Coffee and sleep

So what time is it?

So is it the right time for a coffee?

Most people I know would simply answer it as yes now would be a great time for a coffee and here at UKVending we tend to agree with you. That doesn’t, however, stop those pesky scientific types trying to make sense of our mutual love of coffee.

The latest scientific research into coffee has focused on when is the best time to drink coffee and here’s the rub, a massive 82 percent of the people who took part in the research have found out that they consume their coffee at the wrong time of the day.

More specifically those morning drinkers drank their cups of coffee at the wrong time. Expert Doctor Sarah Brewer, who was part of the research team, concluded that the first cup of coffee should be drunk no earlier than 10am and much later than the national average time of 8.30am.

The research, partly funded by bed and sleep specialist, Time 4 Sleep, created a number of tools so that people can more accurately gauge whether or not their consumption of coffee will affect their quality of sleep.

The good doctor explained the reasoning behind the 10am figure. After sleep and when we wake in the morning the body is full of a naturally produced substance called cortisol – a stress hormone that plays an important part in the waking up process in the morning. Caffeine in the coffee mimics the cortisol and raises the levels of stress hormones even higher and disturbs the body’s biorhythms. In fact cortisol has an important part to play in your body’s rhythms all day long.

Dr Brewer suggests that you should only have coffee at 10am another at 2pm and a third, small cup, around 5.30.