Sleep & Aging

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For most of my adult life, I could drink coffee after lunch and sleep just fine. These days a 1pm cup means I'm staring at the ceiling at 1:30am.

As we age, our bodies take progressively longer to clear caffeine out of our system. The tolerance you built in your twenties doesn't carry forward. It quietly erodes, and most of us fail to connect the dots between our afternoon espresso and the sleep we can't figure out how to fix.


I'm fond of espresso.

I cut my caffeine consumption by about 60% a couple months ago. The 1:30am wakeups stopped almost immediately, and I'm sleeping the way I did in my 30s. My wife Collette went further and eliminated caffeine entirely, coffee, tea, chocolate, all of it, and the change in her sleep has been remarkable enough that I suspect I'll eventually follow her there.

Sleep isn't a wellness accessory. It's foundational to both mental and physical health, which is part of why sleep is one of the first things I check in on each morning. If your sleep has quietly gotten worse over the years and you haven't thought to blame your afternoon coffee, this is worth a real look, not just a passing thought.

A place to start: try moving your last caffeinated drink to noon for two weeks and pay attention to what changes. You may be surprised by how much ground you get back.

To our collective wellbeing,


Scott

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