![]() ![]() So on, I started keeping a little jar of my caffeine+piracetam pills by my bedside and using them on alternate days (specifically, my Zeo SmartWake fires in the 9-9:30AM window and I take it then, while I may or may not snooze on). I decided that I might as well try it out as a simple easy non-blinded quasi-experimental alternate-day pilot experiment and if I felt like it after a month or two of data, I might try an RCT. I already had an ample supply of caffeine pills (technically, piracetam+caffeine+others), so I had just been procrastinating on doing a design & setting up my usual RCT. I’d meant to try it out at some point, and winter was as good a reason as any. It sounds logical enough (why wouldn’t a caffeine pill work?), and he cites a study successfully trying a similar trick with naps. The added benefit is of course a regular sleep schedule. A dose of one pill ensures that I wake up (but still yawning) while two pills makes me start the day much more quickly. In my case the time for the pill to start working seems to be 1.5 hours. Then I sleep and wake up rested and energetic around 8. At 6:00 I go up, take a 50mg caffeine pill, and go to bed again. Then I was reminded by Kaj Sotala of an Anders Sandberg blog post I’d seen a while back, “The Early Bird gets the Caffeine Pill”: All in all, the days seemed less productive and drearier whenever I crawled out of bed an hour later than usual. With the coming of winter, I, like so many other people, have started to find sleeping in to be too tempting: why get out of bed into the cold air when I can just snuggle under my covers and drowse another hour? This is bad because I was getting sufficient sleep as it was and didn’t need more, and because I think it may exacerbate sleep inertia as the waking process is dragged out for a long time. The estimated effect is small and the posterior probability relatively low, but a decision analysis suggests that since caffeine pills are so cheap, it would be worthwhile to conduct another experiment however, increasing Zeo equipment problems have made me hold off additional experiments indefinitely. From 2013-2014 I ran a blinded & placebo-controlled randomized experiment measuring the effect of caffeine pills in the morning upon awakening time and daily productivity. One trick to combat morning sluggishness is to get caffeine extra-early by using caffeine pills shortly before or upon trying to get up. ![]()
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