Is Andrew Huberman Ruining Your Morning Coffee Routine?

Andrew Huberman–the host of the influ­en­tial Huber­man Lab pod­cast–has got­ten a lot of mileage out of his rec­om­mend­ed morn­ing rou­tine. His rou­tine empha­sizes the impor­tance of get­ting sun­light with­in 30–60 min­utes of wak­ing; also engag­ing in light phys­i­cal activ­i­ty; hydrat­ing well; and avoid­ing cof­fee for the first 90–120 min­utes. In his words:

I high­ly rec­om­mend that every­body delay their caf­feine intake for 90 to 120 min­utes after wak­ing. How­ev­er painful it may be to even­tu­al­ly arrive at that 90 to 120 min­utes after wak­ing, you want, and I encour­age you, to clear out what­ev­er resid­ual adeno­sine is cir­cu­lat­ing in your sys­tem in that first 90 to 120 min­utes of the day. Get that sun­light expo­sure, get some move­ment to wake up, and then, and only then, start to ingest caf­feine because what you’ll do if you delay caf­feine intake until 90 to 120 min­utes after wak­ing is you will avoid the so-called after­noon crash.

And if you drink caf­feine at any point through­out the day, real­ly try and avoid any caf­feine, cer­tain­ly avoid drink­ing more than a hun­dred mil­ligrams of caf­feine after 4:00 p.m and prob­a­bly even bet­ter to lim­it your last caf­feine intake to 3:00 p.m. or even 2:00 p.m.

For many, this isn’t exact­ly a wel­come piece of advice. And you nat­u­ral­ly won­der how the advice sits with James Hoff­mann, author of The World Atlas of Cof­fee, who has devel­oped a robust YouTube chan­nel where he explores the ins and outs of mak­ing cof­fee. In the video above, Hoff­mann explores the research sup­port­ing Huber­man’s advice, all with the goal of deter­min­ing whether Huber­man is ruin­ing (or improv­ing) our ear­ly wak­ing hours.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

How Human­i­ty Got Hooked on Cof­fee: An Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry

The Birth of Espres­so: The Sto­ry Behind the Cof­fee Shots That Fuel Mod­ern Life

How Caf­feine Fueled the Enlight­en­ment, Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion & the Mod­ern World: An Intro­duc­tion by Michael Pol­lan

The Curi­ous Sto­ry of London’s First Cof­fee­hous­es (1650–1675)