Natural Health for Life: Is Melatonin a Safe Supplement?

The answer to whether or not melatonin is a safe supplement is … yes, and no. Before deciding to take a supplement, you should understand how it will work in your body and if you NEED to take it.

While many supplements are good for almost everyone and will at least not hurt you even if you don’t need it, some should be considered more carefully. Melatonin is one of these.

Simply put, a person’s body SHOULD produce melatonin anyway. It is necessary to regulate sleep cycles. Some people don’t produce enough melatonin naturally, and these people usually suffer sleep interruptions, either in the form of not being able to fall asleep or, more often, falling asleep only to wake up within a couple of hours and then finding themselves unable to get back to sleep after their middle-of-the-night waking.

These are the people that can benefit from taking melatonin. Their body is already impaired with melatonin production, and they are already suffering from lack of sleep. Replacing the melatonin their bodies should produce naturally will help correct this.

However, there are many reasons that people have trouble sleeping. More often than not, the cause is actually stress. Other factors can interfere with sleep as well. These people may already be producing enough melatonin, but are not sleeping because of some other reason.

The problem comes when someone goes out and buys melatonin and starts taking it without knowing whether they need it or not. (And every customer who has come to my store to buy melatonin hasn’t known whether or not they needed it.) It can be safe enough to try it if you can be unbiased enough to determine whether or not it actually helps. You should keep a sleep log for at least a few days before beginning melatonin, and continue it after beginning to take it. If you don’t see an improvement within a very short time, you shouldn’t continue to take melatonin.

The reason is that, as I said, the body naturally produces melatonin. If you begin to supplement that with extra melatonin, your body gets the signal that melatonin isn’t needed. Continuing to take the melatonin supplement over time, if it is not needed, can “shut off” your body’s natural mechanisms and you will then become melatonin deficient where you weren’t before. In this way, the supplement can be “unsafe.”

And if you were losing sleep for some reason other than low levels of melatonin, you still won’t be able to sleep until that issue is addressed, but at the same time you may now need to take melatonin supplements when you didn't need them before.

It is a much better approach to try to evaluate what is the most likely cause of your lack of sleep. As stated before, stress is the most likely culprit. In the case of persons under stress whose thoughts tend to race when they lie down to sleep, the herb skullcap is often helpful. If the cause is physical pain or tension, such as from an injury, valerian root would be the first choice to try. There are a number of other herbs as well that are more specific to other kinds of insomnia. Melatonin is usually indicated first in cases where there is not a more obvious cause and/or when the person has experienced a major disruption in sleep cycles, such as a person on shift work or one who has moved across multiple time zones.

Even when melatonin is indicated, it should be used “as needed” and the person should attempt to wean off of it if the need is temporary and can resolve itself. For those persons who truly do not produce enough melatonin, there may be a need to continue to supplement throughout life.

0 Comments:

Contact