Order your next latte with an extra shot of nap

Debating between a cup of joe or a quick siesta to make it through the day? Try both. As it turns out, power napping and coffee drinking share a latte common ground (shameless coffee puns intended).

Scientific evidence shows the “coffee nap” is an effective remedy for the afternoon slumps. Though it sounds paradoxical, researchers claim having a cup of coffee followed by a 20-minute nap allows for greater refreshment, reports Vox.

According to the report, multiple studies at Britain’s Loughborough University demonstrated that the coffee nap successfully boosts alertness more than napping without a caffeine appetizer or simply drinking coffee. The study was published nearly 20 years ago, but is making headlines again.

Do coffee naps really work? Conventional wisdom argues that caffeine interferes with sleep. It boils down to the competing effects of caffeine and adenosine, a drowsiness-inducing chemical compound that accumulates in the brain during waking periods and dissipates in sleep. Caffeine takes about 20 minutes to be absorbed in the body, moving through the small intestine and passing into the bloodstream, where it is eventually transported to the brain. Caffeine’s increased-alertness effect generally peaks about 30 minutes after consumption. Sleeping for only 20 of those 30 minutes reduces the amount of adenosine in competition with the caffeine, boosting caffeine’s energy kick.

“If you can fall asleep in your nap before caffeine does that, when it’s time to wake up, you’re getting the benefits of the caffeine perfectly timed with the nap sleep benefit,” sleep researcher David Dinges, a professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, told the Huffington Post.

In various studies, researchers at Loughborough found that when tired participants took a 15-minute coffee nap, they went on to commit fewer errors in a driving simulator than when they were given only coffee, or only took a nap. (This was true even if they had trouble falling asleep, lying half-awake during the 15 minutes.) A 2003 Japanese study found people who took a caffeine nap before taking a series of memory tests performed noticeably better, compared to people who solely took a nap, or took a nap then washed their faces or had a bright light shone in their eyes. They also subjectively rated themselves as less tired.

Kimberly Ann Priest—a poet and freshman English instructor from Shepherd, Mich.—is a self-proclaimed coffee enthusiast who recently gave coffee napping a try. She swears by the power of a good brew, and drinks an average of four lovingly prepared cups per day.

Her first coffee nap experience was about the same as her regular power naps, she said, although she noted feeling “a little more awake” after she got up. The next day, she completed her second coffee nap—sipping her fourth cup of the day from her “I HEART NY” mug after returning home from work, then dozing off for a quick sleep with her iPhone timer set for 20 minutes. When it went off, she noticed her usual grogginess fading after just a few minutes.

“Usually after a power nap I feel groggy, then energetic, then groggy again,” she said. “This time I feel a slight stimulant in my system without all the jittery punch we sometimes get from caffeine. I just kind of feel … awake. It’s not an amazing difference, but enough to maybe make that cup of coffee worth it before the power nap.”