---
title: "Why Coffee May Be Draining Your Energy (Not Boosting It)"
entity: "blog"
canonical_url: "https://www.drdanwool.com/blog/coffeeandenergy"
markdown_url: "https://www.drdanwool.com/llms/blog/coffeeandenergy"
lastmod: "2025-01-20T07:00:00.000Z"
---

## Coffee and energy

[video transcript]  Drink coffee? Yeah, me too. Guilty as charged. I'm frequently asked when coffee becomes a detriment to somebody, and not surprisingly, it's when you drink too much, but it's also about WHEN you drink coffee.

The lift we get from coffee is usually from adrenaline. It pokes our adrenaline, kind of puts us in a slight "fight or flight" mode. But what ends up happening after we poke adrenaline? We stimulate cortisol. Cortisol's main job, if we were running away from a beast in "fight or flight" mode, is to melt glycogen out of the liver into glucose, and then take all that glucose and kind of put it in our muscles to run away, put it in our brain to make it sharp.

But most of us are just sitting around. Maybe we're even having a cup of coffee on our morning commute, sitting in the car. So, all that sugar just kind of sits there. All the signals get amplified, and we get some inflammation.
 

## The Mid-Afternoon Coffee (Cortisol) Crash Explained

Now remember the sugar piece. If you're having another cup of coffee, let's say, when you get to the office, and then another, and then another... most people kind of know that if they have too much coffee before two o'clock, they're probably not going to sleep very well. So they'll stop.

But I had somebody in here the other day, and they drank 72 to 100 ounces of coffee before 2:00! That's a lot! And then they crash between 3-6 in the afternoon. And this is somebody who wants to have peak performance, trying to take a business to the next level, for example, and they're crashing in the afternoon and can't figure out why.

Well, when you go back and look at how glucose is getting dropped into the system, and then we abruptly stop, and cortisol just naturally kind of rises with the sun and sets with the sun, by five o'clock there's no glucose in your system. So it's an emergency to your brain. That's the fuel your brain works on, and it starts to wind you down. Sometimes all the way down, and you want to take a nap.
 

## Optimizing Your Coffee for All-Day Energy

So if you are a coffee drinker, I would keep it to one cup. Another trick that we recommend: cortisol is also responsible for waking us up. A lot of people have coffee right when they wake up. Don't do that.
Have a little bit of water with a pinch of salt in it instead. Delay your coffee until breakfast, or maybe when you get to the office after a couple of hours. Cortisol will have woken you up, you will have had a couple of hours to have seen the sunlight, and then it's a great time to have a cup of coffee, and you will get the exact boost and mental clarity that you want from that without crashing.

So don't overdo it, and shift your coffee consumption to mid-morning, and you will get a lot more optimal energy throughout the day.
 

## More Tips for Your Health

If you want more tips like this, continue to watch this channel. Please drop some comments in the comments here on the YouTube channel. I'm more than happy to answer your questions. And check out my website, drdanwool.com. In the meantime, it's Dr. Wool. "Fix your gut, solve your health".

## Oh...one more thing

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About the Author

## Dr. Dan Wool, NMD

Dr. Dan Wool is a naturopathic doctor who specializes in gastroenterology, hormones and men's health in Scottsdale, Arizona. [Set up a free 15-minute discovery call with Dr. Wool today! ](https://drdanwool.com/booking)

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