Because changes in the dosages of my medications can only happen once every month or so at most, a strategy for managing my mood and energy levels has been to supplement with the caffeine in coffee. My wife got us an espresso machine a while back, so I’m able to pull shots when needed.

Initially, my dosing schedule for espresso shots mostly assumed front loading with 2 to 3 in the morning followed by single shot top ups at noon and in the late afternoon. This was based on the assumption that I wanted to have a consistent level of caffeine in the bloodstream, and avoid peaks or high variance, since the half-life of caffeine is about 5 hours. This sort of worked for a while, but I noticed that I crashed pretty hard in the evenings despite it.

Recently, after reading more, I noted that the Adenosine levels actually increase over time throughout the day, and so fixing the caffeine level at a particular amount will probably be too much early in the day, and too little later in the day, assuming that we need to offset the rising sleepiness. Thus, a more practical dosing schedule is probably an even distribution, something like a double shot in the morning, followed by a double shot at noon. Initial experiments suggest that this works better, and keeps me from crashing as much in the evening, although this is still early in my testing.