Photo: Marta Ortiz (Getty Images)
Java, cup of joe, lifeblood; whatever you call coffee, it’s the drink many depend on to keep them alert. If you’re like the average American, you’re drinking about 1.6 cups a day. However, when you drink coffee is as important as how much of it you’re consuming. Earlier this year, neuroscientist Steven L. Miller, at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, published research indicating the peak time for caffeine consumption is between 9:30 and 11:30 a.m.
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But what if you don’t want to ballpark your caffeine rush and you need something more accurate? Enter the Coffee Kick calculator. Coffee Kick predicts when you should drink your cup o joe to achieve maximum caffeination. The calculator factors in how much sleep you’ve had and how much coffee you’ll need to stay alert.
The project, helmed by Małgorzata Koperska, M.D., and Dominik Czernia, Ph.D. student, uses a scientifically proven formula based on research on soldiers in a sleep deprivation state. If you have a long night ahead of you, just choose one of the most popular caffeinated drinks and pick the time of each separate dose. The calculator crunches the numbers and shows when your peak level of alertness will hit.
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So if you wake up at 10:30 a.m. and have two cups of coffee around 11:30 a.m., you peak at 11:44 a.m. This kind of calculator can be helpful to anyone, but especially to students who are consistently low on sleep. Let’s say you have a meeting at 10 a.m. but stayed up too late. You can now time exactly when to drink your caffeine in order to hit the apex of alertness in your meeting.
Do you have any tricks for getting the most out of your caffeine fix? Let us know in the comments!
