Why does coffee make me sleepy?

Heavy coffee consumption eventually wears out your adrenals and depleates essential vitimans and minerals. If your tired after drinking coffee you likely have adrenal exhaustion. See a doctor.

About 10 or 15 minutes after coffee (any kind) I am very sleepy and often have to go asleep for a little while. I would love to know why.

Light roasted coffee has the most caffeine.
Medium roasted coffee has average coffee caffeine amount.
Dark roasted has the least caffeine.

Ive tried Light roast, and didn't really wake up much, but my heart sped up too fast and I became very very sick.
Medium roast makes me either sleepy or nothing, sometimes it wakes me up though. It doesn't make me sick like light.
Dark roast takes alot to equal one medium roast.

For some reason, energy pills wake me up. Green tea either does nothing or wakes me up. But at least it doesnt put me down.

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Part of the reason we crash to sleep is dehydration. Drink 2 cups of water with your 1 cup of coffee, and sometimes that makes a huge difference. I crashed to sleep after a cup of coffee, guzzled down a bunch of water, then almost exploded. I could feel my blood rushing under my skin. So sometimes just some water is all it takes.

Dont drink dairy with your coffee, especially if you are not white. This sounds crazy, but Europeans digest milk and dairy alot easier than other races, who seem to digest plants much better, but have high rates of lactose intolerance. If you are not white, or half white, try coffee without any dairy and mixing it with water or black tea. Sometimes that helps.

Take iron supplements, because sometimes coffee can't work with poor blood in your body.

Try a slow-digesting carb after your coffee, like coarse oatmeal, or a pear, or granola. The oats digest slow, and help feed you energy for awhile.

If none of these help, then the tweaker may be on to something. It does sometimes seem like homebrew coffee puts us to sleep while McDonald's or gas station coffee snaps us awake. This COULD be a money trick, so to keep home brewers using more and more coffee, while selling plain coffee to companies who order massive orders of coffee at a time. Small cans may be hit with a sleepy chemical, while bulk orders are just plain as they are.
This is sooo possible, since gaming companies give their machines a lifespan, where no matter how well the machine is maintained, it will break or die after so many years, and this keeps people buying new game machines. Don't blame Obama for that, that's from the Bush/Reagan/Cheney group. But we're talking needing waking up, not that. So, try a cup from a McDonalds or Burger King or gas station and see what happens. Then the next day, try a home brewed cup. See what happens. If home brew knocks you down while store bought wakes you up, then only buy coffee in bulk direct from the company, or a small farming company, and avoid big company profit tricks.

ADHD meds are stimulants, they are meant to make you hyper focus on one thought rather then trying to deal with an over stimulated mind. The same meds are also used on people with DID, who also tend to have multiple thoughts running through their heads at once, some claim not being able to watch a show while spell checking a thesis paper, changing a diaper and chatting on the phone to someone would be very hard to give up...but a nice coffee now and then and a settled focused mind can be nice. I've fallen asleep with a hot coffee still steaming beside me many times.

I used to drink quite a lot of coffee each day. Including several cups of cheap Coffee at work.. And it would give me the normal effect of being more alert, or even a bit jittery at times. At one point over a decade ago I decided I didn't like the effect coffee was having and switched to drinking green tea. Now I still like the taste of fresh coffee but I just can't drink it. Only a small cup will make me feel drowsy within about 10 minutes of drinking it. A while back I fell asleep at my in laws right after dinner and having a small but strong cup. Really embarrassing.. But I couldn't help it. Now I drink tea and have no problems. Another effect I've been noticing is that coffee can give me some very odd De ja Vu/broken day dreaming type sensations. It's difficult to describe. Neither of these sound very normal reactions to coffee so I'm guessing something odd is being triggered in my system by either the caffeine or some other compound in coffee. I've never been the kind to experiment with drugs or even smoke, so those definitely aren't any kind of contributory factor. So yeah.. For me at least, coffee = bad gear... Which is a real shame because a good black coffee tastes so good :-(

Caffeine is a stimulant.
Stimulants work differently on people with ADHD.

I drank hot coffee and it immediately made me drowsy as I was working my way to the bottom of the mug. And thats with any cup of hot coffee, because it happens when I drink decaf too. When I drink something like a ice cold frap it makes me hyper.

All the the time

Most of the coffee and caffeine seems to be poisoned with something to tranquilize people and knock them out cold as soon as they drink it. One cup of this "bad" coffee and I sleep for hours. Anyone who claims this stuff isn't drugged is delusional. It is undrinkable except as a tranquilizer at night if you can't sleep. The stuff is drugged somehow. I think they're contaminating it with some kind of cleaner or something that turns into GHB. Plausible deniability. There is tons of the bad stuff. I think it's supposed to wake people up just in a different way. Every Starbucks Kcup I've had that I got for Christmas has made me sleep for 2-4 hours. I've had the same thing at McDonalds, picked up a cup on the road to wake up and started to fall asleep almost immediately. Nestle instant too good batches and tranquilized batches. Like someone slipped me a mickey. It has nothing to do with the brand it seems to be all brands, but not all coffee from any brand. Just most of it. I am convinced it's being poisoned intentionally by religious cults or as a political act of some kind.
People who truly need it can't get amphetamine to function, why should you be allowed to take caffeine to function better when you don't need it? This is how the government and the religious cults that run it make sure you're not addicts and they're not feloniously fostering an addiction. Opiates, you need opiates, tranquilized pigs don't squeal as much when slaughtered. Lifespan just declined again, praise Jesus, the govt. and the Obama financed AMA for protecting our health by murdering us. Don't think the ABA is going to protect you from the AMA and the DEA, they've been financed by the drug war since before the govt. started providing free legal services to the poor. Coffee in Europe never has this effect. Why?

