In which cases it is useless to drink coffee, scientists said

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Lack of sleep negatively affects the whole the body, disrupts a wide range of cognitive processes and impairs attention. This means that a person with a lack of sleep is not able to perform some complex tasks. Scientists from the University of Michigan decided to find out whether caffeine improves attention during sleep deprivation.

The study was published in the Journal of the American Psychological Association. The participants of the experiment (276 people) were asked to perform two attention tasks: an easy one and a more complex one.

The easy one included a simple test on concentration of attention, and the difficult one required to perform actions in a certain order without skipping or repeating. After that, the participants were divided into two groups: the first group slept at home, and the second group stayed awake all night in the laboratory.

In the morning, all participants took a capsule with 200 mg of caffeine or a placebo, after which they began to perform the tasks again. It turned out that lack of sleep reduces performance when performing both tasks. Caffeine, in turn, helped the participants to solve an easy task, but not everyone coped with a difficult one.

In the end, experts came to the conclusion that in case of lack of sleep, you cannot rely only on the stimulating effect of caffeine on brain activity. It can really increase energy and reduce drowsiness, but it cannot replace a full-fledged sleep.