Can coffee help you sleep? The Better Sleep Clinic launches ‘Sunrise Coffee’ to help insomnia sufferers

The Better Sleep Clinic, an online clinic specialising in sleep, has launched its own coffee brand, Sunrise, to challenge one of the biggest sleep myths: coffee causes insomnia. 

Poor sleep is at epidemic levels, yet much of the advice online is often based on viral trends rather than evidence. The Better Sleep Clinic is encouraging people to challenge what they hear about sleep, starting with coffee. 

Coffee is often vilified as a substance that causes sleep disruption, however coffee and quality sleep both support wakefulness. The Better Sleep Clinic is going further and saying that a cup of morning coffee can actually improve sleep for many people, particularly those who suffer from Insomnia. 

Insomnia is a specific sleep disorder where people struggle to fall asleep or stay asleep at least three times a week, and with a significant impact on daytime performance and wellbeing^[1]. Poor sleep also impacts mental health, cardiovascular health, and your risk of diabetes, and is responsible for 1 in 5 road traffic accidents^[2] [3].

The Better Sleep Clinic specialises in the diagnosis and treatment of a range of sleep disorders, in particular obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) and insomnia.

Through years of experience, the clinic has observed that when people aren’t sleeping well and struggling with insomnia they start trying to fix their sleep. But this can fall foul of a key principle with sleep - the more you try to sleep, the less likely it is to happen. A phenomenon known as ‘sleep effort’.

Sleep effort is one of the key drivers of insomnia.

What is Sleep Effort?

When people aren’t sleeping well, they often try everything to fix it. They skip the gym, stop socialising, avoid watching TV in the evenings. And nearly always cut out coffee. 

Following this process means that very soon, all you have left in your life is your insomnia, and you have nothing else to think about. This preoccupation with sleep makes the problem much worse^[4].

Reintroducing coffee pushes back against sleep effort. It gives you control over your sleep, restores normality and starts to re-build the parts of your life that insomnia has taken away. 

A morning coffee will make no noticeable impact on your sleep at night^[5], but it can ease the pressure to sleep perfectly and help you adopt a more relaxed, flexible mindset about sleep. 

Dr. David Garley, Director of The Better Sleep Clinic, and his team have therefore launched Sunrise Coffee, a natural product designed to promote wakefulness, while helping insomnia sufferers rebuild parts of their routine that may have been disrupted. 

Dr. David Garley says: “The idea that coffee causes insomnia is one of the biggest sleep myths. A morning coffee is not going to make any real difference to your sleep at night, yet many people are unnecessarily cutting it out because they’re worried about its potential impact. To get people talking about this, we thought, ‘why not launch our own coffee?’. A sleep clinic bringing out a coffee product feels counterintuitive on the surface, but it actually makes perfect sense.

We know insomnia is tough to live with, but there are effective treatments to get you sleeping better. The gold standard treatment is called CBTi (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Insomnia). CBTi is not one treatment, but several different components put together. Many of these components aim to reduce the pressure and anxieties that many of us feel about sleep, as this anxiety is often the reason you have insomnia.

The Better Sleep Clinic has partnered up with local Bristol independent coffee roaster Wogans, to produce Sunrise Coffee, a natural processed Brazilian blend with a full body and sweet notes of praline, raisin, and maple syrup. Available in beans or ground, it can be purchased for £11.00 at thebettersleepclinic.co.uk/coffee

If you are struggling with Insomnia, The Better Sleep Online Insomnia Course is also available here at £175.00.

References

^[1] Clinical Knowledge Summaries, NICE. https://cks.nice.org.uk/topics/insomnia/diagnosis/diagnosis/

² Fernandez-Mendoza J, Vgontzas AN. Insomnia and its impact on physical and mental health. Curr Psychiatry Rep. 2013 Dec;15(12):418. doi: 10.1007/s11920-013-0418-8. PMID: 24189774; PMCID: PMC3972485.

³ Department of Transport "Fatigue and Road Safety: An Evidence-based Review" (2011)

⁴ Marques DR, Pires L, Broomfield NM, Espie CA. Sleep effort and its measurement: A scoping review. J Sleep Res. 2024 Dec;33(6):e14206. doi: 10.1111/jsr.14206. Epub 2024 Apr 6. PMID: 38581186; PMCID: PMC11597019.

⁵ Gardiner C, Weakley J, Burke LM, Roach GD, Sargent C, Maniar N, Townshend A, Halson SL. The effect of caffeine on subsequent sleep: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Sleep Med Rev. 2023 Jun;69:101764. doi: 10.1016/j.smrv.2023.101764. Epub 2023 Feb 6. PMID: 36870101.