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Naltrexone
I will start with naltrexone, which can help people who have difficulty regulating their drinking have a more natural and sustainable relationship with alcohol should they choose to not cut it out of their lives entirely.
A fun hack for melatonin is that smaller doses work better than larger doses.
Yes! Scientific trials have shown that for most people, 0.3mg of melatonin gives better quality of sleep than 3mg.
I’ve seen pills as high as 10mg on the shelf and have to wonder wtf they’re for. If you take too much your body becomes less sensitive to it and you become dependent on supplementation. 10mg is definitely too much.
I think the big difference between people benefiting at small doses (~0.3mg) and large doses (2+mg) is that the 0.3mg group use it for sleep quality through the night, whereas the 3+mg people just need the sudden shock to get to sleep in the first place.
The drawback with big doses is that your brain becomes less sensitive so your naturally-produced melatonin might not be enough to keep you asleep for the whole night after the pill wears off. It has a very short half-life in the body (under 1 hour), so there’s no way for a single dose before sleeping to last 8 hours. We naturally produce only 0.06-0.08mg per night, so it’s easy to see how supplementing melatonin could desensitize someone and cause them to wake up after just 4-6 hours of sleep.
I have ADHD and am in the large-dose category and use 2-3mg of melatonin to help me fall asleep. Without it, I can’t sleep reliably because my brain often won’t shut up. Sleep reliably is so much more important to me than sleep quality.
Using it only 5 nights a week, I’m not significantly dependent. I can still sleep without melatonin, just less reliably. I’ve tried 0.3mg, but it felt the same as taking nothing.
For me, 10mg would be excessive and probably harmful in a desensitizing way. The most I’ve taken is 6mg, but it only helped in 2 out of 6 times. The other 4 times my brain just wouldn’t stop. If doubling my usual dose didn’t help, I don’t think doubling it again would be any different.
There are however studies with higher doses, e.g. this one about kids with ADHD that says:
two-third of the patients responded to relatively medium doses (2.5–6 mg/d), whereas doses above 6 mg added further benefit only in a small percentage of children.
so I guess it’s different for everyone.
Yep, this seems to the magic number; I shudder when I hear people taking like 5-10mg. How can that be safe unless most of it is destroyed via digestion
Since it’s a natural hormone the body already has ways to get rid of it. It has a half-life of less than an hour. The lethal dose is so high we haven’t been able to intentionally kill animals with it: “Melatonin is not fatal even at a dose of 800 mg/kg in animal studies”.
The big risk of ongoing high doses is becoming so dependent on it that you wake up as soon as it wears off (e.g. after only 4 hours of sleep). At this level you basically can’t sleep without it and have to slowly wean yourself off to get back to normality.
