NewDelhi May 29 :If you often stay awake to submit your assignment just before the deadline or finish a super important work project, you might count on coffee to save you and help you stay awake. However, according to a new study, even if caffeine can help you stay awake to attend to your task, it is not much of a help in preventing you from making mistakes a sleep-deprived person would make.
In an experiment conducted by the scientists at Michigan State University, 275 participants were asked to finish a simple task that required attention. While sleep deprivation impaired their performance, caffeine helped them successfully finish the task.
However, when the participants were given a more challenging ‘place keeping’ task, which consisted of smaller steps that required to be completed in a specific order without skipping or repeating, caffeine had ‘little effect on most participants,’ pointed out one of the authors of the study Kimberly Fenn in a news release by Michigan State University. The study is the first to investigate the impact of caffeine on place keeping by sleep-deprived participants.
An associate professor of psychology at the university Fenn said, ‘Caffeine may improve the ability to stay awake and attend to a task, but it doesn’t do much to prevent the sort of procedural errors that can cause things like medical mistakes and car accidents.” The research, conducted by Fenn and her colleagues at the university’s Sleep and Learning Lab, was published on May 20, in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition.
Caffeine, being a psychoactive stimulant, is considered to increase wakefulness and attentiveness, the main reason why coffee machines have pervaded offices everywhere. However, coffee does not make you less sleep-deprived. Sleep deprivation can cause a number of diseases like diabetes, depression, heart attacks and more. According to a 2019 study by Fitbit, Indians are the second most sleep-deprived people in the world. As much as 33% of adults in India could be suffering from insomnia, a sleep disorder that makes falling asleep harder, according to a 2016 study published in the Journal of Family Medicine and Primary Care.