Cortisol and Coffee

There’s been very few stretches of my adult life where I haven’t woken up and reached for a cup of coffee first thing in the morning. It’s a core part of my daily routine, as non-negotiable as urination and feeding the cat, and I’m hardly alone in the habit. One of the easiest ways to make my spouse happy is having a cup of coffee waiting for them the moment they wake up, perched on their bedside table beside the phone delivering their wake-up alarm.

Fortunately, this is pretty easy for me to provide, given that we live on slightly different schedules (I get up early to write, they sleep in because they find it harder to fall asleep than I do).

Unfortunately, drinking coffee first thing in the morning is actually a pretty terrible thing to do to your body.

The logic here comes down to cortisol, aka “the stress hormone”. Despite it’s nom-de-plume as a stress marker, bodies naturally produce three cortisone surges throughout the day, and the first of them is right as we wake up. This phenomena — the Cortisol awakening response – means we’re 50% to 77% more cortisone within a half-our of waking up each day. Think of it as your body’s acknowledgement that waking up means shits about to get real, so you’re primed to be alert and deal with the shift from relaxed to engaged.

Except there’s a bunch of stuff that can affect the level of cortisol in your bloodstream upon waking up, ranging from whether you’re a shift worker, whether it’s light out, whether you’re a lark (who naturally produce more cortisol) rather than a night owl, and whenever you have ongoing pain conditions.

It turns out the caffeine in coffee interrupts this cortisol production, causing the body to produce less of the hormone and rely on the coffee instead. Instead of getting the morning energy boost from cortisone, we’re getting it from a substance that we quickly develop a tolerance to.

In this light, optimal coffee consumption usually happens later in the day, when our cortisol levels ebbs (Can’t stomach the thought of going without a hot beverage? Tea might make an interesting substitute — Arthur Chu has a twitter thread on the impact on theanine in tea alongside the caffeine, and why it makes a difference),

Of course, if you’re enjoying your morning coffee, none of this is really meant to be an admonishment and a demand to stop. I read all of this — and wrote all of this — with the mindset of someone who figured “you’ll take my morning cup of coffee out of my cold, dead hands, assholes.”

Except…well, here’s the thing: I do regularly skip the coffee first thing, which has less to do with the science above, and more to do with crime writer Elmore Leanard’s morning routine when he was initially building his career. Leonard would wake up before work and write, and he motivated himself by refusing to drink coffee until he’d written his first 750 words of the day.

I adopted that habit myself when I started a full-time work last year, and the result is that I’m usually y awake for an hour or so before the first cup of coffee hits my system. And it’s definitely taken an edge off my mornings, and made the routines a little easier to cleave to, so long as my day-to-day stress levels aren’t off the charts.

I don’t know that I’ll ever be one of those people who waits two hours for my morning coffee, but I could well be on the way to becoming someone who doesn’t wake up to a cup of Joe first thing.