Okay but how are people using it? It can so easily be misused: it's a signalling hormone that resets the phase alignment of the circadian rhythm. Yet so many people just eat it randomly like a sleeping pill. That's bound to be damaging in the long term. It shouldn't be necessary to take it every single night. If you're having trouble sleeping every single night, you've got other issues. Maybe you're stressed out by the world you live in. Maybe it means you're taxing your central nervous system, throttling it constantly. You need to go around the glutamate–glutamine cycle more often than you can sustain. There are metabolic costs to doing this. Maybe you've been eating food from soil devoid of minerals like magnesium, a critical cofactor in the glutamate-glutamine cycle. In fact people struggling with chronic stress have been shown to be statistically more likely to be insufficient or deficient in magnesium.

But you take melatonin because nobody wants to tell you all this. And you take it at random times thereby fucking up your circadian rhythm even worse.

Don't get me started on vitamin D and how that's _also_ a circadian phase signaller, but how I never see those big flashy press releases about whether or not vitamin D is good or bad ever go into this.

Why do I have so little faith that they controlled for timing in the study?

Very relevant: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/10/melatonin-much-more-th...

Some more interesting comments: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/E4cKD9iTWHaE7f3AJ/melatonin-...

TL;DR:

- People take the wrong doses because pharmacies sell pills with huge doses, in reality 0.3 is optimal (can confirm from personal experimentation).

- People treat it like a sleeping pill when in reality it shifts the sleep cycle and it does so _depending on when you take it_. The article has various suggestions depending on your particular sleep issue.

If you use it, I suggest experimenting with the timing and dose, but especially timing - and I am talking multiple hours, up to 7, before going to sleep. And then do actually go to sleep immediately when you feel sleepy or it'll make you wake up too early and you'll be tired.