The Perfect Nap – Coffee Please

If you find yourself needing more and more coffee to get that “energy jolt”, you’ve developed a tolerance to your daily brew. If you want to reduce your tolerance and daily volume of coffee, you’ll want to read about strategic coffee use. Even if you drink coffee for the taste and like the fact that you don’t get the jitters, i.e., if you’re happily coffee tolerant, you still might benefit from the instructions for the perfect 15 minute nap from UK researchers. Kevin Purdy’s recent article reports that It takes ten days to wean yourself off coffee and start over in building tolerance. You’ll experience some headaches, but if you want to use coffee’s caffeine energy benefits, you need to limit caffeinated coffee consumption. This is made easier by the availability of Swiss decaffeinated coffees; switching to them still provides the taste and coffee pleasures without the caffeine. The UK researchers have developed what they call the “caffeine nap” which you take in the afternoon for a very effective 15-minute refresher. To do this, start with a quickly downed cup of coffee. It’s important not to leisurely partake, but to drink it quickly, because it takes about 15 minutes to start affecting your body. Immediately after downing it, close your eyes, relax and snooze or doze, whatever you can do. After 15 minutes, the caffeine should kick in, thus waking you up. The nap should not last more than 15 minutes. A nap lasting a half hour will cause areas of the brain to relax so much it will take the same amount of time to get them back up to speed. And that would NOT be a perfect nap. There are actually other compounds besides caffeine in coffee that influence a person’s energy level and alertness, and these are present in decaf. This is why, to remain free from caffeine tolerance, it’s necessary to limit caffeinated brew and satisfy your coffee longing with water processed decaf. The body readily adapts to routines, so throwing varying amounts of caffeine at it every day might help keep it from succumbing to tolerance. With a little attention, it might not be as easy as “a decaf a day keeps the tolerance away”, but the tolerance re-build-up should be slowed. So, brew on, strategically.