Dr. Michael Grandner

Otherwise, the systems in our body would get all out of whack.

But it's not precise 24 hours.

It's a biological clock that is slightly longer than 24 hours in almost everybody.

Not quite 25 hours, but somewhere in that gray zone.

But what happens is, so it's like if you want to, if every day of your life is a string and every day is going to be 24 hours.

and you had to produce the string to be the exact same length, what you do is you make all the strings slightly long and trim the edges off.

That way you can guarantee they're all gonna be the same.

And that's what physiology does to your rhythm.

It makes it slightly longer than 24 hours, then resets it in the morning to start it all over again with the morning light as it hits the reset on the rhythm.

So,

blind people who can't see light they get this their natural rhythm never gets reset so it's slightly more than 24 hours so if you were living a slightly more than 24 hour rhythm you woke up at six o'clock today you'd wake up at 6 30 tomorrow you'd wake up at 7 the next day and then eventually you're waking up at 2 in the afternoon it's miserable and then it cycle around it's called it's called non-24-hour circadian rhythm disorder where you just can't reset your rhythm with light

they found is you give someone a third to a half a milligram of melatonin in the evening and a blind person fixes the whole thing sends the nighttime signal at the time that it needs to see it and the system responds beautifully to it you're not trying to replace their natural melatonin that half milligram dose is the signal it's a clock signal it's it's what tells your body hey

nighttime now.

And if you give it a little bit before you're naturally going to start producing it or right around that time, it sends the signal a little early.

So it's sort of like your body responds of like, oh, I didn't realize it was nighttime yet.

Better get started.

And it starts your own natural process a little early.

So that half milligram dose in the evening, like five hours before your bedtime is

That's the evening signal where your evening is hasn't even really started yet.

You're giving your evening a little bit of boost.