videogame streamer ☆ digital archaeologist ☆ cheeseburger enjoyer ☆ occasional drawer ☆ anxiety haver ☆ some sort of fennec wah thing ☆ has trouble with words so doesn't write a lot ☆ private 🔞 space: @roxbox
in-character OC accounts:
🔥 @roxyrocket
🧡 @RustyRetro
🐰 @NACHOFIEND
after a long time of not being on any over the counter sleep aids i started taking 1 mg melatonin again last week and gamers you HAVE to trust me that less is more with melatonin. everyone looks at me like i'm speaking in riddles when i say this but it's true. 5 milligrams is way too fucking much and likely won't let you sleep.
anyway it is currently working really well, and eventually i'll have to stop but for now i'm really happy to be getting some fucking sleep for once.
Absolutely crazy to me how this works. Nobody believes me when I tell them to use a 0.3 mg eyedropper of liquid melatonin instead of a 10mg pill
Honestly if I had a pill splitter a .5mg half tablet would probably work!
IIRC the median effective dose for sleep is south of 0.1mg, and yeah it's a multipurpose signalling hormone where larger quantities are an entirely different signal and very likely to Not Do What You Want. but it's an unregulated supplement in the US and I've frequently seen store shelves with nothing under 3mg (still grouped with sleep aids). goddamn infuriating!
I wonder if that lower dose would reduce the bigger problem I have with melatonin, which is that it induces incredible nightmares for me
YMMV obviously, but I can report that 0.5mg was still enough to give me vivid dreams (plus kaleidoscopic visions with my eyes closed while still awake). no nightmares that I recall — in fact I don't even remember any anxiety cascades, which is surprising now that I think about it, they were very common at the time — but often drifting into full lucidity, which can be fun but makes my overall sleep quality considerably worse so I decided it was a wash and stopped using it.
that's the smallest dose I ever took, hadn't even heard of liquid form until now so half or a quarter of that might be worth trying.
My experiences with higher levels of melatonin was the kind of extreme nightmares bordering on night terrors i got as a kid, especially when I dropped weed as a sleep aid last year and tried it again, so I'm real nervous. I don't need the gore and abstract horror in my head every night again.
yeahhhh it kinda pissed me off to learn this!! it seems like most of the melatonin sold in stores comes in like 10mg EXTRA STRENGTH tablets or gummies (liquid is REALLY hard to find around here) and i wondered why i was waking up so groggy and not really getting any better sleep than before. now i specifically seek out either 1mg (or something that is easily divided down to 1mg) and, unless my insomnia decides to be a real bastard, it knocks me out in like 30-60 minutes
We remember talking with a friend overseas and was surprised to learn doctors often prescribe <1mg doses. It's ridiculous that you can't find doses that low here! We want to talk to our doctor about getting a small-dose melatonin prescription to help with our sleep problems, because we're so prone to drug hangovers from H1 antagonists and stuff like trazodone. (Insane that's more readily prescribed than a proper dose of melatonin!)
