As with a lot of medicine the dosage matters a lot. I will take .5 mg of melatonin when going to bed earlier than usual and the effect is fairly subtle. But it's commonly sold in 10mg doses which seems very high.
My understanding is that melatonin has an inverse correlation between dosage and effect. 10mg won't make you as sleepy as 1mg.
I take 1mg of melatonin every night, and it does immediately make me sleepy. I used to buy 10mg at the drugstore and it just makes me feel like shit for the next day.
The optimal dose is 0.3mg, so I would cut the 1mg tablet in half to get close. You’re still doing better than most people who are essentially taking a horse-sized dose at 10mg.
The 10mg makes you feel bad because it’s still in your system the next day. At the recommended (lower) doses, your body fully clears it out by morning, so you feel alert and also have much lower risk of long term effects.
That sounds quite magical. Wouldn't it be more likely that the uptake characteristics were very different for the two variants? Not sure if possible but maybe the 10mg variant were still being digested the day after so it would make you sleepy then instead of during the night?
I have to go out of my way to find doses under 1mg, almost everything they sell in US retail stores is 5mg or 10mg. Inevitably I end up with something marketed for babies.
