How Coffee is disrupting your sleep

Coffee. This simple word to most Americans is life’s greatest gift. More than 80% of adults in America drink coffee and that number is rising every year. Many people drink coffee habitually once, twice, or throughout the day whether it’s a Grande soy latte with an extra shot topped with whip cream from Starbucks or a classic favorite coffee brewed right in your kitchen. Coffee is used by many to wake you up and start your day off while others use it to keep them going through out the day or to help them stay awake to complete that assignment they put off till 12:00 PM. What many people don’t know is just how much coffee is affecting their sleep habits and their body’s natural internal clock.

           

A study published in the journal, Science Translational Medicine, shows how a single caffeinated double espresso can affect a persons sleep cycle. Researchers at the department of integrative physiology at the University of Colorado designed a sleep study where participants were given either a double espresso or a placebo and placed in either dim or bright light. Without external cues such as the suns natural light, the participants were relying off their body’s internal clocks to tell them when to sleep, such as the body’s natural release of melatonin. One of the primary roles of melatonin is to make you sleep and your body naturally releases it at night. From this study it showed how one double espresso before bedtime could delay a person’s melatonin release by roughly 40 minutes, which in turn delayed when they fell asleep. This delay of melatonin release caused by coffee is powerful enough to shift people's internal clocks. This can affect how much people sleep are getting and why they are feeling tired in the morning.

By understanding what disrupts our circadian rhythms we have a better chance of figuring out just how circadian clocks work. The findings from this study are important because it helps other neuroscientists to better understand our brains. Dr. David Cavanaugh, a neuroscientist at Loyola University Chicago, has also been working to better understand circadian rhythms. His research is focused on Drosophila flies and figuring out just where in the brain these clocks are located and work. Drosophila flies share 70% of human genes and can be applied back to humans in helping to learn more. From his research he has found that even when you remove environmental cues such as light, the internal clock still remains intact and flies are active when day should be happening and resting when night should be. Cavanaugh also hopes to map out which cells in the brain play a part in circadian rhythms.

With Dr. Cavanaugh’s work with Drosophila flies and other neuroscientists’ research we are getting closer to discovering just how our internal clocks work. With these findings hopefully in the future we can have more insight on to how sleeping disorders such as insomnia are caused and can be treated. Until then the best advice we can give is to stop drinking coffee hours before bed and let your body's internal clock do it's job.

"Coffee isn't just keeping you Awake, it's Messing up Your Internal Clock." Medical daily. N.p., 17th Sept. 2015. Web. 15th Oct. 2015.

http://www.medicaldaily.com/caffeine-coffee-may-throw-circadian-rhythm-and-all-it-takes-one-double-espresso-353110

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