Melatonin

“And so what you have to do is you want to manage the jet lag. So what it looks like is sleeping in to make up a little bit, taking a larger dose of melatonin when you go to bed the following days to help reset the circadian rhythm.”

“And they've shown studies that like a three, three gram, I think it's three grams or three milligrams. Check that, Doug, if it's a milligram or gram of melatonin right before you go to bed to help reset your circadian rhythm. But I think it's, I want to say it's milligrams.”

“for you toward your goals. Any discussion about supplementation for sleep, I feel has to include a discussion about melatonin. I've talked about melatonin before on numerous podcasts, mine and others.”

“The other reason is that melatonin supplements almost always include levels of melatonin or amounts of melatonin that far, far exceed the normal biological levels or so-called endogenous levels of melatonin that we would normally produce.”

“It's the sirtuin genes of the body for longevity, right? It's part of my protocol. It also affects NLRP3 inflammasomes, but you also do it with low-dose naltrexone and low-dose melatonin. Wow. So in alzrophine. Taken at night before bed? Yeah. So if you have a problem sleeping with LDN, I take actually mine in the morning just to make sure it's not.”

“It's my favorite compounder. And I take it with very low dose one milligram melatonin to block NLRP3 inflammasomes. And the fourth is inflammatory prostaglandins. If you're eating, you know, healthy fish, which difficult these days, you can, you know, wild organic salmon.”

“You take LDN, melatonin, and a multi-mineral supplement, very important. I take Minorex from Zymogen, which has copper and zinc and magnesium. I take magnesium malate as well as magnesium glycinate, sometimes L-threonate if I have a problem sleeping at night.”

“We have homeopathics. There's one called travel anxiety. Pretty easy to know what that one's for. We use melatonin. We use CBD. We have herbal tinctures. So, and it depends on the animal. Sometimes you have to layer on a lot of different things.”

“It's going to impact when you go to bed and when you wake up. So I think that's the biggest, the biggest impact. And I think, again, when we go back to melatonin, you know, it's when you're disrupting that sleep onset offset, that's going to obviously have all the downstream negative effects that we've already spoken about.”

“moderate doses of alcohol up to one hour before bedtime reduced melatonin production by nearly 20%. That's the study on alcohol and melatonin in young adults. A 2018 study of 4,908”

“Oh, my test. Yeah. We'll come back to that in a second. Okay. And then, of course, you've got melatonin, right? The issue with all these is the same that you have with your podcast. These are doing the exact same thing.”

“It's really common. If there's like levels to this, you probably like level one, two, and three, level one being things like, actually, surprising enough, magnesium, chamomile, melatonin, of course, lots of randomized control trials. Level one being the best. The best of the best. The best, highest quality.”

“And then there's this one over here, melatonin, that a lot of people are aware of. Yeah. Strong. What level is melatonin? So melatonin probably has more evidence than the rest of these things combined because it's a medicine.”

“Nobody is going to be super concerned about risk factor profiles with eating two kiwis. But you start getting to the level of something like a melatonin, and now you have to have real conversations about risk versus benefits. We typically don't use melatonin at the dosage that's normal.”

“A lot of times we're trying to find like one milligrams, cut them in half, kind of things like that. The only real reason we use melatonin outside of some fringe cases is when we actually legitimately need to reset circadian rhythm, travel, jet lag, things like that.”

“things like that. And it is effective and it is useful there. It is safe in small doses. Where people mistake melatonin is I use it every night to go to sleep and or I wake up in the middle of the night, can't go back to sleep. I go grab a melatonin. Why is that bad? It doesn't work. It doesn't work.”

“They're doing all the right things. It's cold. It's dark. They're meditating. They're doing all this stuff. They're popping in even a moderate dose of melatonin. And the amount of melatonin the next day in their urine is 100x, the upper end of the reference range, which means they're spending the rest of their next day in a hyper-dose melatonin state.”

“This is not a normal waking physiology that you should be going through. Presumably, that's just melatonin from sort of cheap sources that haven't been tested. That's going to knock off a huge part of your problem, right? Only, this is why we'll always say you don't, no one needs supplements.”

“This should not be a part of your nightly routine most of the time. What exactly is going on in my brain when I take melatonin? Because a lot of people take it, and we know that it makes us feel tired, but understanding the mechanism, I think, will help us understand the application. So, it actually doesn't really make you feel tired. That's part of the issue.”

“And that's worked very well for me. I don't do well with melatonin. In fact, most of my clients don't do well with melatonin. And- And I find that it either creates like really vivid dreams, like very, very vivid, intense dreams.”

“It even can create a dependency. They have trouble sleeping when they're not on it. So I haven't become a big fan of melatonin, but ashwagandha, tryptophan, L-theanine, I've seen miracles with that on a regular basis. Cause it seems like it's non-tranquilitic.”

“episode that she did with us where she gets into some details of some other things that can be beneficial because some experts will recommend things like low-dose melatonin at night presumably to improve sleep perhaps perhaps other things as well, some don't. Some will recommend DHEA, others not.”

