= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
bramflakes comments on Open Thread, October 7 - October 12, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (312)
I spent about £19 on half a year's worth of 1mg Melatonin pills. I swallowed one last night at about 2300, then went to bed at midnight.
Thoughts:
I didn't notice any extra sleepiness during that hour interval between taking it and going to sleep. This may mean that melatonin as a solution to hyperbolic discounting may not work for me. Alternatively I just went to sleep too early and had I stayed awake, the melatonin would have kicked in and made me want to go to sleep anyway.
I woke up over an hour before my alarm, feeling /much/ more refreshed than usual, and with almost no desire to sleep in. If this was the work of melatonin then it will be very useful to me in stopping my habit of turning off my alarm and then going back to sleep again.;
Obviously, this was only one night, so things like placebo and random variation in effects are there. I'll continue with this experiment and take notes. I can't be bothered to do a blinding experiment like gwern did with his nootropics experiments, but given that the effects of melatonin are well-researched and that most people react the same way to it, I'm fairly confident the effects I'm getting are real. Even if it is a placebo, I'd still be satisfied with it given how much money I paid.
1mg is hitting yourself over the head with a sledgehammer. Try 200mcg or 300mcg first!
Considering the most common dose I found on sale was about 3mg and they even went up to 10mg, I assumed 1mg was the low end.
Nope. That's moderate Civilizational Incompetence; science knows well that 1mg is often way too much for a first dose, but shops have presumably found that the average customer thinks "More melatonin is better" and that informed customers are too scarce to market to. You can get correctly dosed melatonin on the Internet, as with any other niche market.
In the Netherlands you can get them as 0.1mg tablets in drug stores, which makes for easy dosing.
Interestingely enough, the package used to recommend a dose of 1 tablet, but has recently been updated and now recommends taking 10 tablets at a time!
Also, I think that at some point there was a patent or other legal issue - at some point (which might or might not still be an issue) a company managed to restrict the use of low-dosage melatonin (I'm afraid I don't recall the details)
bramflakes is in the UK; you can't buy melatonin over the counter here, and I've done a small amount of searching and haven't found anywhere online that ships to the UK and sells <1mg.
200ug ships to UK, I think.
Thanks so much! I just ordered 600 tablets.
Are you in the UK? If so, that's confirmation that they really (try to) ship there. Or are you just happy to find a smaller dose than before? (which is why I saved the link)
I'm in the UK, yes. (It's listed in their shipping chart, and the order went through with no problems, so I have no more than baseline expectation of it not arriving.)
But you are of course absolutely correct about the Dose Response Curve.
Maybe you should invest in a pill splitter.
If your melatonin comes in plastic capsules, like mine, you can twist them apart, discard some amount of the contents (I tend to roughly-fill the smaller of the two caps and throw the rest) and optionally put them back together, without too much hassle.
I bite my pills into thirds.
I do this too, though in smaller bites. fitfths? fourths? I'm not sure, actually, but it seems to work.
I'm trying hard to imagine how that works.
Take pill.
Bit a bit off.
Leave the rest for later.
it's not exact, of course, but it's not too tricky to get them in between 2/5 and 3/5.
I was taking melatonin for a while, but I kept having these weird/disturbing dreams whenever I took it, so I stopped. Are melatonin induced nightmares common?
More vivid dreams is common, and for some people the dreams are nightmares. (Not for me, though.)
I did have more vivid and "weirder" dreams, especially in the morning (perhaps memory bias), and a handful of them were quite disturbing, far from my norm. But, this lessened after a couple of weeks of off and on use.
I've had melatonin quite a while and still have far weirder dreams than before starting. Last night, I dreamt of having a generalized epileptic seizure while conscious. Luckily I can shrug nightmares off easily these days.
This was also my experience.
I've been taking melatonin for a while. I haven't noticed any obvious improvement, but when I temporarily ran out of it and forgot to buy more for a few days, it felt like I slept worse. Might've been just a placebo effect, but then the pills are cheap and taking them feels like a nice evening ritual to do before going to bed, so I don't mind continuing it.
I've been picking up bottles of 120 3mg pills off eBay for about £7 including P&P. FYI, in six month's time when you can't do without it.
How can I mitigate dependence? I do it by using at most a week at a time.
It's not dependency in the same way that caffeine, alcohol, adderall, etc. cause dependency. Your baseline right now is "normal sleep" and when you take melatonin, you get "better sleep." Eventually, melatonin becomes "normal sleep" as you get used to it, and when you stop, you experience "bad sleep." However, you were having bad sleep beforehand, you just weren't aware as you didn't have anything to compare it to. Now that you've experienced better sleep, going back to bad sleep isn't really an option.
It's not that you become dependent. It's that you are dependent and aren't aware of it.
A clearer phrasing of the question: Melatonin is important in my existing sleep processes. Does taking exogenous melatonin reduce my body's own production of the stuff to compensate, and if so how severe is this effect?
It doesn't appear to do that.:
Good question! This is definitely an important thing to consider.
One week is a trivial amount of time. I've been taking it for years and have had to slowly, steadily increase the dosage.
Do you have any evidence that the cause is not ordinary aging?
Interesting! If you don't mind sharing, how much were you taking initially, and how much are you taking now?
300mcg initially. Currently at 200mcg to trigger sleep onset 6 hours before, 1.2mg timed-release, and a supplementary 300mcg timed-release or 200mcg if I wake up in the middle of the night.
Why not? Sure, we're talking psychological dependency, not metabolical dependency, but still
s/melantonin/cocaine/
s/sleep/energy/
and your argument still works exactly the same way.
Cocaine and melatonin aren't really comparable. There are a lot of reasons why you wouldn't want to take cocaine, including price, legality, negative side effects, undesirable neurological changes, etc. Cocaine use also develops a tolerance and has withdrawal symptoms. On the other hand, melatonin is very cheap, usually legal, rarely has side effects, doesn't develop a tolerance, and doesn't have any withdrawal symptoms.
Pretending you can assign easy numbers to "sleep quality" and "energy level," my argument goes something like: Before melatonin, sleep quality was at 4. This is perceived as normal. After melatonin, sleep quality is perceived at 6. This is initially a +2 bonus, but eventually is perceived as normal. However, sleep quality doesn't ever go back to 4 -- it stays at the new 6. When melatonin is discontinued, sleep quality goes back to 4. It doesn't drop down to 2 for a while before returning to 4.
Cocaine doesn't work like that. When you take cocaine, you get an initial boost of energy, and then a crash. If you sustain an energy level with cocaine, you'll develop a tolerance, requiring more and more cocaine to achieve the same effects. This crashes your energy systems even harder and will present you with withdrawal symptoms if you try to stop. To put it to numbers, you'd have a 5 baseline. A dose of cocaine puts you at 10, and you crash at 2. If you use cocaine to get your energy level up from the crash, you're now dependent and developing a tolerance. When you try to stop cocaine use entirely, withdrawal symptoms put you at a 1 for quite some time, and you might never return to your previous 5 baseline.
Gwern's melatonin piece is probably your best first port of call on this (and many other) subjects. I've been taking it pretty regularly (most nights) for coming up to a year, and can still fall asleep without too much difficulty without it. "Without too much difficulty" is a bit of a relative term, though. I keep somewhat unusual hours and have had difficulty getting to sleep for as long as I can remember.
Were the pills slow release or normal? The difference in time to fall asleep could be significant.
Normal.
I've taken melatonin for a few months, and at the start I thought it did make me sleep better; but then I ran out of tablets one day and I didn't notice my sleep getting worse, so I stopped again.