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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Open Thread, October 7 - October 12, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
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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.