A Short Guide to Melatonin
Melatonin is a hormone that helps you sleep. In a time when 1 in 5 adults say they have trouble sleeping, it’s no surprise that melatonin is becoming more and more popular as a supplement. Since some studies have found that taking melatonin has a positive effect on sleep, I’m interested in finding out more about how and when we should use it based on our current research.
That’s why this week I’ve set out to answer three questions about melatonin:
What exactly does melatonin do?
What are the side effects?
Does regular use change how effective it is?
What exactly does melatonin do?
We produce melatonin naturally to help regulate our sleep cycles. In the daytime, light causes us to stop producing it, and as it gets darker melatonin helps us get sleepy and lowers our core body temperature to get ready for bed.
It’s actually also found in a lot of foods: eggs, fish, milk, nuts, and cherries are just a few examples that are high in melatonin.
Taking extra melatonin seems to help sleep quality. For healthy people and insomniacs, a review found that it helped you fall asleep 4 minutes faster and increased total sleep time by 14 minutes. More recently, researchers gave a “weak recommendation” for using melatonin to:
Avoid jet lag
Treat insomnia
Promote sleep
Prevent daytime sleepiness
based off sample sizes of between 250 to 1000 otherwise healthy people. A decently large majority of studies tend to agree on this topic, but the sample sizes are still too small to make official recommendations.
There are other claims of melatonin benefits in anything from antioxidant to anti-aging properties, but there isn’t enough evidence to make any firm conclusions about these yet.
The clinical use of melatonin is still up for debate because it’s hard to agree on the right dose size and situation. For example, there was no link between dose size and effect for studies using anywhere between 0.3 and 4 mg of melatonin, so we need more studies to figure out why this happens. However, because it’s seen as a safer option than existing sleep medication, researchers are interested in further development.
What are the side effects?
Melatonin is considered safe, even at high doses. The most common side effects are headaches or sleepiness a few hours after taking melatonin, but no serious side effects have been found in studies. There’s also speculation about whether it could mess up your circadian rhythm or cause you to lose focus, but in general if you’re taking it at night this shouldn’t be a problem.
Then again, there hasn’t been a lot of long-term research on this topic, so it’s best to be conservative, especially with children and pregnant women. And as with any other drug, melatonin can also interfere with other medications - consult a doctor if you’re in this situation.
Does regular use change how effective it is?
There aren’t any reports of people developing a tolerance to melatonin. In fact, melatonin levels go down significantly as you grow older, which has been linked to other diseases and sleep disorders. This means that as time passes, you’re probably more likely to find melatonin helpful. Of course, the lack of long-term studies makes it hard to say for sure, but there isn’t much reason to believe that taking melatonin will make it less useful in the future.
Should I take melatonin?
In my non-doctor opinion, it’s probably good to take melatonin to combat specific situations like jet lag. Current evidence seems to say that there’s not really any downside to taking melatonin, but the upside may be kind of small as well unless applied correctly. Anything to do with regular use then depends on how much you feel it helps, and how easy it is to get.
*As an update, I have heard that melatonin can interfere with dopamine - will be updated once I’ve done more research, but for now remember to use it sparingly!
Thanks for reading! If you’re interested in where I got this content from, here are some of the reviews I used:
2021, Journal Impact Factor - 3.8
What do we really know about the safety and efficacy of melatonin for sleep disorders?
2021, Journal Impact Factor - 2.6
2021, Journal Impact Factor - 3.8
2021, Journal Impact Factor - 10.5
2019, Journal Impact Factor - 7.0
2014, Journal Impact Factor - 2.6
2017, Journal Impact Factor - 5.7