What is melatonin?
Melatonin is a hormone naturally produced by your brain's pineal gland. For our purposes, it's important to note that it plays a fundamental role in signaling to your body that it's time to fall asleep.
Melatonin and sleep
Melatonin regulation in the body occurs in cycles opposite to those of body temperature. In the late afternoon and early evening, body temperature is at its highest and melatonin is at its lowest. Conversely, from the middle to the end of the early morning hours, body temperature is at its lowest and melatonin levels are at their highest.
By the way, do you remember the circadian rhythm biological clock graph?
Well, the melatonin graph is practically the same!
In humans and other diurnal animal species, melatonin secretion occurs during normal sleep hours. The melatonin cycle occurs even in night shift workers working under bright lights, but light can suppress it.
We don't really understand all the effects of melatonin. But we do know some of them that you may have already heard about.
Have you ever heard of jet lag?
Well, this happens when you travel to places with different time zones. Imagine you're going to Barcelona. Depending on the time of year, the time difference can be up to 5 hours ahead. If you arrive there around midnight, your body won't be ready to sleep yet because it will think it's still 7 PM. That's having jet lag.
Your body will eventually adjust to a new time zone. But how does it know how to do this? If you're stuck in a constant 24-hour circadian cycle, how does your body know it needs to adjust? What adjusts your circadian rhythms is ambient light.
But if you're thinking: "Jet lag isn't a problem for me, I hardly ever travel."
That's true, but there are much more everyday things that affect your biological clock, like electric light and everything it brought with it (TV, cell phone, etc.).
Can I increase melatonin through my diet?
Despite what you may read on some websites about foods rich in melatonin (e.g., milk from cows milked at night contains 10 times the amount of melatonin as regular milk), there is no evidence that diet is a significant source of melatonin in the body.
The levels that occur naturally in foods are not high enough for an individual to alter their melatonin level through diet alone. However, there are some foods that can help you sleep better by supporting melatonin production in the body, such as bananas, pineapple, oranges, and tomatoes.
But as we mentioned before, eating bananas alone won't make a significant difference in your sleep.
Melatonin supplements
You probably already know that using melatonin supplements is a resource that many people use to try to sleep better. Small doses of melatonin can help normalize circadian rhythms (biological clock) in night shift workers and people with jet lag.
But, in general, melatonin doesn't work like a sleeping pill that you take and pass out. The effect is much more subtle and only increases your body's perception that it's time to sleep.
Now, before you decide to buy melatonin, or continue using it, there are three things you should know:
- Scientific studies have shown that melatonin supplementation generally doesn't make much difference for insomnia.
- A 2005 scientific study 1 analyzed several studies on melatonin use and concluded that melatonin treatment reduces the time it takes to fall asleep, increases sleep efficiency, and increases total sleep duration. But the variability among the different studies was so large that there is no general consensus.
- Another 2003 study 2 conducted a comparative analysis where people with insomnia were divided into three groups, where each night one group received 0.3mg of melatonin, another group received 1mg of melatonin, and another group received a placebo. The results showed no significant difference between the groups. This confirms that even if melatonin made any difference, taking higher amounts of melatonin doesn't show differences either.
-
It's not exactly known what melatonin supplementation does to your body in the long term, but it's known that taking high doses of other natural hormones can be dangerous, so it's important to keep this in mind.
-
Finally, we believe it's relevant to say that people with chronic insomnia don't have problems with melatonin production or regulation, so taking this substance would be a way of trying to solve a problem you don't have.
Final comments
Here at Vigilantes do Sono, we believe we don't own the truth and much less that we have a magic solution to solve everyone's sleep problems. That's why we will never tell you whether or not you should take a certain approach; we will only provide information about what has or hasn't been scientifically validated, with appropriate expectations, and it's up to you to decide what's best for you (remembering that some decisions should be made with a specialist physician).
Therefore, within this topic of melatonin, we wanted to conclude with a clinical guidance from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (perhaps one of the largest sleep references in the world) regarding medication recommendations for adults with chronic insomnia 3.
The suggestion for physicians is:
Do not use melatonin as a treatment for sleep onset or sleep maintenance insomnia (versus no treatment) in adults.
In other words: receiving no treatment is a better option than taking melatonin.
But this is a recommendation, so if you already use melatonin and it works for you, or you would like to start using this substance, we only recommend that you take the lowest dose that helps, for only a brief period of time and under medical supervision, to ensure that your unique circumstances are taken into consideration.