Coffee time alarm: 11 a.m. in the office in the morning…
There should be people who don’t like coffee. I’m not one of those people. For me there is no life before the first coffee. I probably wouldn’t even make it out of the house, let alone to work, without my morning coffee. I admire my co-workers who don’t like coffee for being productive without the added caffeine. For me and many other Europeans, however, coffee in its many varieties is a loyal companion through the stressful everyday life. According to a study, every European drinks a little more than a cup of coffee a day on average. That’s very little by my standards, because I consume up to four cups of the caffeinated drink on some days – and that’s just scratching the limit of what is still considered healthy for my body.
The best time to drink coffee
A lot of people don’t drink coffee because they don’t like it. For me he is above all a wake-up call. Of course, I have nothing against the bitter taste either, but it should mainly do one thing: It should wake you up. That’s why I always run to the coffee machine for our office when I’m getting tired, and I’ve noticed that with my colleagues too.
There are real peak times for using our coffee machine for our company: early in the morning when most take their place in front of the computer, next time at 11am when the caffeine wears off and then again in the afternoon for the rest of the working day to survive. However, in 2013 Steven Miller published the theory that there was a perfect time to have coffee. The then postdoctoral fellow at the Geisel School of Medicine in Dartmouth claimed that a person’s cortisol levels fundamentally affect the body’s caffeine absorption. Since cortisol is held responsible, among other things, for a person’s ability to concentrate, it is obvious that coffee should be consumed especially at times when the cortisol level in the blood is particularly low.
However, if the concentration of this stress hormone is high, you can save yourself the trip to the coffee machine for the company, since you are awake and concentrated anyway. According to a British research team from the University of Sheffield, a person’s cortisol levels are particularly high three times a day: in the morning between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m., at noon between 12 p.m. and 1 p.m. and again in the late afternoon between 5.30 p.m. and 6.30 p.m. According to this, one should not drink coffee at all before 9 a.m. and would be wide awake by nature.
Most of us are well aware that this often does not correspond to reality. Very few are naturally early risers, so it is not surprising that some people run to the company coffee machine earlier than others. Since the sleep-wake cycle is controlled by the internal clock and is different for each person, it is difficult to make a uniform statement about the best time to consume coffee.
To do this, everyone would have to study their body clock very carefully in order to find the perfect time to drink coffee, and even then it would still be unlikely to always find the right moment. In addition, people react very differently to caffeine, which explains why some get by with one cup of coffee a day, while others make seven runs to the office coffee machine. Ultimately, everyone’s best bet is to drink coffee whenever you feel like it, whether that’s four times a day, every other day, or never.