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Me too. Every night without fail.

Mario?

Also pair with behavioral cues! Pick a stimulus for each sense that you only use while trying to sleep! Examples:

• Sight: dark obvs but you might try an orange night light if you need low light for mobility / safety or PTSD / night terror related reasons.

• Sound: I use a thunderstorm but other white noise mixes are also great.

• Touch: heavy blanket

• Smell: detergent, or a different air freshener than you use in the rest of the house.

• Taste: cup of chamomile before bed.

Avoid phone / TV while in bed unless the TV / YouTube is your sound cue in which case turn down the brightness / red shift it and play something boring / familiar like a sitcom you watched a lot of as a kid or a steamer you've seen a lot of.

Avoid most activities in general in bed except sleeping and fucking and possibly one mindless repetitive task like knitting or an easy untimed puzzle game. If you need an activity to wind down, learn to be mindful of your physiological sleepiness symptoms (mine is eyelid heaviness) and the second you feel it put your activity down immediately and lay your head on your pillow with your eyes closed.

It is very important that if you use medication to sleep you do. not. get in the habit of fighting them. If you let them make you sleep instead of using them to compliment a full behavioral sleep plan, you are going to wind up on ridiculous doses of medications that doctors are gonna get shitty with you about prescribing. Save yourself the trouble and make yourself a sleep plan. And if you have little kids that can't regulate their sleep this is a great time to enforce (and model!) healthy sleep habits.

This will likely take about two weeks to kick in but once it does you are gonna have some of the best sleep of your life.

And to back this commenter up I have a lot of patients say melatonin gives them nightmares. Most of them have tried taking >10mg. That is waaay too much and melatonin is well known to do that in high doses. Buy the lowest strength melatonin you can and like this person says maybe even get a pill cutter and split them.

Huh TIL! Thanks for the tips!!

I completely agree on the dosage info, meaning that's how it works for me.

I tried melatonin many times over the years, but it was always the higher dosage stuff. I found it to be ineffective and worse, it would leave me groggy the next day. That's especially true for the extended release stuff.

Then about 7 years ago or so, I was reading something that suggested ideal dosages are below 1 mg and decided to give it a try again. Sure enough, I find that .25mg or .5mg are the sweet spot for me. Helps me sleep and there's minimal grogginess the next day, sometimes even no residual grogginess.

Anecdotally, I do believe melatonin supplements have wide variation in terms of efficacy for people. I know plenty of people who do just find with the 5mg and higher stuff. I know people who it's entirely ineffective for. I'm also seeing someone below suggest taking it hours before you need to sleep -- that sounds absolutely absurd to me, but that's also the nature of advice for this stuff. Seems like it just works differently for different people.

When I take it consecutive nights the effect seems to add up and just make me more and more groggy all the time. Also the nightmares I have on it are horrendous. Usually I just take it on Sundays to get my sleep schedule switched back to weekday time and that works well enough.

The melatonin I use says "Take just before bed" in the instructions

I mean, that's how I have been using it for the past 3 years, in fact I feel more sleepy after taking melatonin than after taking benzos - but that's just probably me.