Your Morning Coffee Is Killing Your Energy Without You Knowing It

Don’t worry, you can get it back

Danny Forest
5 min readOct 7, 2020
Photo by Alexander Jawfox on Unsplash (adapted)

You just woke up. What are the first things you do within the first 30 minutes of waking up?

If you’re like me, you prepare coffee first thing in the morning. I don’t even take time to go to the bathroom first, I reach straight for the kettle to boil water.

I know I’m not alone doing that. If you’re like many professionals in America or Europe, you start by drinking coffee or a caffeine-infused beverage. Is this a good habit to have? Does it really make you more focused?

Yes, momentarily. However, the answer is a lot more complex than that.

It turns out, over time, caffeine is reducing your baseline level of energy. This is a huge finding! The first few times you took coffee, you got extra energy above your regular baseline. As you kept drinking coffee, your baseline started to shrink. Note, however, that according to some studies, this rule doesn’t apply the same way for people suffering from ADHD.

This illustration shows the long-term effects of caffeine:

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Danny Forest

Polymath. Life Optimizer. Learner. Entrepreneur. Engineer. Writer.