Acclaimed food writer Michael Pollan
investigated the ways in which caffeine affects our sleep in his audiobook Caffeine,
which came out at the end of January. "Everyone is caffeinated," Pollan
concluded, after cutting out caffeine for three months. "Until you get off
caffeine, you don't realize how universal that state is."
According to an article in The Wall Street Journal, when he first cut out caffeine,
Pollan described feeling "out of tune with the rest of civilization," groggy,
and dazed. But it wasn't long before Pollan realized just how much the caffeine
fast would benefit him. "After a couple of days, I was sleeping like a teenager
again," he recalls. "It was the only upside I could see, and it was a big one.
It was wonderful to have these deep, dream-filled sleeps."
So, how exactly does caffeine affect
our sleep? According to Pollan's research, "[Caffeine] appears to take its toll
on slow wave sleep, the critical brief period of deep sleep that we need to
reset our brains for the next day and to resynchronize everything." Pollan
shared that we sleep better when it's quiet and when it's cold. "The lower our
body temperature, the better we sleep," he says. He also says that the "absence
of screens and stress" plays a big part, too. After all, everyone knows that
getting a good night's sleep is the key to having a great day.
Pollan compared the effects of
alcohol and caffeine on sleep, stating that "if caffeine messes with slow wave sleep,
alcohol seems to mess with our REM sleep, when we do the most dreaming." When
Pollan tried caffeine for the first time after his three-month hiatus, he
remembers feeling euphoric. He says it definitely seemed similar to a
psychedelic experience: "Not that I hallucinated, but I felt a radical shift in
consciousness and substantially different than I had a half-hour before."
