As you age, your ability to get high-quality, restorative rest starts to decline. Sleep experts are starting to discover a strong link between poor sleep and age-related brain diseases like Alzheimer’s. That’s why it’s more important than ever to get the best sleep you can in the healthiest possible way. Many people choose to supplement with melatonin in order to accomplish this. But is it as healthy as most people claim? Or are there specific health risks with melatonin that we’re all ignoring? If you’re taking melatonin right now (or if you’re considering it), we strongly advise you to keep reading so you can learn all about the potential health risks of melatonin.
Risks Associated With Taking Melatonin
It’s almost human nature to believe that “more is better”. But recent research into melatonin shows that this may not be the case. Medical experts recommend keeping your nightly dose somewhere between 0.2 Mg and 5 mg. According to the data, anything less may not be very effective – and anything more than that can be severely counterproductive.
Taking too much melatonin – especially if it’s done on a nightly basis – may reduce or eliminate your brain’s ability to make its own melatonin. Your brain can also develop a tolerance to melatonin that makes the same dose ineffective over time. In either scenario, you can quickly slip into a physical dependence on melatonin supplements. Taking more than 5 mg of melatonin each night can cause several negative side effects, such as:
- Dizziness
- Headaches
- Nausea
- Rebound insomnia
- Moodiness or depression
- Lower testosterone (in men)
- Hormone imbalances (in women)
It’s great that scientists and sleep experts are discovering so much about how melatonin can help improve our sleep. But it’s time to get the word out about how megadoses of melatonin can hurt – or help – you overcome your struggles with sleeplessness. If you haven’t tried using melatonin to help you sleep better at night, we encourage you to give it a try. But you also need to understand how to take melatonin the right way. This becomes increasingly important as you get older.
The Benefits of Taking Melatonin for Sleep
We don’t want to talk about the risks of taking melatonin (or, rather, too much melatonin) without giving you a fair and balanced view of the positives of melatonin. For starters, let’s look at the types of sleep disturbances that melatonin is best designed to solve. Melatonin is healthier and more effective compared to other sleep supplements if you are suffering from:
- Jet lag
- Shift work
- Occasional sleeplessness
- Segmented sleep (waking up in the middle of the night)
We also want to take a second to talk about the risks of not taking melatonin for sleep problems. The first and most important risk has to do with what people usually take instead of a natural, safe sleep supplement like melatonin. The vast majority of people reach for the nuclear option first: a prescription sleeping pill. But these pills can do a lot more harm than good in the long run.
Prescription sleeping pills are either “hypnotics” or benzodiazepines (“benzos” for short). Either of these pills will make you feel sleepy and make you lose consciousness. But that doesn’t mean you’re truly asleep, or that you’re getting a better quality of sleep. Think about it like this: getting hit upside the head with a baseball bat will also make you lose consciousness. But is that loss of consciousness a healthy, restorative sleep? Absolutely not! Most prescription sleeping pills are the same way, especially if you use them on a nightly basis over a long period of months or even years. And over the counter sleeping pills aren’t much better.
As you can see, there’s a lot of misinformation about melatonin out there – both on the positive and the negative sides of the issue. But if you take melatonin the right way, you can get tons of health and wellness benefits without any of the negative side effects. Keep your nightly melatonin dose at 5 mg or less, try to take it as needed if your sleep problems aren’t as severe, and don’t be afraid to combine it with other natural sleep aids for the best possible rest!
