Get the best from your rest part two: Melatonin and magnesium

Key Takeaways:

• Melatonin is a hormone that peaks at night and goes off early the next day.
• It’s not a sleeping pill; it helps restore natural rhythms.
• Magnesium supplements reduce some of the neurotransmitters that are associated with anxiety.
• Talk to your doctor before taking any supplements.

In part one of this series, we talked about how things like electronics, temperature, and food can impact your sleep.

For this blog, we’re going to discuss two popular sleep aids: melatonin and magnesium.

Should you take them? Do they work?

Let’s talk about it. 

What is melatonin?

Melatonin is an interesting hormone. It’s my favorite hormone. 

All the other hormones you can think of as AM radio stations in their signaling. I don’t know if people remember what AM stands for anymore, but that’s amplitude modulation. 

If you go to the doctor, they’re going to tell you that you have too much insulin or not enough thyroid hormone or too much estrogens or not enough. It’s all about the amounts. 

Melatonin is different in that the biological signal is an FM station. It’s frequency modulation. Whether it’s in a day-active creature like us or a night-active creature like a mouse, it always peaks at night. 

A couple hours after dark starts, melatonin levels go up and they stay up until morning. Light can cause melatonin levels to crash.

Some people might only need 20 lux of light, which is the amount of a dim bedroom. Some people may need 200 lux, which is turning on your bathroom light for a very long period, like 15-20 minutes. That’ll crash melatonin, and then it’s down for the rest of the night.

Your poor dumb liver cell says, “I wonder what time it is?” If it sees melatonin, it knows it’s nighttime, and it should do its night-time liver things. If it’s not seeing melatonin, it says, “It’s daytime.” And it does its daytime liver things.

Again, exposure to light at night often crashes people’s melatonin, which causes your internal organs to react as if it were daytime all the time.

Now one thing that can help is if you take supplements, you can restore some of that lost melatonin and maintain a signal.

How does it work?

It’s not a sleeping pill per se. It just restores a natural rhythm. And there’s a lot of variability in this. 

Melatonin production and secretion should turn off early in the morning the next day. For some people in the winter particularly, they don’t get enough light to turn it off. It continues, and that can cause seasonal affective disorder, or winter depression.

Can anyone take it?

Because I’m not a medical doctor, I would encourage somebody to go see their doctor before they start taking it. This is one of the few countries in the world where you can buy an active hormone from any grocery store, so make sure you check with your doctor first.

Despite studying melatonin, I personally avoided it for years and years, and then I met some colleagues on a trip to Japan. They got there, and they were spot on with local time. No jet lag at all. And I was miserable. They convinced me to take a little bit of melatonin. But I checked with my doctor before I did.

There’s a lot of social media content promoting magnesium products for sleep. What do they do?

How it’s supposed to work is that it reduces some of the neurotransmitters that are associated with anxiety. If people are lying there persevering about things that are causing them anxiety, then it’s probably okay to take in small doses.

I would really encourage people to check with their doctors on that one and do some research, particularly on the websites of Cleveland Clinic or Johns Hopkins. They have recommendations.

There are different kinds of magnesium supplements, and you need to make sure you’re getting the right one, according to your doctor.