi! It’s me again, your sleeper buddy who has been hung up on the Getting Better Sleep Workshop by SWS ever since it happened. But it doesn’t stop there – now my YouTube algorithm has been suggesting videos about sleep too. And honestly? I’ll take it. I am now invested in getting better sleep, and hopefully you are along for the ride.

Now, I’m not here to preach to you. There’s plenty of people doing that already, and it gets a little hard to take them seriously when they aren’t living our lives. But I’m here to tell you that I AM, in fact, among us, and I have honestly found these changes to be actionable (for the most part) at Caltech, and taking it a step further, I’ve found myself actually appreciating these changes I made to my sleep schedule.

This time, I want to talk about two major things that we deal with probably quite often: caffeine, and all-nighters.

I’m sure we’ve all heard at some point that caffeine has a half-life of around 5 hours, but it can really range from 3-7 hours. That means, ideally, you’re not having caffeine 5 hours before your bedtime. What caffeine does is it prevents adenosine from binding to receptors in your brain. Adenosine is the waste product released by your brain throughout the day, which when it latches onto your receptors, makes you more tired and inattentive. That’s why we feel a bolt of energy or focus when we down some caffeine, but it’s important to understand that that is just delaying the inevitable, not preventing it. That doesn’t mean I don’t drink coffee – I still do, but I’ve been trying to limit my consumption to only having it until 5 PM. Past that, I’m either going to get a steamer or a hot chocolate.

But then you ask, how can we pull an all-nighter without caffeine? Well the thing is, to nobody’s surprise, all-nighters are actually really bad for you. Not only do they make you feel incredibly crappy the day of, they actually prevent your long term memory from developing (if all-nighters are pulled often enough), which means you end up being worse at solving problems or making connections with what you’ve learnt. And speaking of making you feel crappy, a study showed that people who had been awake for 19 hours have coordination and reaction times that are similar to those who have been drinking, which also means you can end up making poor decisions. That’s why, if you think you need to work late, give yourself at least 5.5 hours of sleep, to prevent long-term harm to your body and brain’s functioning.

Tldr; it’s important (and doable!) to track caffeine consumption during the day and make sure we’re not letting substantive caffeine amounts exist in our bloodstream, and it’s also important to get at least 5.5 hours of sleep every night! And trust me, it’s not as hard or as bad as it sounds.