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Comment by omalleyt | Hacker News Reader

I had this problem all my life. Now I take 500 micrograms of melatonin every night an hour before bed. I'm out like a light.

It might not be for everyone, but it's changed the way I feel about sleeping. And it's non-habituating

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It's really easy to develop a tolerance and a reliance on it though. That's the downside to a supplement like melatonin.

My understanding from speaking with sleep specialists is that you'd need to take a large amount every day for weeks or months to develop a tolerance. They thus recommend cycling off melatonin bi-weekly or monthly for a little while.

(Sorry, no source other than time spent visiting the Cornell Sleep Institute.)

Yeah. Melatonin works unreasonably well for me too, and it's as "natural" and side-effect-free as a drug can be. Definitely worth trying.

How has it affected your quality of sleep? Do the same hours as before make you feel equally rested?

Personally when I take melatonin, I fall asleep quickly but I get weird dreams and I feel my sleep quality isn't the same. I took it for a little while (a couple of months) and now only take it when I'm really struggling to fall asleep.

I've tried it a couple times. I have to allow extra time to sleep and have someone there to wake me up since I sleep even heavier than normal - more chance to miss the alarm, unfortunately. I wake up groggy, but once that passes I'm very, very well-rested. Also, I get weird dreams as well.

I decided long ago I wouldn't try it again without a doctor's advice, which is probably a good thing since now I live in Norway and it is only available with prescription. Some folks do wind up needing it if they take it every night, though. I worked in a pharmacy in the states and heard the pharmacists' advice on this very thing many times.

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