Dr. Alok 'Dr. K' Kanojia

The last thing to talk about is melatonin.

And there are studies that show that people have difficulty with nighttime anxiety.

Yeah.

So accordingly, dysfunctions and melatonin production and rhythms have been hypothesized to contribute to insomnia chronicity.

Okay.

So melatonin does a couple of really important things for the brain.

One of the things that it does is it increases GABAnergic tone.

This means that it increases chloride transmission across the neuron.

When you hyperpolarize a neuron, it's kind of counterintuitive.

That means that the neuron is more likely to shut off.

So this is a suppressing neurotransmitter.

Good examples of things that activate GABA, i.e.

suppress things, alcohol and benzodiazepines both work on increasing GABA transmission.

So melatonin also shuts things off.

Okay, now let's understand how this works.

There's another reason I'm increasing the hypersensitivity of the amygdala, and that's because, remember, so when we go to sleep, this is really fascinating, we want to be in a safe place.

So when we sleep, y'all ever thought about this?

We want to be in a safe place, but our sensitivity to danger increases.

That's why we want to be in a safe place.

So I want to be in a room.