“the brain's master internal clock and suppresses daytime melatonin, which establishes a definitive biological countdown. for deep sleep at night. Deprived of this anchoring cue and bombarded by a 24-7 hustle”

“saying, yes, it's true that the pineal gland makes melatonin and that that's part of how we get to the 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., but it's also true that vitamin D has receptors in the brainstem. That means that we are at the edge of about a big change where some of these ideas that we talked about today that are very deep and very...”

“It's both the melatonin pipeline starts in the gut, manufacturing the calm down chemical is in the gut, and the cortisol alarm system is linked to the gut. The trickiest part of the microbiome-sleep connection is that it is a bidirectional loop.”

“might become a little bit specific to, uh, the symptoms that you're experiencing. So if you have sleep issues, then, uh, there's studies that have used a melatonin and that's, that's shown improvements of branch chain amino acids at high doses for sleep.”

“Pediatric? Yeah. So the people's use of melatonin in kids is increasing. So in pediatric populations, it's increasing exponentially. And in fact, if you go down the sort of the supermarket aisles here in America, often if you go into sort of the health sort of food section, there's this big purple section.”

“there's this big purple section. That's the melatonin. And a large proportion of that is they're dedicated to gummies for your children with melatonin. And there was a study that was published about three years ago that showed here in America, over the past 10 years, there has been a 503% increase in poisonous overdose admissions to hospitals of melatonin in the past 10 years.”

“to hospitals of melatonin in the past 10 years. 503% increase. So firstly, we've got to be a bit careful. The second reason is that melatonin is a bioactive hormone, and it's also involved in reproductive development.”

“which is to say male rats who were going through adolescence. And they were dosing them with high amounts of melatonin. And what they found is that that stunted the development of the testes, of the testicles, and it caused testicular atrophy.”

“Now, these were very high doses. But we've got to be a little bit careful. We think, we say, well, melatonin is a natural hormone. So anything natural is safe. Melatonin overall, in terms of its safety profile, is very safe. It's actually a very good antioxidant.”

“They've been taking it for years. We've got no idea what happens after years. That was my hesitation when the first time someone offered me melatonin is, from doing this podcast and speaking to smart people like yourself, I've come to learn this sort of principle that if you start making something for your body in terms of a hormone,”

“Your melatonin was off the charts. She wasn't even taking melatonin. But her melatonin was off the charts. So imagine that it's like taking an Adderall to go to bed and then taking a sleep medication to wake up. That feels exactly what life was like.”

“for cortisol, her sleep cycle. Started to normalize. As her melatonin started rising at night and falling in the morning, she was less exhausted in the morning. I noticed that almost right away. She was more on her game. You know, we have a huge project going on in Colorado and she was managing all the contractors and that took a nosedive for a little while.”

“It's going to set a timer for you to be able to fall asleep about 16 hours later. It's also going to suppress any melatonin, a hormone that makes you sleepy, that happens to be swimming around in your bloodstream at the time you wake up. It does a number of other things too, including interact with the adenosine system”

“any melatonin that happens to be circulating in your brain and body. Now, melatonin, a lot of people think of as a supplement, but melatonin is naturally released as the evening comes about, and into the nighttime hours, it's a hormone that makes you feel sleepy and allows you to fall asleep. So viewing bright lights,”

“than what we would make endogenously. So it's really supra-physiological. So that's of concern because melatonin is not just responsible for making us sleepy and fall asleep, it also does things like interacts with other hormone systems, testosterone and estrogen, even in the puberty system in kids.”

“but at least it's the last hour of the day. Now that part of that is sleep architecture and blue light, et cetera, et cetera. The pineal gland, melatonin, yada, yada. We all know the physiology of that. But part of that is just, just the way that you actually understand yourself at the end of your day and get ready to rest. If you're living with your partner,”

“Game over. Well, I mean, it's your pineal gland shuts off, right? No more melatonin for you. And so, which is problematic on its face, but it's also, you just, you spike your cortisol. I mean, it's bad stuff happens to you. So the phone should be in a different floor, in a closet, plugged in someplace from an hour before you go to bed until after an hour after you get up.”

“Maybe my neurology colleagues will disagree, but that seems to happen. But the question is, what is actually leading to the deterioration of melatonin synthesis? Because it decreases quite dramatically. And some people even think that might start puberty. Like if you have a pineal cyst, you can have precocious puberty like eight or nine years old.”

“This is your internal clock, anchored to the light-dark cycle, coordinated by melatonin at night and cortisol in the morning. It's not just one clock, it's a central clock in the brain with hierarchical peripheral clocks governing individual cells and organs.”

“Artificial light at night, especially but not only blue spectrum light from screens and LED bulbs, suppresses melatonin release. Melatonin produced by your pineal gland, melatonin supplements, and drugs called melatonin receptor agonists act primarily on the suprachiasmatic nucleus , the brain's circadian center,”

“internal clock with circadian appropriate sleep timing. In other words, melatonin is not a sedative. It doesn't knock you out by suppressing neuronal activity. It's a circadian signal. It prepares the brain and body for sleep.”

“Further complicating dosing, studies of melatonin supplements have reported bioavailabilities ranging from 1% to 74%, which is in part due to inter-individual dosing.”

