My experience is anecdotal but I drink both. I've found that once you're a heavy caffeine drinker that you hardly notice it's effects on things like sleep. Alcohol is different. 8 drinks before bed and I wake up tired, despite my usual bedtime. I drink way more caffeine than I do alcohol, yet alcohol is the only substance that has ever seemed disruptive.

Yes, after a while your body gets addicted to caffeine and adjusts to the amount you are ingesting, so you need to increase how much you're taking in order to keep feeling the high you expect from coffee.

If you suddenly stopped assuming caffeine, you'll start suffering from withdrawal symptoms such as headaches and drowsiness; this is because your brain adenosine receptors are accustomed to a certain amount of caffeine (which is itself an adenosine antagonist). Your brain receptors recalibrate themselves after a while if you stop drinking coffee/tea, or if reduce your intake of caffeine to a smaller amount.

Not sure why you're getting downvoted.

The withdrawal symptoms for caffeine are brutal in my experience. It's really surprising every time I dabble with having an espresso a few times a week when I'm in a cafe-frequenting mode. Even just one week of having a double espresso every other day will leave me with 1-2 days of terrible headaches and nausea beginning 1-2 days after completely stopping.

No other drug I've experienced so quickly establishes such miserable withdrawal conditions. And I've been around the block in this neighborhood.

I think with 8 drinks I would either die or have a weeklong hangover :)

8 drinks are about 6 beers of 375mL volume here. In my country (Australia) beers are typically sold single, by 6 or by 24. So having 6 beers isn't uncommon. It's something you may do at a weekend BBQ during summer.

8 drinks is quite a lot. That much alcohol affects a lot of things.

> That much alcohol affects a lot of things.

Don't take this the wrong way, but it's been a long time since I read a sentence that conveyed no meaning whatsoever. I found it amusing.

It is. Try sleeping with a smartring, smartwatch or phone app that measures your deep sleep. The difference is shocking. The sleep quality for me is about half of what it is when I'm sleeping sober.

I'm sure it depends on people to people. Everybody has different tolerance levels for both alcohol and caffeine. For me, mostly it doesn't disrupt my sleep even if I drink an hour before to go. But, the thing is decreasing anxiety level if I'm surrounded by a crowd. My focus can be easily fucked up then. While alcohol feels more comfortable at the same time.

I'm sure different people have different sensitivity to caffeine and certainly the author's sleep benefited from both reducing caffeine and removing alcohol entirely. But if you read e.g. the studies mentioned in "Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker, you'll see that alcohol's effects are much graver.

I second that, I used to have sleep issues and it got fixed after moving my coffee habits to morning.

Yeah, I can't have caffeine after 2pm or I will have terrible sleep. Alcohol also causes bad sleep, but only in larger quantities.