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Comment by yosito | Hacker News Reader

Melatonin is not like a sleeping pill where more will necessarily make you more drowsy. It is a hormone that signals to your body that it is time to sleep. I can't find it right now, but there was a study of different doses in a large number of people that determined that just 0.2mg was more effective than larger doses for most people. And I've found that's true for me too. When I use melatonin, I use 0.2mg, and I fall asleep within half an hour, sleep a full night, and wake up feeling refreshed. If I use a larger dose, I sleep even less well than I would without a supplement.

I suggest to anyone who is taking 1mg or larger doses to experiment with a "microdose" of 0.2mg and see how it affects you.

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The best melatonin pills would be both chewable and small dosage, but unfortunately they are hard to find. I suspect manufacturers have a hard time selling smaller doses because people think they’re getting a superior product with larger doses.

Personally I settled for a 500mcg chewable dose that I split in half with a pill splitter.

Sublingual tablets have always worked best for me.

For higher dose people, I would investigate a smaller dose that dissolves in your mouth/under your tongue.

Try melatonin drops. The ones I use are 1.5mg for 10 drops, which means I only take 2-3 drops.

They also last a reaaaly long time for me, because I take such a low dosage and I don't use them everyday.

It's referenced in the article - https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/86/10/4727/2849013

In general - I'm surprised people take melatonin so casually without realizing that it's a hormone - not a mineral or amino acid like other sleep aids - https://impossible.co/blogs/health/melatonin-side-effects

It’s not a hormone. It’s an antioxidant.

It's both.

Out of the 3 billion years it is mostly a multitasking antioxidant. Sleep is only a small portion of what the molecule does.

I tried not to downvote your comments but "this molecule has existed for 3,000,000,000 years" is completely unrelated to whether it is a hormone — it is a hormone that is emitted by every normal human's pineal gland in the brain every night.

Whatever else it might be... you should stop.

This type of comment isn't helpful.

A hormone describes the type of compound something is. An antioxidant describes its behavior. They're not mutually exclusive.

I use 0.25mg and agree completely. The most annoying part is I can't find any pills less than 1mg so have to do a shitty job of separating them into 4 quarters.

can be sure whether the content is equally distributed across all quarters ?

Nootropics Depot sells melatonin in 0.3mg pills.

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