If I were to drink an espresso at 5:30pm and then go for a 2h run, would the caffeine still affect my sleep at say 9:30pm? I understand that the half life of caffeine is around 4-6hours, so my question is, would this reduce after burning extra energy?
In: Biology
Caffeine doesn’t really give you any extra energy. It just inhibits the feeling of tiredness. How long it takes to disappear depends a lot on your metabolism. You don’t “burn it” or “use it up”. It gets filtered out of your blood by your liver and the broken-down leftover compounds are removed by your kidneys and pissed away in urine.
It’s not caffeine’s “half-life” as such. It isn’t radioactive. It is your liver’s and kidney’s capacity that determines how long it affects you.
Caffine blocks receptors for hormones which regulate sleep. Those hormones are produced anyway, even if caffeine is blocking them being received.
Exercising won’t significantly affect the rate at which caffeine is broken down in your body, but may stimulate additional production of hormones.
So it won’t make you sleepy any sooner, but may well make you more sleepy when the caffeine begins to wear off.
Your body produces “tiredness” molecules as the day goes on, and there are “sensors” in the body which measure these and trigger tiredness and sleepiness. Caffeine just sorta temporarily plugs these sensors and prevents them from measuring the tiredness, till your body clears it out from the system enough that the sensors start working again.
To answer your question, jogging will increase production of the “tiredness” molecules which will cause you to crash harder once your metabolism clears the caffeine.
Not really. Drugs are not caloric so you don’t burn through them faster by consuming more energy. Drugs have a half life because they literally lose their chemical structure while inside of your body. There may be some fluctuations in this depending on a number of factors but in general no. Your body isn’t burning caffeine. The caffeine is simply decomposing.
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