I tried to look into caffeine very slightly just now. I watched a video that said adenosine goes into receptors in your brain, and then make you tired. But caffeine blocks these receptors so that adenosine can’t make you tired anymore. I already knew caffeine did something like that, but I didn’t know it was specifically adenosine.
I remembered that Adenosine Tri Phosphate (ATP) is used in your body as energy to do things like: contract your muscles. So I thought that maybe something like this happens: You use adenosine tri phosphate in your muscles, maybe it turns into just adenosine after it gets used, and then because you have more adenosine you feel more tired. I think there is something where when you exercise more, you get more tired, so I think this would make sense as an explanation for that.
So if all the things I said previously were true, that would mean that you get less tired after exercising if you use caffeine because the caffeine blocks the adenosine from making you sleepy.
I wanted to see if adenosine tri phosphate turns into adenosine, which makes you sleepy, but gets blocked by caffeine, so I looked up: does adenosine tri phosphate turn into adenosine which makes you sleepy and found this article: Adenosine Sleep: What Is Adenosine and What Does Adenosine Do? . IDK how good this article is, I haven’t fact checked it at all or made sure it’s accurate or anything. But it seems to agree with me.
Here is a single sentence from the article that seems to agree with what I thought:
After ATP is “used up”, it decomposes yet again into adenosine. As adenosine builds up in the bloodstream, it interacts with specific cell receptors, inhibiting neural activity and causing drowsiness.
I read more of the article and I think it said something along the lines of: if you do more caffeine, that means adenosine doesn’t get into the receptors, which means when caffeine wears off you feel even more tired, and the adenosine gets carried over to when you wake up as well.
So normally maybe your life would be like this: You got to sleep with high amounts of adenosine in your receptors so you feel more tired, then you wake up with low adenosine maybe?
But with caffeine maybe it’s something like: you go to sleep with high amounts of adenosine in you, but medium amounts of adenosine in your receptors because they are being blocked by caffeine, so when you wake up there is still a bunch of adenosine that didn’t get used up in your receptors or something, so because the adenosine got carried over from yesterday you feel more tired, so you drink more caffeine to feel less tired, and then you can be stuck in a permanent cycle where caffeine makes you more tired so you take caffeine to make you feel less tired.
IDK why adenosine doesn’t just permanently build up in you receptors, i guess there is a process to remove it from you receptors, then maybe adenosine leaves your body through urine or maybe it turns into Adenosine Tri Phosphate again. It’s probably easier and more efficient for your body to attach 3 phosphates to an already existing adenosine than it is to make a brand new adenosine with 3 phosphates attached to it.
OK I’m about at the limit of my willingness to keep writing or checking if anything in my message makes sense. So I’m gonna stop here even though I intended to like maybe quote the article that I referenced again.