When is the best time in the morning to have some caffeine? If you never thought about it much, you probably drink your coffee as soon as you can. On the other hand, if you’re always looking for ways to optimize your life (maybe we’d even say hack it), you may have heard the advice to wait until mid-morning. Good news: you can ditch this supposed hack. There’s no need to delay your morning caffeine. Drink it when you want it.
We’re even guilty of promoting this hack: in 2013, we shared a blog post from a neuroscience PhD student who argued that 9:30 to 11:30 a.m. is the perfect coffee-drinking window. Since then, delaying morning caffeine has become a talking point for biohacking podcasters, TikTok yoga/hormone coaches, and other influencers of questionable credibility.
Meanwhile, actual scientists have been looking at these caffeine-delaying tips, and they have thoughts they’d like to share. In March, a group of sports scientists …