Melatonin Dosing for Insomnia
Melatonin is a fairly common supplement used as a sleep aid and now as an immune regulator. We often talk with people who are aware of melatonin but are taking way too much. For some supplements, more can be better (within reason) like vitamin C, vitamin D, NAC, ALA and others.
Others do best in a happy zone like melatonin and tocotrienols and more is definitely not better.
From looking at this chart you might think that taking more is better. I will explain.
Melatonin levels are on the left and age on the bottom. You will note that melatonin levels are highest about ages 6 to 12 and begins to drop off at the start of puberty and continues to decline with age until about age 60 when hardly any is produced. Maybe this helps explain why children tend to be able to sleep so well and why supplementation might be a great idea in the elderly. I wonder about serotonin levels in the elderly as melatonin is produced from serotonin in a one-step conversion. Does this mean that the elderly also have low levels of serotonin? Melatonin plays such an important role in the inflammatory process (NLRP3 inflammasome), does this help explain why the elderly have different responses to viruses than the young? Sorry to bring these up and not answer them but the purpose of this article is looking at melatonin and the control of circadian rhythms and sleep and in particular supplementation.
As I review the role of melatonin in different aspects of human physiology, I have come to the realization that a fairly complete treatment would be a textbook. That isn't going to happen today, so I hope you bear with me as I carve this complex hormone function into a myriad of blogs.
Let's look at some basics.
- 1.Typically, melatonin levels increase at night and decrease during the day.
- 2.Taking melatonin supplements could help many sleeps better especially if jet lagged.
- 3.The amounts of melatonin used in supplementation in studies has been extremely varied, that is differing by a factor of up to 3000x.
- 4.The one thing agreed upon by just about everyone is that supplementation needs to only be at night, no matter what effect you are trying to achieve including jet lag.
- 5.If you take too much, the negative effects tend to be mild, if any, in most cases. Some reported problems are drowsiness (no surprise there), low sex drive and maybe infertility. The low sex drive may have more to do with insomnia or from taking it the wrong time of day. In big doses, a person can experience hormone imbalances (melatonin is a hormone after all) and these imbalances might affect reproductive hormones. Reproductive effects seem to come from doses much higher than talked about here.
- 6.Contrary to what the above graph might imply, the dosages for adults and the elderly appear to be similar. This is a situation where more is not better. In some investigations, researchers reported that tiny amounts, that is .1 mg (1/10 of a mg) were the best. This super low level of supplementation also raised blood levels of melatonin to the same levels of healthy adults and in the elderly who had no sleeping problems. To say this another way, .1 mg of melatonin supplementation was found to increase blood levels better than higher doses like 2 or 3 mg or more.
- 7.Melatonin was discovered at MIT and the university patented dosages between .3 mg and 1 mg. So, companies have to make doses below or above those levels or pay MIT a fee. Just an interesting side note.
- 8.You should therefore, experiment with dosage for your own sleep needs. Begin with a very low dose like 1 mg and work up slowly and note the point where your body tells you that it is now too much. We tend to find that most people do OK with 1-3 mg per dose.
