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Chapter 1: How does glycine help us sleep by cooling the body?
Is fever a symptom of glycine deficiency? By Benquo.
Chapter 2: What role does glycine play in mitochondrial health during sleep?
Published on March 22, 2026.
A 2022 Less Wrong post on ocean and the quest for more waking hours argues that ocean agonists could safely reduce human sleep needs, pointing to short-sleeper gene mutations that increase ocean production and to cavefish that evolved heightened ocean sensitivity alongside an 80% reduction in sleep.
Chapter 3: Why might most people need more glycine in their diets?
Several commenters discuss clinical trials, embryo selection, and the evolutionary puzzle of why short-sleeper genes haven't spread.
Chapter 4: How does glycine support immune function compared to fever?
I thought the whole approach was backwards and left a comment. Quote, Orsin is a signal about energy metabolism.
Unless the signaling system itself is broken, for example narcolepsy type 1, caused by autoimmune destruction of Oryx in producing neurons, it's better to fix the underlying reality the signals point to than to falsify the signals. My sleep got noticeably more efficient when I started supplementing glycine.
Chapter 5: What evidence supports glycine as an antipyretic?
Most people on modern diets don't get enough.
Chapter 6: What practical considerations should you keep in mind when supplementing glycine?
We can make roughly 3g a day but can use 10g plus, because in the ancestral environment we ate much more connective tissue or broth therefrom. Glycine is both important for repair processes and triggers NMDA receptors to drop core temperature, which smooths the path to sleep. While drafting that, I went back to Chris Masterjohn's page on glycine requirements.
His estimate for total need is 10 to 60 grams per day, with a high end for people in poor health. I had just written that glycine lowers core temperature.
Chapter 7: How does glycine deficiency affect sleep needs and immune response?
What if those are connected? Is fever what happens when you are too glycine depleted to fight infection through the more precise mechanisms glycine enables? Heading. Glycine helps us sleep by cooling the body.
Chapter 8: What dietary changes can help restore glycine levels?
The established explanation for glycine improving sleep is that it lowers core body temperature. Glycine helps activate NMDA receptors in the brain's master circadian clock, the suprachiasmatic nucleus, or SCN. This causes blood vessels near the skin to widen, dumping heat from the core to the surface.
The body needs its core temperature to drop in order to fall asleep, and glycine accelerates that drop. In rats, surgically destroying the SCN eliminates glycine's sleep-promoting and temperature-lowering effects.
Heading.
Glycine cleans our mitochondria as we sleep. Your mitochondria produce energy, and as a by-product they generate reactive oxygen species, ROS, chemically aggressive molecules that damage proteins, lipids, and DNA. ROS accumulate during wakefulness.
Amber Ohorones' 2024 paper Signals of Energy Availability in Sleep synthesizes the evidence that this accumulation is a key signal driving the need for sleep. Wakefulness generates ROS, ROS buildup triggers sleep, and sleep clears them. A Drosophila study tested multiple short-sleeping mutant lines with mutations in unrelated genes. All were more vulnerable to oxidative stress than normal flies.
When the researchers forced normal flies to sleep more, those flies survived oxidative stress better. And when they reduced ROS specifically in neurons, the flies slept less, as if the need for sleep had partly gone away. Their conclusion? Oxidative stress drives the need for sleep, and sleep is when the body does its oxidative cleanup.
The body's main intracellular antioxidant is glutathione, a small molecule made from three amino acids, glutamate, cysteine, and glycine. In many contexts, glycine is the bottleneck for glutathione production. You have plenty of the other two ingredients, but not enough glycine to keep up.
If you are glycine deficient, you cannot make enough glutathione, you clear ROS more slowly during sleep, and you need more sleep to achieve the same degree of clearance. That is a complete mechanistic chain from glycine deficiency to increased sleep need, and it is entirely independent of the NMDA temperature pathway. Most people could use more glycine.
Glycine is classified as a non-essential amino acid because the body can make it primarily from another amino acid called serine. But the body only produces about 3 grams per day.
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