As caffeine is a central nervous stimulant, you usually associate it with speeding up your body, making you feel more alert and awake. However, these effects can be temporary, leading you to consume more caffeine to make you feel more awake or potentially increasing feelings of drowsiness as caffeine’s effects subside. Because caffeine affects every person differently, understanding how caffeine impacts you personally can help you determine how much you can consume without feeling overly drowsy.
Adenosine
One of the factors concerning caffeine and drowsiness is the neurotransmitter adenosine. When adenosine binds with its receptors -- imagine adenosine like a key fitting into its lock -- your nerve cells slow down, and you feel drowsy. However, caffeine binds in this receptor instead of adenosine when you drink it. This makes your nerve cells speed up, making you feel less drowsy. The drowsiness-lifting effect typically only proves temporary, however.
Caffeine Loss
Because caffeine stays in your body only a certain amount of time, it will eventually leave your adenosine receptors, making you feel fatigued and drowsy. Because caffeine affects people differently, you may find you feel even more fatigued and tired than you did before you drank caffeine to wake you up. This is because even though caffeine has masked the effects of your fatigue, you are still tired when the caffeine wears off.
Drowsiness Cycle
Some people tend to use caffeine as a means to reduce drowsiness. For example, if you are sleepy in the morning, you may drink a cup of coffee to help you feel more alert. However, this can create what the Mayo Clinic terms “an unwelcome cycle.” However, your body can become accustomed to the caffeine, and you need to drink more to feel less drowsy. However, drinking excess caffeine in the day can affect your ability to go to sleep and stay asleep at night. Poor-quality sleep can create a cycle, causing you to continue to drink more coffee to stay awake.
Warning
Drinking caffeine to mask the effects of drowsiness can be harmful to your health. For example, if you are driving and the caffeine in your coffee, soda, chocolate or energy drink wears off, your reaction times may be affected, which could lead to a potential accident. If you drink between 500 and 600 mg of caffeine per day -- the equivalent of four of more cups of coffee -- to prevent drowsiness, you also may experience insomnia, nervousness, restlessness and irritability, according to the Mayo Clinic. Try cutting back to 200 to 300 mg of caffeine per day, which is considered a moderate caffeine dosage and the equivalent of two to four cups of coffee per day.
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