CBD oil works a treat.
All the aviation medicine lectures I’ve been to tell me that coffee can help boost alertness, so I believe it could have an effect in the morning. They did say that more than one has little effect so to cut down on caffeine, have your one morning coffee and switch to decaf after that.
Don’t do it,I started having a bottle of cider at 24.00 to ease my pains and cramp it didn’t work it’s a losers game.
On advice I have gone onto decaf tea bags from 17.00 that has made a difference and the tea tastes OK.
The amount of coffee required to achieve a desired effect would be far in excess of 1 morning coffee in the morning.When people say they can't start the day without their fix of coffee,it is more about habit than it actually having any physical effect on their body.So the amount of caffeine required to boost alertness would be negligible drinking only one coffee.
Doing ten press ups and ten burpees would have you feeling alert if you did that at anytime of the day,but not many want to do that when it's easier to boil the kettle or order a coffee at Costa!.
One thing which triggers sleep is a chemical called adenosine - levels rise throughout the day, and the higher they are the more we feel pressure to sleep. When we sleep that chemical is cleared through the night, and we wake up in the morning alert again and ready to repeat.
If we don't sleep well the chemicals are not cleared, and we wake up not refreshed (i.e. not all adenosine cleared). Coffee helps that as it is an adenosine antagonisy - the caffine binds onto the adenosine receptors, therefore our bodies can no longer sense the elevated levels of adenosine and we therefore feel alert.
It's why coffee works at night to pick us up. Trouble is the actual adenosine is still rising, so when the caffeine wears off we will have a real crash.
As was mentioned above, habit is a big one (google 'social jet lag'). Your body is programmed to go to bed more or less at the same time, so when we vary that a lot we struggle to adapt. Alcohol isn't great - you get unconscious, but the actual quality of sleep is poor, so we wake up with still high levels of adenosine, need coffee to get going, then more alcohol to sleep.
For me I've found being fairly regular really helps. Keep a cool bedroom (16 deg or so). Also avoid blue light like the plague for a couple of hours before bed - as it gets dark our bodies produce melatonin which is the trigger to send us to sleep. Blue light inhibits this, which would mean our body can only start once we turn the lights off, hence it can take an hour or more to be tired enough to fall asleep. You can get glasses which block blue light and wear those - they make a huge difference. You look like Bono, but it helps sleep :-)
Being an hotel resident for some 30 odd years I have used the white noise approach - I used the radio4/World service
When I am away I still have my own travel radio and have it on all night and the slamming doors and pissheads don't bother me.
My longest sleep when travelling was 29 hours in one single sleep.
I don't do screen after 7pm and don't have caffeine after the mid afternoon drink. A glass or two of wine maybe a couple of nights but if i want the purest sleep then no wine either.
Good luck with it.
B