Melatonin impairs morning cognition in healthy young adults

ajkjk•13 minutes ago

My understanding is that you ought to take melatonin in small doses (0.3 or so) an hour or two before sleep in order to get tired, whereupon you sleep (normally, ish, unless you take too much and then you get crazy dreams or sleep paralysis). If I take it and go right to bed I always wake up still in the 'window' of its effect.

WarOnPrivacy•14 minutes ago

Not sleeping impairs my morning cognition - a lot. Melatonin is part of the rotating stacks I use to mitigate insomnia.

My mornings have always been impaired, going back to pre-school. Meds don't make my mornings any worse than my baseline.

johntash•11 minutes ago

What else is part of your rotating stacks? Asking as someone who melatonin doesn't seem to help much

mutagen•8 minutes ago

Not OP but I seem to get a benefit from GABA. Valerian root is effective at inducing sleep but leaves me groggy and I've had paradoxical anxiety reactions to it and there's some question around its longer term use. L-theanine is often mentioned but I'm not sure I benefit. Magnesium glycinate is another that comes up often.

mutagen•about 1 hour ago

This thesis appears to be related or the underlying research:

https://d.lib.msu.edu/etd/51312

Indicates 2mg and 5mg were given along with the placebo. While these are common dosages available in the US, these are higher dosages than recommended by at least some sleep experts. The thesis doesn't seem to differentiate between the dosages when evaluating cognitive processes.

Now I want to evaluate my sleep stack against morning cognition.

wincy•27 minutes ago

I take 300mcg when I’m having a hard time getting to sleep or if I’ve had a lot of caffeine. Mostly because Scott Alexander told me to.

mutagen•10 minutes ago

Yeah I'm in the 300 mcg camp, I take a time release formulation, try to take it early but often it isn't far off bedtime.

turtleyacht•23 minutes ago

Coffee isn't mentioned. Morning cognition could be impacted by whether subjects take caffeine before starting tasks.

DANmode•27 minutes ago

5 is almost universally too much.

4 is almost universally too much..

3 is the most I’ve ever recommended.

More than enough.

senderista•11 minutes ago

Even 200 mcg is enough to give me brain fog. I stick with 100 mcg unless I'm really having a hard time falling asleep.

gwern•about 1 hour ago

Hard to discuss this with only a short abstract. They don't even give a dose or formulation of the melatonin, and details like "We found no significant differences between the melatonin and sleep groups on any of our sleep measures." raise more questions than they answer.

ororroro•15 minutes ago

The study is on "healthy young adults". How much improvement would you expect on someone who is already "healthy"? It's not like they are going to ascend and become superhuman.

colordrops•27 minutes ago

Anecdote - I've used it dozens of times and I'm always foggy in the AM, so I avoid it if I have to be sharp the next morning. Perhaps it's a coincidence and this study is flawed, but I can believe it pretty easily.

dripdry45•12 minutes ago

same here. I use 5HTP instead, apparently the same chemical pathway just goes in at a different point. no fog in the morning at all. Nice and sharp, feel good.

redrove•26 minutes ago

Could it just be dosage? Commonly found dosage is 10-20x what you'd actually secrete and IIRC absorption is actually quite good.

dripdry45•8 minutes ago

My understanding is that melatonin can overload certain receptors and cause an issue with fogginess since it works directly on the brain. 5HTP is more broad and is “gated“ on the same metabolic pathway, so cannot overload the system the way melatonin does.

Melatonin impairs morning cognition in healthy young adults

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion (16 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews