You stop drinking caffeine at 11. Or 2. Or you’ve moved to decaf entirely.
And you’re still waking up at 3 a.m.
I hear this pattern often. The question underneath it — does caffeine stop being a factor once a cutoff is in place? — turns out to be harder to answer than most sleep advice suggests. The reason has to do with why the same cutoff time means something different for different people, and even for the same person on different days.
If you’ve made changes to your caffeine timing and still wake in the second half of the night, I put together a short video on this. It covers why a fixed cutoff time is an estimate at best, the variables that determine how caffeine is processed differently by different people, and one approach that tends to give you more useful information than adjusting the cutoff time alone.
The useful question isn’t whether caffeine is affecting your sleep. It’s: by how much — and what do you want to do with that information?
—Kat
P.S. You’ve been managing your stress. The 3am wakeups haven’t responded.
There are at least four categories of stressors driving middle-of-the-night wakeups — most of them have nothing to do with what’s happening in your life:
