How to Timing Your Caffeine Intake and Improve Alertness
Have you ever drank coffee to stay up late, but then when it came time for your exam, your mind was clouded with fatigue? Researchers at the U.S. Army have developed an algorithm that can predict the peaks and troughs in energy associated with caffeine consumption, and in turn, have created a web-based tool that helps you predict how much alertness you can expect based on your own sleep schedule. and coffee habits.
A tool called 2B-Alert allows you to enter your sleep schedule, as well as how much caffeine you drank and when. (You need to estimate the caffeine content yourself, but you can click Help to view a cheat sheet showing how many milligrams of caffeine are in some common drinks and foods.) You can also import Excel data if you’re already tracking it. …
After you click the Predict button, a line appears on the graph showing how much you can expect to be awake over time based on the sleep schedule you entered and your caffeine intake. The graph can display up to seven graphs at once, so you can compare the approximate week when you sleep regularly to a hectic week when you cut back on sleep and try to make up for that with an extra cup of joe here and there.
It’s not the prettiest design for a web app, but the data visualization makes 2B-Alert fun. It is especially interesting to observe how not getting enough sleep over many nights can have a cumulative effect, although this should not surprise new parents. The graph can also show you how you can best time your coffee breaks to avoid a drop in energy at inconvenient times, such as on your way home from work. Most strikingly, the graph is overlaid with dotted lines to show the points where fatigue can have the same effect on reaction time as drunkenness.
The main disadvantage of 2B-Alert is that its algorithm is based on the “average” person. For example, you cannot enter your height, weight, or gender. Because caffeine affects people in different ways, the schedule may not be appropriate for your situation. Researchers have also developed a smartphone app that will learn over time how caffeine and sleep deprivation can specifically affect you, but it is not yet available to the general public.
Thankfully, other smartphone apps are already helping you track your caffeine intake and hopefully get an idea of how much to drink and when. For iOS, you can try the Caffeine app , which has a similar graph function and can even notify you when your caffeine level needs to be low enough for you to fall asleep. Caffiend , a more minimal iOS app, lets you track your caffeine intake as well as hydration levels, and makes it easy to enter drinks with three quick add points to save your favorites. Both of these apps can sync caffeine data with Apple Health. On the Android side, try Caffeine Tracker: Kofe + or, if you can’t see the graph, Caffeine Tracker .
The 2B-Alert study was done by the Biotechnology High Performance Computing Software Applications Institute ( BHSAI ), part of the Department of Defense, and the accompanying study was published May 28 in the journal Sleep Research . The publicly available tool does not save your data or use it in research – the schedules you enter and the resulting graphs are deleted when you log out, although you can export the data and build a graph in advance.
I stayed up late and wrote all week, and when I got into sleep and wake mode, the graph showed that my usual coffee schedule of one cup in the morning and another at about 2:00 did not cut it. By moving my second cup to lunch and adding another 3, I was able to stay alert during dinner. It’s also interesting to see how the extra espresso in my favorite latte (another 80 mg of caffeine) affects the schedule.