Melatonin info dump GO!
Try getting the 1mg tabz and quartering them. You need like .1-.2mg and the big amounts can do the opposite and AMP your ASS.Quartering to .25mg is easiest way to get smol
Stay tf away from 3/5/10mg that’ll just crank you. I’ve seen 3mg extended release but I still think that’s too much even if it does work over time
Aaaaand get “USP” on bottle if possible (and in US) as that’s the only “this is what it says it is” check in the US for supplements
Also pair with behavioral cues! Pick a stimulus for each sense that you only use while trying to sleep! Examples:
-
Sight: dark obvs but you might try an orange night light if you need low light for mobility / safety or PTSD / night terror related reasons.
-
Sound: I use a thunderstorm but other white noise mixes are also great.
-
Touch: heavy blanket
-
Smell: detergent, or a different air freshener than you use in the rest of the house.
-
Taste: cup of chamomile before bed.
Avoid phone / TV while in bed unless the TV / YouTube is your sound cue in which case turn down the brightness / red shift it and play something boring / familiar like a sitcom you watched a lot of as a kid or a steamer you’ve seen a lot of.
Avoid most activities in general in bed except sleeping and fucking and possibly one mindless repetitive task like knitting or an easy untimed puzzle game. If you need an activity to wind down, learn to be mindful of your physiological sleepiness symptoms (mine is eyelid heaviness) and the second you feel it put your activity down immediately and lay your head on your pillow with your eyes closed.
It is very important that if you use medication to sleep you do. not. get in the habit of fighting them. If you let them make you sleep instead of using them to compliment a full behavioral sleep plan, you are going to wind up on ridiculous doses of medications that doctors are gonna get shitty with you about prescribing. Save yourself the trouble and make yourself a sleep plan. And if you have little kids that can’t regulate their sleep this is a great time to enforce (and model!) healthy sleep habits.
This will likely take about two weeks to kick in but once it does you are gonna have some of the best sleep of your life.
And to back this commenter up I have a lot of patients say melatonin gives them nightmares. Most of them have tried taking >10mg. That is waaay too much and melatonin is well known to do that in high doses. Buy the lowest strength melatonin you can and like this person says maybe even get a pill cutter and split them.
God I need to get my shit together, cause do I ever need god’s chosen sleep
-
I completely agree on the dosage info, meaning that’s how it works for me.
I tried melatonin many times over the years, but it was always the higher dosage stuff. I found it to be ineffective and worse, it would leave me groggy the next day. That’s especially true for the extended release stuff.
Then about 7 years ago or so, I was reading something that suggested ideal dosages are below 1 mg and decided to give it a try again. Sure enough, I find that .25mg or .5mg are the sweet spot for me. Helps me sleep and there’s minimal grogginess the next day, sometimes even no residual grogginess.
Anecdotally, I do believe melatonin supplements have wide variation in terms of efficacy for people. I know plenty of people who do just find with the 5mg and higher stuff. I know people who it’s entirely ineffective for. I’m also seeing someone below suggest taking it hours before you need to sleep – that sounds absolutely absurd to me, but that’s also the nature of advice for this stuff. Seems like it just works differently for different people.
Huh TIL! Thanks for the tips!!
unpopular take: your sleep cycles are fucked up because you take a pill for a thing your body makes anyway, instead of just putting away the damn phone at a reasonable time. if you actually have that bad a prolem, get rid of the damn phone altogether. you can live without it, and you’re clearly unable to self-regulate with it.
Hey, it’s me
Me too. Every night without fail.
Right now even.
Mario?
For me it’s ‘finally fall asleep, wake up 2 hours later’ :(
I’m actually allergic to melatonin. Anyone else get insomnia and chills at a minimum? They love to push that shit on you to avoid narcotics because they deserve hard labor instead of medical jobs.
Melatonin resistance? I imagine you can overuse it.
When I take it consecutive nights the effect seems to add up and just make me more and more groggy all the time. Also the nightmares I have on it are horrendous. Usually I just take it on Sundays to get my sleep schedule switched back to weekday time and that works well enough.
You might be taking too much. I used to take 3 mg semi regularly to help get to sleep quickly on weeknights, and I would sometimes be groggy in the mornings. One time I decided that I really needed to sleep so I took 6 mg and got the weird dreams and was super groggy the next day. I’ve cut back since then.
Yeah, i think mine were 5/10mg, I know there were 2 options at the store and I got the weaker ones but it was more than 3mg. I just don’t use it much and it’s fine.
okay someone please validate me, i tried melatonin and it obliterated my libido. but i couldnt find anyone talking about it! has this ever happened to anyone here??
In my experience people dont take melatonin correctly its not a non hypnotic benzo that you take and pass out 25 minutes later. you need to take it hours before you intend to sleep
The melatonin I use says “Take just before bed” in the instructions
What’s great is there’s nothing to differentiate between medical advice, marketing language and serving suggestions on a label.
Fun fact: the FDA regulates most supplements (including melatonin) as food, not drugs. That means there are standards for what’s in them, but it’s mostly that they can’t just outright lie about the ingredients. There are nowhere near the same standards of testing for efficacy / safety, and they don’t even have to be the exact chemical structure (which makes sense for something like powdered ginger root that might vary slightly between batches / growers). Supplements can be super helpful but you really need to do your own research or get advice from a doctor experienced in holistic medicine (a lot of primary care / general practitioners / family medicine doctors are picking up on this but it’s definitely not universal).
thats fine, of course… im repeating this based on an article in the nytimes I read that summarized all the data from double blind studies.
honestly the evidence is mixed whether it has any efficacy at all
I mean, that’s how I have been using it for the past 3 years, in fact I feel more sleepy after taking melatonin than after taking benzos - but that’s just probably me.
I assure you its just you. valium will knock everyone out at the right dose. its in general anesthesia. melatonin doesnt have any solid reliable clinical validity as to its efficacy as a sleep aid
Well, I only have experience with alprazolam in small (under 1mg) doses, so that’s the reason it doesn’t sedate me as strongly.
That’s why the pros don’t use serotonin.
They dissociate.
