Melatonin is a natural hormone released from the pineal gland inside the brain to help control your biological clock. Supplementation of melatonin as a sleep-aid has been popping up over the last few years as the miracle answer to help lure away a persons insomnia troubles. But is this supplement worth taking if the person becomes dependent on it falling asleep?
Let’s take a normal situation that has happened to all of us: You have to be up at 6am to get ready for a long day of work. It’s 1am, and you have insomnia and are wide-awake. What do you do? Some may turn on the TV and watch Netflix till they fall asleep. Some may do small binge eating till they get sleepy. Insomnia is a common occurrence with the person and they use expensive PM aspirin to try and get drowsy. Then there is melatonin—A cheap and effective natural supplementation that has an effect to make the user drowsy and have longer NREM sleep cycles in the deeper stages.
“But you become dependent on it and can never sleep without it.” Let’s look at melatonin as a magic pill. Aging, cancer, sickness, stress, catabolic muscle deterioration, and weight gain all want to attack your body when little sleep is received. The one defense mechanism our body does to try and prevent these with recovery is resting. If insomnia is something that happens every single night to an early riser that causes struggle during the day, shouldn’t it be worth the risk of dependency to help ward conditions that occur from sleepless nights?
I use a 5mg pill of melatonin every night, and I can fall asleep perfectly fine without it. There are certain people who cannot sleep well without it, and individuals who say melatonin doesn’t help. There are different dosages that can be purchased over-the-counter varying in 1mg, 3mg, 5mg and 10mg. Depending on your need, I would suggest 3mg to new users to see how your body responds if you need to increase your intake for people who want to experiment if melatonin is right for you.
