The other night I slept a little over 7 hours. This is a little more than I normally do when I wake up for my day job at 3:30. I remember waking once, briefly. But otherwise slept straight through the night.

Yet I was exhausted all day. When I first woke, I could barely climb out of bed. My morning routine was in shambles because I couldn’t focus on anything.

I put my belt on upside down.

Seven hours of sleep might not be the ideal amount, but is certainly enough to get a decent rest. So what happened?

Coffee happened. And it happened intentionally.

After writing the post about caffeine and sleep, I realized it was relatively based on theory — things I’ve heard, read and general logic.

However, as much as I love some logic, I’m also quite fond of the empirical.

So while I generally try to avoid caffeine in the afternoon, I continued sipping throughout the day. I had my last sip somewhere around 5:30. Then, with supper, I had a diet Coke.

A couple of hours later, I went to bed. I was crashing hard from the caffeine spike by that point, my body was crying for sleep. And when I climbed into bed, I was out almost immediately.

At work, upside down belt and all, I struggled throughout the day. I needed coffee to keep me going throughout the morning. Clearly, though I had slept through the night, I received very little rest.

And of course, my one-time experiment isn’t proof of anything. There could be countless reasons for my lack of proper sleep. But I’m fairly confident my higher-than-usual caffeine consumption played a role.

I plan on experimenting with this more in the future.

But for the sake of my sanity, I’ll try to plan it when I don’t need to spend the day at work.