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Comment by yosito | Hacker News Reader

Melatonin is not like a sleeping pill where more will necessarily make you more drowsy. It is a hormone that signals to your body that it is time to sleep. I can't find it right now, but there was a study of different doses in a large number of people that determined that just 0.2mg was more effective than larger doses for most people. And I've found that's true for me too. When I use melatonin, I use 0.2mg, and I fall asleep within half an hour, sleep a full night, and wake up feeling refreshed. If I use a larger dose, I sleep even less well than I would without a supplement.

I suggest to anyone who is taking 1mg or larger doses to experiment with a "microdose" of 0.2mg and see how it affects you.

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I always wonder if some of the self reported dosage variability for pills comes from differences in absorbtion of pills. Maybe some ppl's stomach acids or bacterial flora destroy particular molecules more or prevents absorption more than in other ppl?

Sublingual tablets are available which result in a much more reliably fast absorption. I recommend them for anyone who wants less variability from their melatonin use.

Any links on why are sublingual better wrt absorption?

Short answer is because the chemical goes directly through the membrane into the bloodstream.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sublingual_administration

It bypasses the stomach and intestines. It also bypasses liver metabolism (first-pass metabolism)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sublingual_administration#Prin...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_pass_effect

you can see this with pot edibles, if you take one on an empty stomach it takes forever to kick in and sometimes doesn’t work very well, but if you eat the same one after a large fatty meal it will kick in fast and strong

How do you dose it though? Lowest dose I can find is 1mg pills and even those are pretty rare in my country. Do you get 1mg pills, crush them and measure out on precision scales?

You can get 300mcg pills but they never seem to be the sublingual, dissolving type. The lowest I've found dissolving tablets is 1mg. I take a half or a quarter and dissolve it under my tongue. That works fine when it works. Sometimes it puts me to sleep and I sleep longer than my usual 5-6 hours while waking up with a hangover. Sometimes it just makes me sleepy for 15 minutes and then I'm wide awake. Melatonin is very hit or miss for me. I smoked a lot of pot though, and from what I hear that triggers a massive melatonin release, so maybe my homeostasis is a bit messed up.

Sleep is tough. There are so many confounding factors and issues which can affect it... it's hard to find a single thing that works or that works consistently without side effects.

the variation may be because the pill isn't uniformly distributed so one half pill doesn't necessarily mean half dose of melatonin, which is why I was wondering if he crushed them. Check out the other responses, there seem to be liquid alternatives which are easier to dose.

I've heard 0.3mg recommended as a dose and I had a bottle of small 0.1mg pills.

You take syrup drops. One drop is ~150 mcg.

This is the way I do it now. I buy melatonin in a liquid and it has a dropper with measures on it. I don't sweat about a couple of drops too high or low, it's fine, much better than trying to chop up tablets into doses!

It's tastier too.

> . If I use a larger dose, I sleep even less well than I would without a supplement.

I stopped taking Melatonin because I noticed, on multiple occasions, that after a week of use my sleeping period became extremely easy to disrupt and resulted in a bad sleep.

I was taking a brand sold in costco, each pill being 5mg.

If I ever decide to try Melatonin agin I will try splitting it into 1/20 parts (0.25mg) and try again

There's no guarantee in general that a pill will have its active ingredients distributed evenly throughout. Although they're not often carried in stores, there are versions of melatonin that come in 0.5mg doses.

> not like a sleeping pill where more will necessarily make you more drowsy

> I suggest to anyone who is taking 1mg or larger doses to experiment with a "microdose" of 0.2mg and see how it affects you.

So the problem I have with this reasoning is that I have tried this and the higher doses make me way more sleepy. I take a lower "correct" dose anyway (most of the time), but it has nothing to do with what works better.

The trouble is that you know how much you're taking. How do you rule out a placebo effect?

Human have a pretty strong bias towards thinking that more equals better.

Sleeping is probably one of the most physiologically influenced physiological processes we undergo, so it's pretty easy to believe that placebos would have a powerful influence on it.

If it's placebo, then don't tell me to test it (because as you say, that doesn't work). That said, the effects are so strong and so consistent I don't really care if it is placebo. As long as it works :)

Melatonin is not a hormone. It is a multi tasking antioxidant molecule. It is also 3 billion years old.