Melatonin…such a huge topic….where to start?

First of all, melatonin is a powerful anti-cancer hormone produced by our pineal gland, a little gland in our brain. Melatonin is produced at night while we are sleeping. There are conditions that either increase or decrease melatonin production, such as length of sleep and the amount of light coming into the room but I’ll have to save those details for another post. If you want to get a head start, the take home message from that future post will be the following: sleep for at least 8 hours per night and sleep in a pitch-black room — one where you cannot see your hand immediately in front of your face. A sleep mask is good, but doesn’t quite cut it — cover all light sources. Also, meditating for 10 minutes (sitting in a chair upright) before bedtime increases melatonin production and will help you fall asleep.

Many people who have trouble sleeping take supplemental melatonin — anywhere from 1 to 3 mg per night. This is okay if done on an occasional basis, but I don’t recommend it everyday. Melatonin supplementation has been shown to lead to atrophy (shrinkage) of the pineal gland, the gland that produces it. As the pineal gland has less work to do (because melatonin is being obtained from the outside) the gland gets smaller. And then when you try not taking melatonin, you body is not capable of making nearly as much. Often insomnia is a result of an over-stressed system, or a weakened system. An ideal goal for insomniacs, is to figure out the root of the problem and deal with it from there. Of course with my obvious bias, I would recommend seeing a naturopath, but there are lots of different practitioners and tons of information (books, videos etc.) on how to sleep better. One book that comes to mind is Restful Sleep by Deepak Chopra. Lots of great information and a very good place to start; I often make recommendations to patients that come directly from this book.

The pharmaceutical companies have come up with a drug called Rozerem which is a “melatonin receptor agonist”. This means that it stimulates the same places in your brain that melatonin does. Synthetic hormones are never a good thing. Rozerem has been shown, in high does, to cause liver cancer and fetal deformities in lab animals. Sounds awfully suspect to me, especially when you consider that in very high doses, melatonin protects against cancer and has even been used to treat cancer. So this drug is doing something very different than melatonin somewhere along the line.

Considering how disruptive insomnia can be to a person’s quality of life and also considering that insomnia usually gets worse with age and almost always gets worse with menopause, I would highly suggest that all insomniacs take measures now (whether it’s a book or a practitioner) towards strengthening/relaxing their system in order to sleep better.

TC