Caffeine is supposed to keep one awake, yes? For me and my brother, caffeine (in any form) makes us sleepy. It does this to noone else in our family, nor to anyone else we know. Is it a medical condition, or are we just weird?
I used to work with a guy who said the more coffee he drank after, like, 8 PM, the better he slept. I did see him down 3 cups one evening.
A cup of coffee after dinner used to be standard practice. Refer to any episode of the Dick Van Dyke Show, for example. But in real life too. As far as I know, it didn’t affect how well people slept.
Caffeine is psychoactive drug, and your body can get used to it, and addicted to it in order to function well. So you think that morning cup is waking you up, but it is really just making you normal at that hour and without it you would would be sluggish and unalert. In other words, how you feel after that first cup is how you would feel without coffee if you never drank it, i.e. normally alert after a good night’s sleep. If you’re used to drinking it in the evening, even close to bedtime, that’s now natural for your body, so it doesn’t affect your natural sleep cycle.
It’s not crystal meth…
Drinking too much coffee, whether via the adenosine hit after it wears off or by impacting sleep so you do not rest well, can make it seem like there are fewer hours in the day and leave you feeling tired.
My wife will sometimes wake up in the morning, have a cup of coffee, then go back to sleep for another half hour or so. She calls it a “coffee nap”.
I rely on coffee to get me up and moving in the morning, like 5am-7am. But sometimes if I delay that first cup until 10-11am, it puts me down like a horse tranquilizer. No idea why, it’s not super predictable, but I avoid that situation because that’s not what I want from caffeine. It seems to be ok if I postpone caffeine through the entire 10am-2pm brunch window.
Coffee naps are apparently a thing.
I don’t drink coffee. I get my caffeine from the Diet Coke I have with my lunch every day. If I don’t I’ll get a headache. If I have a Diet Coke in the evening (rare), it does not affect by sleep at all.
Caffeine is known to have paradoxical effects in folks with ADHD. Could that be you?