As an active man with big goals (and no shortage of responsibilities), you know how important it is to take care of your body and maintain a healthy lifestyle. Getting a good night's sleep is an absolutely essential part of this goal — how else can your body rest and repair after a long day of lifting weights, climbing mountains, and saving damsels in distress?

(Here’s a hot tip, brother: it can’t. Your body needs its daily rest.)

Luckily, there’s a lot we can do to increase both the quantity and quality of our sleep. You’ve probably heard that increasing your magnesium intake could help. This is true! Magnesium plays a vital role in melatonin production, helps relax sore muscles, and reduces overall stress. Unfortunately, thanks to modern agriculture that depletes our meat and vegetables, virtually half the planet has a deficiency in this mineral that’s 100% necessary for healthy, natural sleep.

But how much magnesium should you take for sleep? In this article, we'll answer that question, and figure out how to proper magnesium supplementation can help you wake up feeling like a legend.

The Role of Magnesium in Sleep

Here’s a lesson from Science 101: magnesium is a mineral. (I know! Crazy, right?) But this is an important thing to note, because minerals aren’t something our bodies produce on their own — we have to obtain them from dietary sources, like green leafy vegetables.

Of all the minerals you consume every day, magnesium is arguably the most important. It plays a vital role in at least 300 biochemical process that we know of — and it’s absolutely foundational for your nightly snooze.

You may have heard of GABA supplements that help people sleep. But guess what? If you don’t consume enough magnesium, GABA can’t work at all. It needs magnesium to bind to receptor sites in your brain. Thus, a lot of insomniacs who think they have low GABA levels actually have a magnesium deficiency. (Not surprising — at least half of Americans have this deficiency, after all.)

Perhaps more importantly, magnesium is intricately involved in the production of melatonin, the hormone that regulates your sleep-wake cycle. Research suggests it increases melatonin’s bioavailability in the body, but honestly, the mechanism isn’t entirely clear. Scientists just know that it’s involved…somehow.

But that’s not all! In addition to helping your these hormones directly, magnesium also plays a tangential sleep role in other parts of your body: your muscles. After an epic gym session, magnesium helps prevent cramping and spasms, replenishes red blood cells, and reduces inflammation. That means less soreness, achiness, and jitters, and that means better sleep.

Either way, when you consume enough, magnesium seems to make every part of your hormonal sleep cascade work better.

How Much Magnesium Should You Take for Sleep?

According to the National Institutes of Health, the recommended daily intake of magnesium for adult men is 400-420 mg per day. However, several factors can affect your body's magnesium needs, including your age, overall health, and level of physical activity. If you tend to sweat a lot, for example, then you probably require a bit more — a lot of your Mg intake ends up in a puddle on the yoga mat.

What does this mean? Well, the average man needs 400 mg per day. But you’re not average, are you? If you’re an ultramarathoner, weekend warrior, or good-old fashioned gym rat, you probably need 20% more magnesium: as much as 500 mg per day.

But even that might not be enough! 400-500 mg is only the minimum your body needs. In fact, the legendary Charles Poliquin — strength coach to dozens of Olympians and pro athletes — recommended 2,000 mg for adult men.

What do we recommend?

Start with 400 mg. Considering that you’re already getting some magnesium from your diet, adding in 400 mg more is usually enough to drastically improve most people’s sleep. If you tolerate it well, you can definitely consider taking higher doses. But first things first: you’ve got to get solidly above the minimum before you think about the maximum.

How Should I Consume 400 mg of Extra Magnesium Every Day?

If you're certain you need to increase your magnesium to help with sleep, you’ve got two options. The obvious one, however, might not be all that easy.

Option #1: Food

For anyone who’s truly health conscious, the obvious first step is to eat foods high in magnesium, like halibut, almonds, spinach, or the grand champion, pumpkin seeds. These foods aren’t only a good source of magnesium, but they also provide a heck of a lot of other important nutrients to support your overall health.

Total Mg / Food / Serving Size

550 mg / Pumpkin seeds, raw / 100g (crazy, right?)

90 mg / Halibut, cooked / 3 ounces

80 mg / Almonds, dry roasted / 1 ounce

75 mg / Spinach, frozen, cooked / ½ cup

50 mg / Potato, baked w/skin / 1 medium

Here’s the problem though: you have to eat a LOT.

To get all your daily magnesium needs, the experts say you’d have to eat 3 cups of spinach or a giant fistful of dry, chewy, hard-to-choke down pumpkin seeds.

But that’s not the whole story. Clinical nutritionists — the smart ones who think critically and lift heavy weights — are fond of pointing out that our modern foods rarely reach the nutrient levels listed by the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. You can thank soil depletion and our glyphosate-happy industrial food suppliers for that.

If you buy all your food from a farmer’s market, you’re probably good to go. 3 cups of spinach will be a great start. But, if you shop at the grocery store, you’re probably going to need some help, and that’s where uber-convenient supplements come in.

Option #2: Magnesium Supplements

The easier option for the modern man is to take a high-quality magnesium supplement. You can find them in various forms, including capsules, tablets, powders, and sprays you can squirt all across your bare chest before you belly flop nude into bed.

Supplements are obviously our preferred option, and it’s why we include a man-sized dose of magnesium citrate in Hibernate Sleep Formula. It’s simple, easy, bioavailable, and the surest way we’ve found to fight insomnia. Whatever magnesium supplement you choose though, we only have one suggestion, and it’s important:

Never take magnesium oxide. Check the label. Seriously. This is important.

Virtually all chelated forms of magnesium will improve the quality of your sleep, but magnesium oxide is far more likely to help you wake up and run to the toilet. (Hence why it’s the primary ingredient in most laxatives.) It helps form salts that suck water into your stomach, and then, that water has to go somewhere.

For real, don’t take magnesium oxide. We wouldn’t give it to our dogs.

Are There Any Side Effects?

While magnesium is generally considered safe when taken at recommended doses, high doses can cause side effects like stomach cramps and the aforementioned (and dreaded) diarrhea. It's also worth noting that magnesium can interact with certain medications, like antibiotics and blood-pressure drugs.

In general, however, a healthy man won’t have to worry about side effects unless he shotguns a heavy dose of magnesium oxide. 

Conclusion on How Much Magnesium for Sleep

400 mg. Start there.

Listen, magnesium is absolutely essential for so many of your body’s functions — not just sleep. It’s not called “the master mineral” for nothing. You need at least 400 mg per day to be “healthy” (in an average sort of way). If you’re a man who works out, you need more. If you’ve reached middle age, you need more too.

Eating a clean diet rich in green leafy vegetables (and the occasional handful of pumpkin seeds) is an ideal way to start. Yet, with so many Americans already suffering from magnesium deficiency, we highly recommend you look beyond the recommended daily averages and start supplementing with a man-sized dose. That’s where the real sleep benefits appear.

That’s also why Hibernate Sleep Formula contains 400 mg of high-quality magnesium, and why we take it every single night. Magnesium isn’t a biohack. It’s not fancy. It’s just the basic elemental nutrition your brain needs to manufacture sleep each night, and when you take an effective dose at just the right time, man, it can work wonders.