A new preliminary study shows that drinking too much coffee can disturb a person's internal body clock.
The research strongly proposes that caffeine, which can be commonly acquired from coffee is more than just a perk-giver to those individuals who consume it regularly. The stimulant is said to delay the drinker's normal body clock to 40 minutes when it is consumed few hours before bed time.
Professor Kenneth P. Wright, the lead author of the study stated their new findings about the other effects of caffeine.
"Everyone knows caffeine promotes wakefulness and disturbed sleep. But there's another way that caffeine is affecting our physiology that we really hadn't considered before," said by the professor of the Sleep and Chronobiology Laboratory at University of Colorado Boulder.
The research team conducted the study by investigating five people for 49 days. The subjects were given the command to drink one capsule of caffeine which is equivalent to double espresso.
The five subjects were then exposed to either a dim or bright light. This was done because of the fact that bright light can encourage a person to sleep, and can also reset the body's internal clock.
Body clock time was measured through the use of the saliva levels of melatonin. Melatonin is considered a vital hormone in body clock regulation, which means that if the melatonin level increase, this corresponds to a person's sleepy feeling.
The results show that the consumption of caffeine delayed the body clock by about 40 minutes which is half the delay associated to the bright light exposure. Professor Wright said that caffeine is not only providing a minimal time of alertness, but also pushing the person's body into another time zone.
Furthermore, Wright stated that one of the effective way to have a much earlier wake times and bedtimes is to either totally remove coffee consumption in a person's diet or by shifting your coffee time to morning instead at night.
