Many people insist on having a fresh cup of coffee to wake them up in the morning. But it seems as if the caffeine thrill they get from that cup doesn’t actually make much difference to waking up at all.
Apparently it does make you alert but it doesn’t actually wake you up in the way we tend to think it does. This is all according to a study that has recently been done, and no doubt people will have their own opinions on whether the studies are worth paying attention to or not.
For one thing, we doubt that the world’s coffee drinkers will stop having that cup of coffee first thing in the morning from now on. We suspect they will continue to have it, regardless of whether they actually get a kick from it or not. It could be that coffee has a placebo effect, giving us a boost even when it actually doesn’t do this at all. What we mean is that we think it is giving us a boost, and therefore it is.
You can see that it could be quite interesting to see how people react to the fact that coffee does not make you more alert. We all know however that caffeine withdrawal can give you some serious headaches, so in fact if people were to start trying to give it up it could lead to some problems. We think the best thing would be to carry on enjoying the first thing in the morning hit of caffeine in our favourite coffee, and not worry about what some study says. Does it really matter if caffeine has been proven not to wake you up? Provided we are feeling more alert as a result of going through our normal morning routine – part of which is drinking a cup of coffee – there is really nothing to worry about.
The study presumes that the main reason for drinking coffee first thing in the morning is indeed to wake us up. But is this the main reason you drink it? We think most people would probably say they drink it because they enjoy it first thing. They have their favourite coffee to look forward to brewing when they wake up, and so that is the main reason they have it. And they will continue to do so, even if the caffeine fails to work.