Matthew Walker

“a ruffled mind makes a restless pillow,”

melatonin has little influence on the generation of sleep itself: a mistaken assumption that many people hold.

Melatonin simply provides the official instruction to commence the event of sleep, but does not participate in the sleep race itself.

This is jet lag: you feel tired and sleepy during the day in the new time zone because your body clock and associated biology still “think” it is nighttime.

The first was that humans, like de Mairan’s heliotrope plants, generated their own endogenous circadian rhythm in the absence of external light from the sun.

the name, while far from easy to pronounce, is instructional: supra, meaning above, and chiasm, meaning a crossing point. The crossing point is that of the optic nerves coming from your eyeballs. Those nerves meet in the middle of your brain

adult’s owlness or larkness, also known as their chronotype, is strongly determined by genetics. If you are a night owl, it’s likely that one (or both) of your parents is a night owl.

Sadly, society treats night owls rather unfairly on two counts. First is the label of being lazy, based on a night owl’s wont to wake up later in the day,

Often, they choose to take melatonin pills in an attempt to help with the problem

Your twenty-four-hour circadian rhythm is the first of the two factors determining wake and sleep. The second is sleep pressure. At this very moment, a chemical called adenosine is building up in your brain.