Like is it our brain that’s like “ok sleep time” and we just doze off?
In: Biology
Sleep is really fucking complicated so here goes:
You have 2 main sleeping mechanisms, melatonin and adenosine. Broadly speaking both of these chemicals are what build up and make us feel “sleepy”. Melatonin is more closely related to the day-night cycle and adenosine is more closely tied to actually sleeping but you need both for things to work right. As we go through our day, we are receiving all sorts of signals from the world including light into our eyes (shocking I know). That light tells our brain roughly what part of the day it is and how much energy we should have. As it gets closer to night time, melatonin steps in and says “hey you need to be winding down right now”. When we finally close our eyes, we’re no longer receiving light information so the adenosine can now move into the brain to trigger our sleep cycles at night and be cleaned out of our blood. Then we do it all again the next day!
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