How much caffeine is too much?

Adam trains in the evenings after a long day. He was dragging and struggling even to show up, never mind grinding through an hour at the gym.

He asked about pre-workout. He read that it boosts energy and performance and found it helps him get through his training.

But he also found that he was struggling to fall asleep.

Makes sense. His pre-workout contains 200mg of caffeine - about the same dose as two cups of dark roast and half of the max daily dose recommended by USDA (400 mg).

It helped but sucked him into a doom loop...

Can't sleep

Feel groggy and exhausted

Caffeinate

Grind through a long day

Feel low/no energy

No motivation to train

Take pre-workout to get through it

Feel good

Can't sleep

Sound familiar??

All this begs the question, how much caffeine is too much? And how late in the day should we use it?

The simple answer to the first question is that anytime we feel the negative symptoms of caffeine consumption, that's too much. 

They are well known- nervous jitters, headaches, rapid HR, sleeplessness, peeing all the time.

When I've had too much, I find myself clamping my jaw, which leads to mild headaches.

Certainly, if you're in a doom spiral like Adam, the evening caffeine is compounding things.

So, how late can we consume caffeine?

Everyone metabolizes it at different rates. For most, the half-life is 5 hours, but can range from 1.5-9.5 hours.

What does that mean for Adam? Half of the caffeine he consumed at 5:30 pm is probably still active in his bloodstream at 10:30 pm, maybe later, which explains why he can't get to sleep.

All of this begs the bigger question... if we feel dependent on caffeine and NEED it to scuffle through our day-to-day, how do we break the doom loop? Something's gotta change.

More to come on that, including next week, when we'll dive into HOW caffeine acts upon our brain and whether it's "good for us" or not. Stay tuned.

Together, we are stronger than our excuses.