Sleep Dynamic Therapy

There can be no doubt that caffeine is a miracle drug, because it has probably saved millions of lives by preventing car accidents if not many other workplace accidents. I’m sure physicians have known for years that caffeine enhances work performance in the middle of the night by maintaining necessary degrees of alertness.

So, I’m not knocking caffeine, but in what follows in this post I hope you’ll consider another perspective on caffeine that just might save your life in a way you might not have anticipated.

Let’s start with the fundamental question, “Why do you drink coffee, tea or soda with caffeine?”

Among caffeine users, the single most common answer is, “I like it” and that’s the end of the story.

That’s a fine answer, but I propose that this answer is actually the beginning of the story.

Here are the facts about caffeinated beverage consumption that we see among treatment-seeking sleep patients, which lead us to believe that caffeine use is a marker of something beyond the simple pleasure of enjoying a good cup of coffee and so on:

1. Sleep patients rarely consume these drinks irregularly.
2. Certain types of sleep patients consume more caffeine, on a daily basis, then they are immediately able to measure, that is, they don’t really track it.
3. Most of these sleep patients reach for a caffeine drink during a period of low energy, fatigue or some other state of lower than desired powers of concentration or other mental faculties.
4. Nearly all these sleep patients have spent years engaged in these behaviors.
5. Few of these sleep patients have spent 90 consecutive days, let alone 30 consecutive days, with absolutely no caffeine ingestion.
6. Few have spent a few days or a week without caffeine to help themselves clarify whether there might be a secondary reason for their regular use of the miracle drug.
7. Few sleep patients understand the points made in this list, including the inability to even understand this point, that is, there is something more to understand about caffeine use than simply enjoying it.

So, my view, from my clinical and research experience is that sleep patients have gone so long in using caffeine and see so many people around them engaged in the same behavior, that the only logical conclusion to a caffeine discussion is that “it must be normal.”

This “normalizing” of behavior is one of the greatest barriers to successful treatment of sleep disorders, because sleep patients think everyone sleeps poorly so it too must be “normal.” Caffeine compounds this problem, because caffeine reduces or eliminates the primary symptoms seen in sleep disorders’ patients, namely, sleepiness, fatigue, low energy or poor concentration.

So, yes, caffeine is a miracle drug because it does enhance many behavioral deficits triggered by poor sleep quality or low sleep quantity. Yet, by successfully treating these deficits in the short term, an individual does not connect the dots (or as I say, the “zzzots”) to appreciate that caffeine is covering up a series of symptoms that should in other circumstances lead the individual to seek help for a serious health condition that robs the mind and body of the essential energy needed to function optimally in daily life.

Merry Christmas and please use caffeine to help you drive safely, if necessary tonight.