Part 5: Release Your Hormones

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Welcome to Part 5 of our Master Your Sleep series!

In this segment, you'll discover how your body's hormonal rhythms play a crucial role in maintaining healthy sleep patterns. Learn the best practices for optimizing your hormone release to improve your sleep quality and overall well-being.

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Prefer reading? Check out the transcript below:

So let's just break it down from the standpoint of what's going on in your brain and body as you go through one 24-hour day. Let's start with waking, so regardless of how well you slept at night or whether or not you were up all night, most people tend to wake up sometime around when the sun rises. Maybe not right at sunrise, but within an hour or two or maybe three of sunrise. Now, I realize there are night-shift workers and people traveling and experiencing jet lag where this is not going to be the case. We are going to deal with jet lag and shift work at the end of this podcast, but for most people, we tend to wake up about the time that the sun is rising or so.

As we do that, adenosine levels tend to be low if we've been asleep for reasons that you now understand, and our system generates an internal signal that is in the form of a hormone. Now, I've talked a lot about neuromodulators and neurotransmitters, I haven't talked a lot about hormones yet on this podcast. The definition of a hormone is it's a substance, a chemical that's released from one organ in your body that goes and acts on other organs elsewhere in your body, including your nervous system. When you wake up in the morning, you wake up because a particular hormone called cortisol is released from your adrenal glands. Your adrenal glands sit right above your kidneys, and there's a little pulse of cortisol.

There's also a pulse of some, and when I say a pulse, I just mean the release of a little bit, there's also a pulse of epinephrine, which is adrenaline, from your adrenals and also in your brain, and you feel awake. Now, that pulse of cortisol and adrenaline and epinephrine might come from your alarm clock, it might come from you naturally waking up, but it tends to alert your whole system in your body that it's time to increase your heart rate, it's time to start tensing your muscles, it's time to start moving about. It's very important that that cortisol pulse come early in the day, or at least, early in your period of wakefulness. I say that because some people are waking up at 8:00 p.m. and are sleeping all day, but it's very important that that pulse of cortisol occur early in the day and that it happens all at once, it sort of sets a rising tide of cortisol in your system.

Many of you have probably heard about cortisol in relation to stress, and indeed, as we go through our day and our life, different stressors, different events happen in our life that make us feel more alert. Some of the more stressful ones might be looking at your credit card bill and seeing what seems to be a fraudulent charge, or looking at your phone and suddenly seeing a text that something you thought was going to happen at a particular time is not going to happen, or you're running late. Those will tend to increase norepinephrine and epinephrine and adrenaline in your system, and if they're severe enough, you'll start getting some pulses of cortisol released from your adrenals throughout the day.

But there's this normal, healthy rising tide of cortisol that happens early in the day, and I say healthy because it wakes you up, it makes you feel alert, and it makes you feel able to move and wanting to move and to go about your day for work, for exercise, for school, for social relations, etc. So when you wake up in the morning is when that cortisol pulse takes off, and something else important happens. A timer is set in your body and in your nervous system that dictates when a different hormone called melatonin, which makes you sleepy, will be secreted from a particular brain region.

When you wake up in the morning and you experience that rise in cortisol, there's a timer that starts going, and these are cellular timers and they're dictated by the relation between different organs in your body, that says to your brain and body that in about 12 to 14 hours, a different hormone, this hormone we're calling melatonin, will be released from your pineal gland. So there's two mechanisms here, a wakefulness signal and a sleepiness signal, and the wakefulness signal triggers the onset of the timer for the sleepiness signal. Now, that sleepiness signal that we call melatonin that's released from the pineal comes only from the pineal. Unless you're taking exogenous melatonin, you're supplementing with melatonin, the only source of melatonin in your body is going to be this pineal gland.

Let's talk about the pineal gland for a second. The pineal gland is a gland that sits in the little structure near, for the aficionados out there, it's kind of near the fourth ventricle, it's about the size of a pea. Descartes, the philosopher, said that the pineal was the seat of the soul. He said that because it's one of the few structures in the human brain that there's only one of them. Most structures, there's one on either side of the brain, so-called bihemispheric, but the pineal, there's only one. I don't know anything about souls, really, certainly not the science of souls, but I think it's very unlikely that the pineal is the seat of the soul, but it is a very interesting organ because it's the only organ in our body that releases melatonin, and that melatonin makes us sleepy and lets us fall asleep.

(See you again tomorrow for part 6 of this series. Stay tuned!)

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