Brain and mood

Does creatine help when you haven't slept?

By GyroscopeUpdated November 14, 20264 sources

In one 2024 trial of 15 young adults, a single large dose of creatine (0.35 g per kg, about 28 g at 176 lb) held up thinking speed and short-term memory through most of a night without sleep. That’s a trial dose, far above a daily scoop, and nobody has tested it on tired people in daily life. Sleep is still the fix.

A study suggesting creatine can stand in for a lost night of sleep is the kind of thing that spreads fast. Most of us have had a night where a newborn, a deadline or a red-eye flight took the sleep, and the next day felt like thinking through mud. Everyone would want a powder that fixed that.

What the researchers did

Ali Gordji-Nejad and colleagues brought 15 healthy adults, 8 of them women, aged 20 to 28, into a lab for two nights without sleep, at least five days apart. At 8:30 in the evening on one night they took 0.35 g of creatine per kg of body weight, and on the other night a placebo, in random order. They stayed awake until early morning, about 21 hours awake in all.

Three more times through the night, the researchers scanned their brains to measure energy molecules and gave them memory and reaction tests. The lack of sleep tired everyone out, about three times as tired on the fatigue scores, and it hurt their short-term memory and reaction time.

On the creatine night, the brain scans showed shifts in energy molecules and no drop in brain pH. Processing speed and short-term memory held up better, with the clearest effect about four hours after the dose, and it was still there at the last test, around 9 hours after.

Why a single dose worked here

Normally the brain takes up creatine slowly, which is why most brain trials last weeks. The researchers’ idea was that two things together might push more creatine in quickly, a lot of creatine in the blood at once and a brain burning extra energy because it’s short on sleep.

It’s like a backup generator. On a normal day you barely notice it, and in a blackout it’s the thing keeping the lights on.

Why it doesn’t change our advice

• It’s tiny. 15 people, two nights each, all young and healthy, in a lab.
• The dose is huge. At 176 lb (80 kg), 0.35 g per kg is 28 g in one go. In a trial of 59 soccer players, one 10 g dose a day gave 56% of them diarrhea, and a 2021 review of creatine questions advises keeping servings at 10 g or under.
• It hasn’t been repeated. Nobody has tested whether 3 to 5 g a day protects you after a bad night.

For everyday thinking, a pooling of 16 trials found small gains in memory and processing speed on regular daily doses, and no change in overall thinking. See creatine and the brain.