Has melatonin ever been proven to help with sleep disorders or is it just the placebo effect?
It isn’t a placebo. Melatonin is a naturally occurring hormone produced by the pineal gland that is essential to regulating sleep cycles. It can be used as a supplement to induce sleep onset or treat things like jet lag. It is generally safe but individuals vary in their dose response to melatonin supplements and individual results may vary. Morning grogginess is one of the more common side effects.
Some people are melatonin-deficient. This appears to be relatively common in people with autism. For a long time, parents were told they were imagining their children’s sleep disorders, or they were putting their children to bed too early to have a difficult child out of the way. But once melatonin supplements were available, and tests for blood levels could be done, it turned out that quite a few autistic people just don’t produce enough.
It could possibly also be the problem for some people with chronic insomnia who are not autistic, but unfortunately, many doctors go to things like Ambien first, before suggesting melatonin.
I have a friend who has had terrible problems with insomnia, to the point of being awake for days on end, and feeling suicidal. She solved it with melatonin alone, albeit, she takes a huge dose that she is embarrassed to tell people about, but it works for her. Occasionally, if she has a change in schedule, or flies to another time zone, she needs a little bit of Valium, but she takes this maybe four times a year. The amount of melatonin she takes is really staggering, and it makes me wonder if she makes any naturally-- she even says if she gets startled awake at night, sometimes she can’t get back to sleep and needs more. But it’s all she takes. No Ambien, no Lunestra, no Benadryl, nothing but the melatonin.
I have terrible insomnia, and I take a couple of other medications off-label, in low doses compared to the doses of people who take them on-label (one is a seizure med, and one is an anti-psychotic). I also take some melatonin. I was skeptical of the melatonin too, but it really does work.
The fact that I have seen it work on autistic children with little language, and one really hyper dog (who was in danger of being rehomed, probably not very successfully, if her wild behavior couldn’t be gotten under control), suggests that it is not a placebo. Dog is happily in a forever home now. Was originally on trazodone, but gained a lot of weight. Lost the weight on melatonin.
The facts about melatonin as a sleep cycle regulator are true, but the effect and dosage requirements vary greatly by individual. I can say that it does nothing for me at all except make me feel groggy in the morning – overall a net negative. But that’s just me.
As for Valium, my sleep cycles tend to be short (waking up once or twice in the night, sometimes staying up and reading for hours) and Valium does nothing to alleviate that. What it does is provide a pleasant and relaxing way to fall asleep, but that’s not really its intended purpose, and it doesn’t affect my usual short sleep cycles.
The amazing sleep drugs in my opinion are the hypnotics, like Ambien or zopiclone. I’ve taken zopiclone from time to time, but being retired, I rarely need to get up at any particular time. But hypnotics are amazing stuff. You can take one and decide not to go to sleep and at most you might feel a little drowsy. But if you lie down and close your eyes you’re off in dreamland in no time, and in my case at least, I’ll typically sleep through until morning.
Just my experiences. YMMV.
I find that 1/4 of a Meltonex tablet (Melatonin and B6 IIRC) helps me fall asleep and stay asleep most of the night. I have no idea if it is the placebo effect or not and I don’t really care because it seems to work for me.
Anecdotes aside, some comprehensive reviews find melatonin may be helpful in sleep disorders, but with a modest effect.* Side effects are generally fewer than with other common pharmacologic interventions.
*one meta-analysis reported that onset to sleep was decreased by something like 23 minutes for those taking melatonin.
Much more than you wanted to know about Melatonin
It is a circadian rhythm regulator with mild hypnotic effect. The best dose is about 1/3 to 1/10 the most common dose.
[Moderating]
A reminder that this is GQ, and the OP is looking for studies. The place for personal anecdotes is IMHO.
I used it regularly when I was traveling around the world on business. If I was flying from New York to Hong Kong I would immediately adopt the new sleep schedule and taking an OTC sleep aid and Melatonin helped me adjust quicker than just a sleep aid alone or nothing. IANAD. YMMV.
300mcg is a good dose and about what the body produces, most OTC pills are 10x more at 3mg though.
So the answer seems to be “it depends,” with a dash of “we’re not really sure” thrown in. Incidentally, as someone with chronic insomnia, I’ve taken a lot of melatonin but haven’t really noticed any beneficial effects. It’s always hard to tell on an individual level; if I take melatonin and still lie awake until 3 a.m., well, maybe it would’ve been 4 if I’d taken nothing. But Ambien reliably knocks me out within 30 minutes, and I’ve used it for about a decade now with no adverse effects.
When I take 3mg, I wake up after only 5 hours of sleep. With 5mg, I get more like 7.5 hours plus a little grogginess. I can’t imagine what 0.3 mg would do. Can they even feel it?
Does anyone here know if melatonin has any effect on urine generation. I usually go to sleep fairly easily and sleep till I have to pee. Anytime after about 3:30 I generally cannot get back to sleep.
This is anecdotal, but I couldn’t find anything relevant with a search. So I’m mostly posting to see if someone else can find a study.
I took melatonin for years to try to help with sleep. It actually didn’t help much with that. Then I read (this would have been circa 2006) that melatonin can amplify the immune system and make autoimmune disorders worse. Well, I’d had two things that were getting worse: an allergy to some kind of pollen and arthritis in some of my finger joints. So I stopped taking it and those two things gradually got better. Now they hardly ever bother me.
Now that I think about it, there may have been one other potentially bad thing that melatonin did. After I started taking it, I very occasionally had episodes where my heart started to labor. It usually happened while I was in bed, shortly after taking the pill. At first, I wasn’t in real good cardio condition, so it would be a pounding type laboring, as in my whole bed would be shaking. Later, I got in much better cardio shape and it would be a racing type of laboring. However, I haven’t had many instances of that since stopping taking melatonin. I had not read anything about this; it’s just something that occured to me right now. But perhaps it’s also somewhere in the literature.