Melatonin had affects on me like waking up way earlier, so I usually took it when I had somewhere to be early
i took 1mg for a few years. i got diagnosed with obstructive sleep apnea and once i started getting treated for that–sleeping through the night like a baby–the melatonin was just something i kept doing as my night time ritual.
eventually, i ran out and couldn’t easily find a replacement for 1 mg pils. the minimum i could find was like 5mg and it was all gummies. 5mg? like who am i, pablo escobar? so i just stopped taking it.
i kinda miss at physician check ins when i would list medications and tell the nurse i took melatonin and they’d ask how much, id say “1mg” and i could just about perceive them rolling their eyes like “why am i even writing this down, giant gorilla taking fucking half a baby aspirin” lol.
“why am i even writing this down, giant gorilla taking fucking half a baby aspirin”
Actually chuckled aloud at this
A friend of mine who used to really struggle with insomnia said his sleep doc recommended similar, and that the dosages are out of control since it’s an unregulated “supplement”, I think he ended up taking the 3mg pills (smallest you can get here easily) and cutting them into 1/4s and taking one quarter each night, along with a host of other changes to routine and sleep hygiene and treatment of other health issues which all contributed to him being pretty much fine now. But he still needs like 9 hours of sleep a night at least to feel rested
i used to suffer from primary insomnia in my early 20s and self medicated in a lot of not-recommended ways, so i wouldn’t judge anyone for the things they try. lack of sleep is bad for the brain thonks.
it does feel like they push hog wild amounts of melatonin on people these days. like they figured out it wouldn’t immediately kill people, so they try to get people to max dose.
There’s no way the study design can prove a causal relationship, which to their credit, the authors freely admit. It seems they controlled for other CV risk factors (e.g. blood pressure) which would be expected. There’s an interesting disclosure that their study cohorts are global, but their method of identifying patients for the melatonin cohort relied on prescription records… but in the US melatonin is OTC so USians would only be included in the non-melatonin group even if they were using it regularly. I can’t be fucked to read into more detail, so my hot take is that people with insomnia severe enough to warrant treatment are de facto at higher risk of adverse health events and all-cause mortality just by virtue of how debilitating insomnia is, period. Maybe future studies will shed more light.
My anecdata of about six months trial of melatonin just made restful sleep more difficult. I was tired for the first hour or two, then the wakefulness returned. Sometimes I would dose another round of melatonin but it just made me so sleepy the next morning I was prone to making boneheaded mistakes at work because I just couldn’t shake it off. That alone was enough to leave the bottle of melatonin unfinished, let alone dying of heart failure jfc I just wanna snooze
Benadryl is my go-to for knocking myself out. I do feel drowsy the next day but when I absolutely need sleep, I’d rather that than another 5 hour (or less) night.
Benadryl makes me irritable and I’m not sure why otherwise I’d be taking that honestly. It’s cheap, like under two bucks for a hundred tabs, and it worked, but I was really really crabby the day after, dependably.
fully anecdote but yup same, i had to stop using it as a long term insomniac.
Correlation is not causation, and the article itself points this out as a limitation in this study. More research is needed.
uh oh
I wanna know if Benadryl causes dementia when you use it for sleep.
As you seem to know, it is an anticholinergic drug and they have been linked to faster dementia onset. The original study lumped them all together. This study suggests anticholinergic antidepressants and bladder antimuscarinics might be the ones to blame and antihistamines not so much. I am not a doctor but I’ve taken 25mg of benadryl or a melatonin at bedtime for a long time so I’m watching these. I switched to taking melatonin exclusively because of the dementia thing.
