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