I work overnight shifts (11pm-7am) and take caffeine pills to stay awake. When I get home, even if I take more caffeine I’m sometimes still too tired and fall asleep. Why does it eventually stop working? Is there some sort of chemical limit? Why can’t caffeine replace sleep for longer periods of time (like days on end)?
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Maybe a better question to ask yourself is why you need to sleep at all. If you can get so much done, be so productive, make food, make objects, keep watch… why would you evolve to shut down for a third of every day?
That’s an awful lot of shutting down and not being productive, and pretty frequently.
Well, the answer to that is, not sleeping makes your brain not function very well.
Your brain working isn’t a zero-sum game with the chemicals it uses. Instead it makes and consumes them more like gasoline, polluting its area, and its clean-up cycle happens during a lower function mode (sleep).
If that doesn’t happen, eventually it will die or put you into some very dangerous situations through delusion/hallucination.
And besides that, caffeine is more like a suggestion than an ‘on’ switch. Especially as you get adjusted to it. If you are tired and sleepy, it takes a lot of caffeine or even a more powerful stimulant to stay awake through sleepiness, until maybe you get to the point where your hormones stop doing their jobs so well and you stop getting those signals and stop being in control of being awake.
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