If caffeine isn’t having any effects on you, it can be due to lack of sleep, natural energy slump, caffeine tolerance, the amount of caffeine, genetics, or medicine. Caffeinated drinks may not affect you, or espresso may have helped you wake up in the mornings, but they now have no influence on your energy levels. In either case, there are a variety of reasons if you constantly question why doesn’t caffeine affect me.
The six main reasons why caffeine isn’t having an impact on you are covered in detail below. Here’s also in detail about receiving caffeine’s energizing effects and boosting your energy without using caffeine.
Why Has Caffeine No Effect On Me?
The factors that contribute to caffeine’s sedative and the reasons why does caffeine not affect me are already discussed, but if coffee isn’t working at all for you, here are the key offenders:
1. You Owe Sleep to Yourself
Sleep debt is known as how much sleep you owe your body over the previous 14 nights. It is compared to your genetically determined sleep need, which is the amount of sleep you require each night. Caffeine won’t help you feel more awake if you have a significant sleep debt. In fact, a study discovered that caffeine no longer improved performance or alertness after three nights of five hours of sleep per night.
When you don’t get enough sleep, everything from your concentration to mental health and physical performance will suffer. It’s a vicious cycle. If caffeine doesn’t affect me has been your concern, you might have been consuming more of it every day, which has kept you up later, increased your sleep debt, and made you feel even more exhausted. Your body naturally accumulates adenosine when you are awake, which is the cause of the tiredness you experience. As a neurotransmitter, it instructs the brain when to sleep and calms the central nervous system. You will start to feel sleepy and want to sleep once it reaches a specific point. And when you do fall asleep, adenosine is expelled from your body, making you feel less tired when you wake up, and the cycle repeats. The way that caffeine affects your brain is by momentarily inhibiting adenosine receptors. Nevertheless, if you haven’t been getting enough sleep, your body will have a lot of adenosine, which means you will experience the chemical’s drowsiness effects even if you have caffeine in your system.
Calculating your sleep debt doesn’t have to be complicated. Your phone usage patterns are used by the RISE app to determine how much sleep you need, providing you with a target amount each night. The software then determines whether you have any sleep debt and, if so, just how much.
2. Your circadian rhythm
Do you ever have that afternoon slump where you feel drained all of a sudden? Your circadian cycle is in action there. This internal body clock controls when you feel awake and tired and operates on an approximately 24-hour cycle. Why doesn’t coffee wake me up might be an unsuitable question in such scenarios. We all naturally experience highs and lows in energy throughout the day, with the afternoon being one of those low times. You will feel this energy slump more severely if you have a significant sleep debt. You will nevertheless experience it even if you are not sleep-deprived because it is a normal aspect of your biology. Hence, if you are drinking coffee and feel like it’s doing you no good, it could just be that you are going through a natural drop in energy.
While you cannot prevent this from occurring, you can minimize your sleep debt and prepare for it. Your daily circadian rhythm can be predicted by RISE, which can also display when your energy levels will peak and decrease. Perhaps you can plan less strenuous tasks for this afternoon’s energy slump. Caffeine should not be your sole source of energy to carry you through the afternoon slump. Caffeine uses too close to bedtime will make it more challenging to get to sleep and get the amount of sleep you need. This results in increased sleep debt and increased fatigue during the afternoon energy slump the following day.
3. You have Developed a Tolerance to Caffeine
Caffeine tolerance may be the cause of your inability to feel the energizing benefits of caffeine that it formerly did. At this point, your body has grown accustomed to the amount of caffeine you typically consume and will require more of it to get the same energy boost. In one study, individuals drank either caffeine or a placebo for 18 days before exposure to caffeine. According to the findings, people who had already been ingesting caffeine didn’t experience its benefits as intensely as those who had been taking a placebo. According to some experts, caffeine tolerance can form in as little as three to five days; therefore, those who enjoy coffee and can’t function during the day without a cup, or three, will undoubtedly develop some sort of tolerance to it.
4. Your caffeine intake is insufficient
While consuming too much caffeine undoubtedly has drawbacks, such as sleep loss and caffeine tolerance, consuming too little caffeine may completely fail to affect you. Depending on factors including weight, age, and heredity, each of us requires a different quantity of caffeine to experience its benefits. To determine whether low doses of caffeine were as helpful as greater doses, a 2019 meta-analysis analyzed multiple studies with various caffeine intakes. While many studies revealed no difference, some discovered that higher doses had a greater impact.
One study, for instance, discovered that with a dose of around 2 mg of caffeine per pound of body weight (342 mg for 400 mg for the average-sized male 200 lbs and 171 lbs for the average-sized woman), aerobic endurance performance was enhanced more than by a dose of approximately 1.45 mg per pound, which in turn was enhanced more than by an amount of approximately 0.95 mg per pound. In contrast to roughly 1 mg of caffeine per pound, a dose of about 2.3 mg per pound of body weight improved maximum knee flexion, according to a different study.
The ideal dosage of caffeine might be different for everyone. Lower caffeine levels may be beneficial for some people, while higher quantities may be necessary for others.