Hi there. It's Matt here and welcome back to the podcast and welcome back to the

episode in this series all about insomnia. Now in the last episode we spoke about the

biological changes that go awry in patients with insomnia, resulting in a signature of hyper-activation of the body's biological

stress systems. But it turns out that the body is only half of the story when it comes to

insomnia. Lest we forget that sleep is of the brain and by the brain and when it comes to insomnia this is also

very much true of the brain and by the brain.

So what are we going to cover in this episode?

Well, we're going to learn exactly what seems to change in the brain of people with insomnia.

And more specifically, we will focus on two types of brain changes.

First, we're going to speak about altered patterns of brain activity within specific regions of the

brain in those with insomnia. And then we'll speak about altered patterns of connections or functional connectivity

between different regions of the brain in patients with insomnia.

And then finally we're going to come full circle

and I'm going to stitch up these changes that I will describe

in patterns of brain activity with the hyperactive stress

biological changes that I discussed within the body in the last episode and in doing so what we'll see is a full embodied view of

the condition of insomnia both brain and body connected. So let's get into it, the brain. The first discoveries

were made by placing either healthy good sleepers or patients with insomnia inside of brain scanners and then

measuring the changes in activity in different parts of the brain as they attempted to then try to fall asleep.

Now in the good healthy sleepers as they were starting their journey to fall asleep, three main groups or

three main regions of the brain nicely started to shut down and fall silent in terms of activity. Those were the following. The first

were emotion-related regions. Those started to calm down and these are regions that we call the

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