“in the supplement. A strong point in favor of melatonin supplements is their safety profile compared to other classes of sleep aids. However, taking excessive melatonin can cause hangover effects, residual daytime sleepiness, or further disrupt circadian alignment instead of correcting it.”

“I mean, would supplementation come in there or would it be bright light exposure? The things that we've heard of from the chronobiologists, like melatonin, getting bright light exposure, trying to time-restricted eating if you're a shift worker, trying to not eat all throughout the day, like things like that.”

“Um, and cause what's happening, it's not only that daytime city. The other thing it's doing, and we'll talk about this when we talk about supplements, but melatonin. So melatonin naturally your, your natural melatonin will drop in the morning down to like almost from its peak to almost nothing.”

“Light suppresses melatonin naturally. That's what it does. And so the early, if your melatonin is still kind of high and it's dropping by getting that light, you accelerate its ability to drop. It's like coffee. Yeah, kind of.”

“but you know, obviously the most, the top of mind supplement people think about when they think about sleep, I think melatonin. Melatonin. So melatonin is a hormone. It's a very old molecule. It's in plants. It's in other stuff. It's not a sleep hormone.”

“A great example of how it's not a sleep signal. It has no sedating properties whatsoever. Melatonin doesn't. You give melatonin to a nocturnal animal. It wakes them up because it's a nighttime signal to the degree to which your body gets a nighttime signal.”

“Now, some people, when they take melatonin, they might be taking the wrong dose at the wrong time. So the way we've started using melatonin as a treatment for something was our natural rhythms are about 24 hours.”

“where you just can't reset your rhythm with light. What they found is, you give someone a third to a half a milligram of melatonin in the evening, and a blind person fixes the whole thing. Sends the nighttime signal at the time when it needs to see it, and the system responds beautifully to it”

“like right around dinner, or like, usually two to three hours before your typical bedtime is when you start producing melatonin. You give it a couple hours before that, it's in the zone where you're looking for it. Like give it in the middle of the day, your body's not looking for it. It's in the zone where your body's looking for it,”

“That also means you'll wake up a little earlier, because the whole thing got shifted. Same thing as if you take that low dose melatonin as soon as you wake up in the morning, that drop gets delayed a little bit. So it ends, so that ball lands a little further along than it expected to, so your day started a little bit later than it thought it was going to”

“Well, A, people think more is more, and sometimes more is less, especially with melatonin. If it's just a nighttime signal, more isn't more. Five, you can take closer to bedtime, that's a little more of a sleep promoting dose,”

“with it, you know, closer to bedtime, it can have that sleep promoting effect, not because the melatonin was sedating, was it sort of got, was that strong enough signal to kick you into gear a little bit. Now, a lot of times people will feel groggy in the morning with it. That's because you just couldn't metabolize it fast enough,”

“So you were, you were, oh, you overfilled your bucket. And so by the morning, you still have melatonin floating around, backfiring. So now you're telling your body it's nighttime when it's daytime, because you couldn't get rid of the nighttime signal fast enough.”

“And, and it had built up over time. So often when I say, if you're taking melatonin at night and it's helping you, but you're feeling groggy during the day, cut your dose in half. And then there's the other problem. There was like a few studies have been published where, I mean, almost all these melatonin supplements that are out on the market have huge variations.”

“or reduces your ability to naturally produce it at night. What about, and that's also what the conclusion I came to, um, what about the ability to like your melatonin receptors? Like, um, is there remodeling? I don't know. I, I haven't seen anything that's concerning in any way. I, I just, I just haven't.”

“sleep on the plane. when I can, I got my earplugs, got my eye mask, got my melatonin, got like, you know, whatever. Um, I will do what, and, and I'll do whatever I can to catch a little bit of sleep on the plane. I'll have a crappy fragmented night of sleep on the plane land in the morning localtime”

“So yes, they are shifted and it changes with age. Um, so yes, you can use light behavior and melatonin to physically shift that you can do that, but they are more naturally inclined to staying up late. I mean, it's high school. It should not start before 9 AM.”

“know, melatonin. Yeah. You can help with that. You can give people melatonin to, you can give melatonin low, that low dose half milligram melatonin. As a phase shifting dose and light as a phase shifting dose of bright light, you can, you can do that.”

“You can, I mean, you can essentially jet lag yourself on purpose without traveling by doing that, by giving light and melatonin at the time you want. I mean, that's good to know, right? I mean. Yeah. Some people are more resilient to it than others. Some people are more sensitive to it than others. But you can do it.”

“You should see the nutty shit that people on like Reddit and whatnot dump on their heads. Melatonin right yeah. I think sulforaphane was one too at one point broccoli sprouts on the head didn't end up working though um i'm sure it has like some like indirect benefit for like systemic health but like at the end of the day the unfortunate reality”

“I probably should have mentioned this earlier when we were talking about the late-night snacking, but the fact that melatonin shuts down insulin production in the pancreatic beta cells is probably Yeah, hyperglycemia disrupts melatonin too. So even back to the glucose mechanism, another reason to not go to bed hyperglycemic is it disrupts the melatonin rhythm at the same time.”