Your Afternoon Coffee Might Be Why You're Still Tired. Here Are 10 Reasons, And What To Do Instead

It is the dip after lunch. The mug is the closest thing to hand, so the mug it is. You are not really after the coffee. You are after the dip stopping.

Caffeine works by blocking a signal in your brain. The signal is called adenosine, and it is how your body tells you it is tired. The coffee turns off that gauge for a few hours. The tiredness is still there. You just can't read it.

It takes your body four to six hours to clear half the caffeine in a cup. Pour one at three and half of it is still working at eight. Some of it is still there at one in the morning. You feel tired, so you get into bed. Then you lie there.

In a sleep study in Detroit, people took caffeine six hours before bed. The recorder showed they lost more than an hour of sleep. They did not know it. They thought they had slept fine.

Lose an hour of sleep and the next day starts short. The wall after lunch comes early. So the cup at three feels earned, and it is. It is also the reason tomorrow will look the same.

The loop is quiet. It does not feel like a loop. It feels like being a person who needs coffee. Take away the afternoon cup and the loop breaks with it. The morning one can stay.

Your body gets used to caffeine. It grows more of the signal the coffee blocks, so the same cup lifts you less each month. You end up drinking it just to feel normal.

Researchers in Bristol tested regular coffee drinkers who had gone one night without. Then they gave them caffeine. It got them back to about where the non-coffee drinkers already were. It did not take them past it. The lift you feel from the cup is mostly the dip from not having had one yet.

You know the feeling by half four. Busy hands, a heart that won't settle, and a head that will not hold the thing in front of it. The caffeine has your body up. The short night has your mind down. Both at once.

The FDA's own list of what too much caffeine does reads like a Tuesday afternoon: jitters, a fast heartbeat, an upset stomach, trouble sleeping. Cup three is where a lot of people cross that line without noticing.

Two in three American adults drink coffee every day, and the ones who do average three cups. Nobody decided that. It crept up a cup at a time, each one poured to fix the dip the last one left.

Coffee is not the problem here. The morning cup is one of life's good things. Cups two and three are doing a different job, and they are doing it badly.

The afternoon cup has one job: get you to six o'clock. It does that, and it charges you tomorrow for it.

Try a different routine. Keep the morning coffee. Move the thing you take for energy to the morning too, next to the kettle, and make it something with no caffeine to wear off.† Give it thirty mornings. If the three o'clock cup is still calling on day thirty, you have your answer, and you have lost nothing.

Irish sea moss grows on the rocks by the sea. People picked it at low tide. They dried it on the grass. They boiled it in milk until it set. Then they gave it to whoever in the house was worn out. No one called it a routine. No one measured it. A fistful in a pot was the amount, because that was the amount that did something.

Selkie is that, made stronger. Thirty parts of raw sea moss go into one part of the extract. You get 1,000mg of that extract in each serving. It also has 250mg of bladderwrack, 250mg of burdock root, and a 50mg complex so it works under your tongue. Every milligram is on the label.†

There is no caffeine in it, so there is nothing left working at eleven at night. A liquid under your tongue skips the queue, so it does not have to go through your stomach before your body can use it. That is what the 50mg complex is for.

It tastes a little like the sea. It is seaweed. Anyone who says it tastes of nothing is not being straight with you. It is gone in about ten seconds, and then you have your coffee.

You do not need another promise. You need room to find out. Selkie comes with a 90-day money-back promise. Take it for the full ninety days. If you do not feel a real difference, send it back and we refund you. An empty bottle is fine.

Here is what to expect.

• Days 1 to 4. Nothing. You will still want the three o'clock cup. Have it if you want it.

• Weeks 2 to 4. This is when most people who felt something first felt it. Often it was quieter than they expected.†
• Month two. This is when the people who order again say they could tell. That is why the promise runs ninety days, not thirty. It is also why we sell three bottles at once.

Your first bottle is $29 when you subscribe. You get three free gifts and free shipping. You can pause, skip or cancel in two clicks.