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Coffee as Sleep Aid
Friday Food and Drink Post: Calling All Coffee Snobs prompted lively comments and cued a memory. It turns out that @she uses a moka pot, by Bialetti. This simple, rugged design serves up a strong cup of coffee with some froth on top. The action is similar to a percolator, but more vigorous, giving you a froth on top similar to expresso. The device was invented by an Italian in the 1930s and is mostly popular in Europe and Latin America.
Seeing a photograph of @she’s coffee maker reminded me of my first college roommate. He was a naturalized U.S. citizen who got out of Cuba with his parents via Spain. He was also overly ambitious about numbers of classes and activities, so he would get way behind, and suddenly try to buckle down and get assignments, papers, and study done.
You see, we were at the University of Chicago, where, at the time, they had to throw students out of the main library Saturday evening so we would have some social life. More precisely, we were being nudged to have a social life beyond the snack shop in the basement of the library, with everyone seeing if you were slacking or getting a quick snack before diving back into the carrels. So, the university and the student body were all on board for academic rigor and excellence, no slack cut.
We knew he was in scrabble mode when, late in the evening, he would fire up the hot plate with a coffee maker like in the photograph. He would then fill his cup a third of the way full of sugar, pour the first part of the brewed coffee over the sugar, and stir it into a latte colored slush. When the coffee maker finished frothing coffee up into the brewed coffee chamber, he’d pour the rest over the sugary slush and drink the concoction. He claimed this was coffee the Cuban way.
I could set my watch by him; fifteen minutes after he sucked down his caffeine-sugar fix, he would be sound asleep, head on his desk. You see, his brain had come to associate the evening coffee ritual with sleep, so that was what it did. Roommates learned to check and blow out any candle he might have lit, as he wasn’t going to wake for several hours. His spirit and coffee were strong, but the mental suggestion was stronger.
Have you seen similar seeming contradictions or instances of mind over body?
Published in General
Always nice to run into a man who’s read, and appreciates, The Great Books.
When my son Brian was in second grade we were told he had ADD and they wanted him on medication. We resisted. My sainted wife took him to six months’ worth of psychiatric evaluation and therapy, culminating in a report that said his ADD was borderline and his IQ was 138. I went back to the school principal and told her that the school was boring him, and asked how they were going to fix it. The results were about what you would expect.
One of the better doctors recommended that we start Brian’s day with coffee and have him take a thermos of it to school, so we did. To keep him company I started drinking a morning cup with him; I had never been a coffee drinker before. I found that I enjoyed it. Brian got a job at Starbucks as soon as he was old enough to be employed (a little earlier, to be honest) and still works for Starbucks. He got his EE degree while barista-ing and is now an engineer at their Seattle factory. I’m proud of him. He was a damn good barista, to the point where store managers fought over him.
Two years ago for Christmas he gave me a siphon coffee maker, sometimes called a vacuum pot. It’s the only thing I’ve used that makes better coffee than a French press. I enjoy the morning ritual of making coffee with science. Dragging this back to the subject of the thread, coffee never has kept me awake. It helps me become alert in the morning or during the day, but it is useless to me as an anti-sleep weapon. The only thing I’ve found that helps with lack of sleep is sleep. Maybe that’s why all my cars have a seat that can be reclined for snooze purposes; taking half an hour to really rest at a rest stop is more effective than caffeine for long distance driving.
It’s sometimes just the little things in good writing that bring a smile.
Exactly so, and the coffee before nap may work for some.