#41 - Which Melatonin Is Best For Your Sleep?
Melatonin has been referred to as:
a nutritional supplement
the sleepy hormone
the nighttime hormone
a wonder drug
Besides assisting with headaches, gastrointestinal disorders and tinnitus (to name a few) - it’s probably known best for helping people sleep.
Now if you’ve already tried melatonin and it didn’t work for you then there may be a good reason - and that’s not because of you or the melatonin.
It could be because the instructions were wrong!
For instance, here’s a couple of photos of the instructions for two different bottles of melatonin that I have:
Why are these instructions bad?: They say to take it either:
20 minutes before bedtime
before bedtime
at bedtime
This is based on the old notion that people go to bed with the intention of turning off the lights and attempting sleep. But so many research studies are showing people do not do this.
For example, there’s a new concept known as ‘shuteye latency’ which has been created in recognition that at least 9 out of every 10 people go to bed and use some form of technology.
Side note - if you wish to find out what screens can do to your own levels of melatonin, then you can check out this blog - but just remember to come back here after.
In short, melatonin needs to be taken in a more precise way, and depends upon the person’s sleep problem.
This could mean taking melatonin:
many hours before they fall asleep (for delayed circadian rhythms, jet lag, or changing the sleep timing of shift workers)
30-min before they fall asleep (for kids)
when they wake-up in the morning (for advanced circadian rhythms, jet lag, or changing the sleep timing of shift workers).
What Type of Melatonin?
There are 2 types of melatonin: fast-acting and long-acting. For all of the purposes above, fast-acting is the best. But don’t throw away those long-acting tablets, they can still be handy.
Where Can I Get Melatonin?
The best quality melatonin is usually prescribed, such that you purchase pharmaceutical grade melatonin. Yet, we’ve achieved great success with melatonin purchased online, or those bottles we’ve purchased on the Walmart shelves when we’ve visited North America.
But What About The Side Effects?
Like anything, there are some people that experience side effects, but these are rare and most of the time tolerable. If side effects are experienced, it’s best to weigh up the short-term gains vs better sleep.
Where Did I Learn About Melatonin?
I trained under Prof Leon Lack and thus became skilled in bright light therapy as a technique to change circadian rhythms and improve sleep. Thus my mentality was ‘Skills. Not Pills’. But my philosophy has adapted.
After a 5-week academic tour of Europe in 2010, I used bright light therapy on myself to lessen my jet lag when returning to Australia. In 2012 when I underwent another academic tour of Europe, a colleague of mine gave me some melatonin to try instead - and at the end of this tour I learned how to use melatonin from quite possibly the leader in this field - Prof Marcel Smits.
I’m telling you, melatonin was so much easier to use than bright light therapy.
Even a couple of years later, Prof Leon Lack was advocating for the use of melatonin.
And since 2012, I’ve been advising clients on the use of melatonin for their sleep, as well as publishing on the topic of melatonin.
Where Can I Learn More About Melatonin?
We’ve packed a lot of information about how to tailor the use of melatonin to the individual person - whether a child, teen or adult - and whether it’s to help them fall asleep, or change the timing of their body clock.
There is a lot of information about melatonin, so we’ve kept out the stuff people would find too complicated to learn, or even boring, and most of the time this info is not directed at the all important question - HOW to use melatonin.
So whether it’s for yourself, or for your clients, or all of the above - our Melatonin manual will help all of the above.
And we’re serious - it’s like a manual. It tells you HOW to take melatonin to suit you.
It’s available right now to download for $19 - compare that single purchase - something that will change the way you do things forever - to a month’s worth of sleep remedies that haven’t worked?
What Happened This Week ...
3 of our research students crunched their data - and the results are really promising! For the moment, they’re showing:
sleep is important when it comes to making a change to one’s alcohol consumption
that there’s a new device that can reduce children’s nightmares in a couple of weeks
that whilst their is a focus on people not drink- or drug-driving, we may also need to educate certain members of our society (ie, parents with a baby that does not sleep well) to take more caution on the roads.
But what is truly satisfying is seeing the development of these new researchers. On reflection, we’ve done a huge amount about the science of sleep over the past 20 years. And I’m sure we’ll do much more in the next 20 years. But it is heartening to see the new generation of potential sleep researchers strut their stuff - way better than we did …
Prof Mike Gradisar
