Don’t Throw Away Your Melatonin Supplements!
By Andrea Donsky | Fact Checked | Sources
You may have heard that you shouldn’t take melatonin unless you’re dealing with jet lag. If you’re in perimenopause, menopause or postmenopause and your sleep has gone sideways, here’s what the research does and doesn’t say before you decide anything about that bottle.
What is melatonin?
Melatonin is a hormone your brain makes in response to darkness. It helps set the timing of your 24-hour internal clock and your sleep, according to the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH). Your brain makes more of it once the sun goes down and less when it comes up, and bright light at night, including from screens, works against it. That’s one reason dimming the lights and putting your phone down in the evening can help.
Read about menopause and sleep problems
Does melatonin help with menopause sleep?
For some women, it may. The MGH Center for Women’s Mental Health notes that melatonin levels normally drop with age, and concluded in 2020 that “a trial of melatonin supplementation may be considered in perimenopausal women with sleep disturbance.” Women who have trouble falling asleep seem to get the most out of it.
It helps to keep expectations realistic. NCCIH says there isn’t enough strong evidence to recommend melatonin for chronic insomnia, and sleep specialists recommend cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) as the first step. So if you’ve been lying awake most nights for months, that’s worth a conversation with your doctor, not just a new bottle.
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Is melatonin safe to take?
NCCIH says short-term use of melatonin appears to be safe for most people, but there isn’t much information on long-term use. Side effects, when they happen, are usually mild: headache, dizziness, nausea and next-day sleepiness.
If you take any medication, check with your doctor or pharmacist first. NCCIH says people with epilepsy and people taking blood thinners should only take melatonin under medical supervision. Labels aren’t always accurate either: a 2017 study found that the amount of melatonin in many products didn’t match what the label said.
What we changed on this page
An earlier version of this article said melatonin may help prevent bone loss, may reduce acid reflux, and may help with glaucoma and age-related macular degeneration. That research was small and early, looked at lab markers or animal models, or studied people with a diagnosed condition, and none of it shows that a melatonin supplement will do any of those things for you. We took those lines out. If you’ve been taking melatonin for your bones, your stomach or your eyes, please talk to your doctor about what actually works for those.
It also said that taking melatonin can make your body stop making its own, so you end up depending on it, and that melatonin from foods like tart cherries is a better source than a supplement. We couldn’t find good evidence for either, so those lines are gone too.
Bottom line
Melatonin won’t fix every kind of menopause sleep problem, but for women who struggle to fall asleep, it can be a reasonable thing to try. Check with your doctor if you take other medications, and if poor sleep has dragged on for months, ask about CBT-I.
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