What is melatonin and should you take it to fall asleep Sleeping with Science

melatonin is a hormone often called the

hormone of darkness simply because

melatonin tells your brain and your body

that it’s nighttime and that it’s time

to sleep melatonin is naturally produced

by your brain and it’s released by a

very small gland deep within your brain

called the pineal gland however you can

also buy melatonin in certain countries

and some people will try to use it as a

sleep aid but melatonin isn’t quite as

effective as you may think

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for example if you pull together all of

the recent scientific studies on sleep

and melatonin which is a technique that

we call a meta-analysis we’ve discovered

that melatonin only increases the speed

with which you fall asleep by 3.9

minutes and only increases the quality

of your sleep what we call your sleep

efficiency by just 2.2 percent

and this is very understandable since

the role of melatonin is primarily in

regulating the timing of your sleep

rather than being involved in the

generation of sleep itself that’s down

to a very different set of brain

mechanisms it’s also important to

understand that melatonin is not well

regulated as a supplement in several

countries as a result the purity and the

strength of melatonin that you buy is

often unreliable so if you’re looking to

optimize your sleep it’s best to focus

on the basics the things that we know

make a real difference things such as

regularity keeping your bedroom cool at

night getting darkness in the evening

and for example trying to dim down half

of the lights in your house in the last

hour before bed and then reverse

engineering this by getting plenty of

natural daylight in the morning hours

and finally try to get some form of

physical activity each day these things

are much more likely to help your sleep

rather than looking to melatonin for

some kind of sleep assistance