I used to drink a lot of caffeine, like 5 coffee a day or two red bulls an drew then I quit coffee totally and cut down on energy drinks to only days when I get no sleep. Recently I started drinking coffee again and it immediately knocks me out faster than a sleeping pill. I suspect our bodies have gotten bombarded with it for so long that they have a built in immediate response to counteract the caffeine effects maybe?

I farm and sit on equipment for many hours at a time. I can not drink coffee during these long days or I will fall asleep while operating equipment. If I can not sleep very well. I can make a cup of coffee to put me to sleep. Do not even have to finish the cup. Like warm milk for some people.

I drink at least a few cups of of coffee in the morning every day, and it wakes me up. Later in the day though, it tends to make me tired, often times so tired that I can't help but fall asleep, before I even finish the cup of coffee. As a matter of fact, it just happened and I just woke up to a half cup of cold coffee. It happens even if it seems I got plenty of sleep the night before. I've found that cold coffee drinks- iced coffee, canned coffee drinks like Starbucks- don't make me tired at all, and doesn't matter if they have sugar in them or not.

I am not a big coffee drinker,I prefer tea mostly, but the minute I have my daily cup of espresso with dinner, I fall asleep. Why?

I love coffee but I feel I have to push myself to move or on lazy days will allow myself to go lay down since it's difficult to keep my eyes open. Differently from previous comments, however, I have a low metabolism & take .112mg of levothyroxine daily.

I've had 6 shots of espresso this morning so far, 2 at a time with a bit of milk, over the course of about 75 to 80 minutes and I want to go back to bed. Got plenty of sleep last night too. Happens every day. Doesn't matter if it's coffee or espresso (or coffee with espresso), hot or iced, black or with a bit of milk. I'm always sleepy, immediately. I have Early Onset Parkinson's so I've always wondered if there were a dopamine connection.

I can drink a cup of coffee thinking yes, this will help me clean my house. Only to finish a cup and feel so weak and tired I can't even stand. I have to lay down and sleep. What's the deal with this. It's real it happens please someone out there study this. It all happens to me within minutes of injesting coffee. I'm not a daily drinker. Never have been for this reason. I never drink more then a half a cup. So....anyone??

I feel sleepy after drinking coffee and I wonderif it has to do with my quick metabolism. If you look at the first answer given by Mike, could it be possible that this process happens much faster in some people than others? So the dehydration would set in quicker and cause sleepyness... Just a thought.

I am not a big coffee drinker nor do i drink them on the regular. I can literally drink a cup of coffee and go to sleep. Its been that way all my life. Cokes or energy drinks dont keep me awake either. I heard you develop a high tolerance of it after a while but how can i develop it if i dont drink it.

I'm 23 and every time i have tried coffee no matter where it was, at school, an important event i needed to stay awake for or my friends house i have fallen asleep within 20 minutes and i will stay asleep for around 16 hours. Coffee to me is like strong sleeping pills. So many people drink coffee so it comes up in my daily life alot. Every time i tell someone "i dont drink coffee because it puts me to sleep" they ask me if i have ADHD. Which i dont know. Is this something that only happens to me?

Hi - This also happens to me sometimes. Most of the time I can drink coffee and it will keep me awake, even hours later. But sometimes - especially when drinking coffee at a diner - I will get immediately drowsy and if it is a day off, I fall asleep within about half an hour and will sleep for an hour or so. So, like the 2 ladies before me, I'm not talking about coffee in the morning and then a crash in the afternoon - there's something about the coffee that makes me sleepy. My own hypothesis is that the particular batch has less caffeine in it, and the "hot milk" from the cream I put in it makes me drowsy.... But I don't think this is so because it often happens (BUT NOT ALWAYS) after drinking it in a restaurant and putting that fake cream in it, which is all most places seem to offer any more. It seems like there's no simple answer for this apparently common phenomenon.

Coffee definitely makes me sleepy, not 4 hours later, immediately after I finish a cup. By sleepy, I mean, I'm likely to go to sleep, if I'm not working and it's my free time. I've been drinking about 5 cups of coffee a day for my whole life, maybe that's the reason. Would love to know why.

When I drink coffee (doesn't matter how it's made or what's in it), I immediately feel a headache coming on and then get very tired. I once fell asleep while in college after I drank a large cup from Starbucks with the intention of staying awake. I wonder why it affects me so differently.