You can get liquid melatonin, marketed for children.
I find it can be a burden sometimes-- like when the police shoot first and ask questions later, plus it doesn’t even keep me from getting sunburned.
Oh wait. You said melatonin. Sorry. Carry on.
Melatonin has always helped, a bit, the first week or so but always declines to virtual ineffectiveness very rapidly. IME.
Had a bad jet-lag experience last time back from Europe - after a week, my sleep cycle was still all over the place and not getting better.
Forced myself into bed at 10.00 at night, took the melatonin, slept great - 8-9 hours. Body clock all reset. It could have been co-incidence, since it should take about a bit over a week to fully recover from the jet-lag, but it seemed like I was getting nowhere, and then suddenly - fixed!
Bloody awful hangover next day, though.
Your mileage may totally vary. I use not more than 1mg melatonin. I find that it helps speed the onset of sleep, and then I wake up fully rested after about 3 hours. This isn’t what I want and probably not what most people want, but there’s a data point for you.
Melatonin doesn’t put me to sleep, but a 300 microgram dose relaxes me enough that it’s usually pretty easy to drop off to sleep.
Important to note, that many commercially available doses are at least 10 times the recommended dosage. The too high doses of melatonin can cause next day grogginess and also burn out the brain’s melatonin receptors, so those dosages cease to be effective after a few days.
I’ve tried it three times and I always have ended up with the same result regardless of dosage: I sleep *even worse *than without it. Instead of waking up every 90 to 120 minutes, I wake up every 45 to 60 minutes.
While it’s supposed to work really, really well with kids with autism, apparently making you sleep even more poorly isn’t unheard of if you have ADHD.
Vivid dreams are probably part of the “working.” Part of my insomnia is that I can sleep for eight hours without getting any REM sleep, and wake up the next morning feeling like I barely slept at all. On the other hand, with the right mix of medications, I sometimes sleep only six or seven hours, but have bizarre and vivid dreams much of the night, and wake up feeling refreshed and ready for the day.
Also, if I have a couple of bad nights in a row where I sleep just three or four hours, the first night I fall asleep, I go into REM sleep with vivid dreams much of the night, and wake up “caught up” on sleep, even if I slept just nine hours.
REM sleep, the time when you dream, is the crucial part of sleep for feeling refreshed in the morning, somehow. Someone explained it all to me once-- and REM isn’t completely the be all and end all of sleep-- there is a time when you are using up a hormone called adenosine, (which is what caffeine mimics, and therefore blocks), and not exhausting all your adenosine can make you wake up groggy, but IIRC, in the short term, missing REM sleep is what most contributes to making you feel like crap. It’s the reason passing out from alcohol and “sleeping”/being passed out for nine or ten hours can result in you still feeling groggy in the morning, because alcohol disrupts REM sleep. Melatonin helps you get more REM sleep, somehow-- I don’t remember how. It binds with receptors, I think.
Sundown Naturals 5mg melatonin (pricey) knocks me out fast but I will get the vivid dreams others mentioned and it took two of them to make it nearly possible to sleep through menopausal hot flashes.
Now that I take HRT and no longer have hot flashes, I also switched to the melatonin blend Costco carries by Schiff (much cheaper); it’s 3 mg melatonin along w/ extracts of chamomile and valerian root as well as Gamma-aminobutyric acid, L-Theanine, vitamin B6 and dicalcium phosphate. I do not get vivid dreams, it takes a little longer to fall asleep (up to an hour) but I usually get a solid 7 hours. They smell a little funny but only for a second.
Mixing a low does of melatonin with valarian root works for me. The valarian seems to slow the overactive brain and the melatonin let’s you drop off. It might be sugar pills but I’ll take it if it works.
Godawful headache the next day every time I have tried it. I use valerian a bit and have some phenibut hanging around but need to take that about 5 hours before bedtime on an empty stomach for it to work, it is great to listen to trance music with after a couple of hours though. I don’t usually have too much trouble getting to sleep now I have addressed a magnesium deficiency, it is staying asleep that is my issue.
I had a similar experience with weird side effects. It seemed miraculous at first, but then I would get this feeling like a vein or something was bursting in my head, especially when I walked up stairs. It was quite scary! I quit and that feeling went away instantly.
But I tend to get side effects from stuff quite easily.
Only works if I use 0.3 mg. The argument is that the extra stuff gets converted into something else, and that can keep you awake.
Absolutely no feeling of drowsiness. Just take it at about 20 minutes before the point when you’re natural melatonin should have kicked in.
This.
But also this.
Sometimes I’ll take a combination of Melatonin, choline, 5HTP, and a mega dose of vitamin B6 before bed time just for the fucked up dreams. It’s an absolute blast.
Keep in mind that none of those things actually cause the dreams, they just help you remember the crazy shit that’s already zipping through your brain while you sleep.
3 mg, the smallest dose I can find. Haven’t seen liquid melatonin but Ill keep an eye out for it.
I found 300 microgram doses on a 6-hour time-release on Amazon, I’ve been trying them out, seems to be helping some, but I still need to keep testing.
I can feel the drowsiness coming on, right on cue, fall asleep nicely then exactly 4 hours later I’m wide awake. So, didn’t really work for me since I didn’t want to sleep in four hours spurts.
I haven’t taken melatonin in years because I think I developed a habit with it, so to speak. I hit a wall with it where it didn’t work anymore unless I took a double dose. I did that once. Never again.
I work in the very early AM hours and sometimes can’t/don’t get to bed at a reasonable time. I take valerian, which isn’t habit forming. One dose and I’m dead to the world within a half hour. It won’t work if I’m really keyed up. That’s when I take a generic “PM without the pain reliever”.
Both hubby and I use it on a regular basis to fall asleep fast. No side effects, from what we’ve noticed
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I’ve tried different formulations of it and have never had any relief.