Caffeine Calculator Helps You Plan Your Day
Caffeine can make you feel better, but so can a good night’s sleep. Until now, if you wanted to plan your caffeine intake in detail, you used 2B-alert as the tool , which was fantastic but awkward and difficult to read. But now the omnicalculator has created a simplified version of what they call the Coffee Break Calculator .
To use it, you simply tell the calculator when you woke up and how long you slept. Then enter the times and types of caffeinated drinks. This is what your alertness looks like during the day (the higher the line, the more alert you are) if you have had a full eight hours and woke up at 6 AM:
This calculator measures “alertness”: when you wake up, you get 100 percent, drop to 81 percent around 11 am, rise slightly around 8 pm, and drop quickly after 11. Sounds good. So what if we drink a big coffee right when we wake up?
Great, in the morning we will be awake, but at night we will still get tired. But what if we really feel this afternoon slump and then drink a big coffee too (I point out it’s 1.5 cups)?
Coffee will do its job, and during the working day we will be much more alert than if we did not have it at all. But the graph looks like a roller coaster, a warning pops up that we have over 400 milligrams today (we will live, but this is not ideal), and we are a little more mindful before bed.
In fact, no one is perfect as a calculator: some of us get more from caffeine than others, and the more often you drink it, the less it helps.
If you want to really understand your caffeine intake, the original 2B alert can simulate several days of lack of sleep and compare different caffeine intake schedules to each other. But for a day-to-day understanding of what happens when you get your dose of caffeine, Coffee Kick is great.