Dr. Alok 'Dr. K' Kanojia

So when you go to sleep, if your frontal lobes have some energy left, then they can shut off.

It's basically like I'm shutting down the factory and there's a factory worker who's going around and turning off all the machines.

It takes energy to shut down the factory.

The factory doesn't just shut off on its own.

It takes a lot of energy to shut down the factory.

So we each have a sleep window where our frontal lobes have enough juice to where we can suppress our amygdala.

We can stop ourselves from getting like, we can have the, oh, this is huge.

We can have the willpower to not pull out our phones.

We can have the willpower to not turn on the TV.

We can have the willpower to read instead of turning on the TV.

That requires willpower.

Going to sleep requires willpower.

Sitting your ass down and being bored in bed for 28 minutes while you fall asleep requires a lot of willpower.

So this is why if we reach a critical point of tiredness, what do we mean by tired?

If the frontal lobes become too exhausted, they can no longer suppress the other parts of our brain.

And then we enter into this severe tiredness phase where our only option now is passing out.

Then the fatigue signals need to be so high that we end up passing out.

But then we are even more fatigued and a full night's sleep is not going to recover from that.

A full night's sleep will recover from the right sleep window.

Does that kind of make sense?