Hi there, it's Matt here. Ranji, welcome back to the show. Thank you for being so gracious to return to essentially tell us the second half of the story, all about sleeping pills.

For folks who may not have listened, I would implore you to go back

and have a listen to our previous episode where we spoke about more generally what sleeping pills

are and what they do. And then we spoke about two classes of sleeping pills, the older first

generation benzodiazepines, things like

Valium and Xanax, and then we spoke about the second wave of sleeping pills, which are called

the non-benzo-diasapine hypnotics, things like Ambien and Linester. But now we're going to speak about

some of the newer classes of sleeping pills. And perhaps I can navigate the initiation of this

conversation with the melatonin receptor agonists. What are these melatonin receptor agonists?

And how do they function? And even though folks on this show have heard me speak about melatonin

and try to explain what it is, maybe you could also just say or bake into the response of what these melatonin

receptor agonists are a little bit about melatonin as well. Sure, absolutely. Again, thank you, Matt,

for having me back. It was a fun show. Yeah, we discussed benzodiazepines and benzodiazepine

receptor agonists, which, you know, as we talked about before, those classes of medications really enhanced the transmission of GABA.

So now we're going to pivot here and talk about a different mechanism of how we can perhaps induce sleep.

So melatonin receptor agonists represent

distinct class of sleep aids that target melatonin receptors, specifically melatonin one and melatonin

two receptors, unlike medications that act on GAVA receptors, which slow down brain activity to induce sleepiness.

So previously, we had discussed medications that bind to GABA receptors to promote sleep by slowing down brain activity.

In contrast, melatonin receptor agonists work by binding to receptors in a part of the brain known as the supra-chaismatic

nucleus. This binding doesn't directly induce sleepness. Rather, instead, it signals to the brain

that it is time to prepare for sleep. So the natural ligand for these receptors, the natural sort of chemical for

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