The Science of Falling Asleep — and Glycine
For You by Recovery+ · The Evening
How you actually fall asleep (and what glycine has to do with it)
Falling asleep isn't a switch, it's a cooling event. As bedtime approaches, your body sheds heat through your hands and feet, your core temperature starts a slow descent, and sleep onset rides that downward curve. Warm extremities, cooling core: that's the physiological doorway into sleep.
Which reframes the evening: most things that wreck Indian sleep are things that fight this descent. Late caffeine is the obvious one, with a five-to-six-hour half-life, a 6pm coffee is still substantially on board at midnight. Sugar-heavy nightcaps, heavy late dinners and bright screens all push in the same wrong direction.
Where glycine enters: in published trials, 3g of glycine before bed was associated with better-rested, sharper mornings, including under deliberate sleep restriction1, and mechanism research links glycine to that same natural pre-sleep cooling process, acting through receptors in the brain's master clock2. Small trials, small groups, and we're telling you that up front: promising research at a specific dose, not a knockout drug.
| Evening habit | Effect on the descent |
|---|---|
| Caffeine after ~2pm | Fights it, half-life arithmetic keeps it in your system into the night |
| Sugar-heavy night drinks | Works against the wind-down at the day's worst hour for it |
| Consistent sleep & wake times | Trains it, regularity is the strongest boring lever in sleep research |
| Screens at full brightness in bed | Delays it, light is the clock's primary input |
| Pre-bed glycine (3g in trials) | The studied dose associated with better-rested mornings1 |
Where we stand: ELXR PM carries 2.5g of glycine, sitting just under the 3g the trials used, plus zero caffeine and zero sugar, because the best way to help an evening is to stop fighting it. It's not a sedative and not a sleep treatment, and we'll never call it one. The rest of the evening architecture lives in the Protocol.
01
FAQ
Does warm milk actually work?
The ritual is real even if the pharmacology is weak, a consistent wind-down cue genuinely helps, and warmth is comforting. Just know a glass of milk carries ~12g of lactose sugar, which is more than most people assume.
How late is too late for caffeine?
Count backwards with the ~5–6 hour half-life: for a 10–11pm bedtime, a ~2pm cut-off leaves only a small fraction in your system. Sensitive sleepers should stop earlier.
Does glycine knock you out?
No, glycine is an amino acid, not a sedative, and the trials show normal sleep patterns, not sedation. The research interest is in how it interacts with the body's natural cooling into sleep.
What's the single best sleep habit?
Regularity, the same sleep and wake time daily. It's unglamorous, free, and the lever large-scale sleep research keeps ranking first.
What about sleep medicines?
Sleep medication is a doctor decision, full stop. Nothing on a shelf, ours included, is an alternative to a prescribed treatment. What a shelf can do is narrower and still useful: remove the evening saboteurs, late caffeine and sugar, and support the routine levers on this page.
ELXR AM + ELXR PM · Batch 001 · 3,000 cans
The first 3,000 cans are numbered. One of them can have your number on it.
₹299 today, ₹299 back as credit on your first order. The deposit just holds your place.
Sources