Hi there, it's Matt here and welcome back to the podcast. Now in our last episode we spoke

about sleep pressure and a denizenicine, how it makes you tired in the evening and then

after sleep has cleared that adenosine away, why you will feel enlivened and awake the following day. But sleep pressure is only one half of the sleep wake story.

There is a second force at play in the sleep wake negotiation as it were.

It's called your circadian rhythm or in plain speak your 24 hour body clock.

Well, it's actually the wrong word for it.

It's not a body clock as we'll discover.

It's a brain clock as it turns out.

Now your 24 hour clock will drum out a daily and a nightly rhythm.

And the Tik-Tok rhythm of your clock

will make you feel sleepy at night

and then makes you feel alert during the day. feel cell of your body. As I mentioned there is a master clock that sits deep at the center of your brain.

You can think of it almost like Lord of the Rings, one ring to rule them all? Well here there is one clock to rule them all and

that central brain clock regulates all of the other body clocks. Now if you are to give your circadian rhythm a personality trait it would be

labeled as a creature of habit. It never stops ticking out its rising and falling rhythm day after day, night after night.

For diurnal species that are active during the day, like as human beings

the circadian rhythm will start drumming out its loud,

activating beat just before you wake up in the morning.

And that drum beat just gets louder and stronger into the

mid-morning hours and into the early afternoon.

And this is when you will hit your peak alertness, your peak performance on several different measures

that we can assess in the laboratory.

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