Melatonin is available in every grocery store in America...but nobody really loves it, do they? (Except me, at least.) Maybe you tried melatonin in the past and it left you groggy in the morning. Or, it caused crazy dreams. Or, it only worked for two days. In any case, the problem is the same: you've almost certainly taken too much.

Microdosing is not just the ideal way—but in my opinion—the ONLY way to use melatonin. With a proper tiny dose, you receive all the sleep-enhancing benefits without disrupting deep-sleep stages, having zany dreams, or feeling hungover in the morning. Let's make that happen. Read on to learn everything you need to know about the power of microdosing.

The Perfect Dose: 0.3mg or Less

Take a trip to any drug store and you'll see plenty of melatonin products. These over-the-counter supplements come in all sorts of dosages ranging from 1mg to 10mg.

How do you know which one is right for you?

The answer is simple: none of them.

Even 1mg pills contain 3X more melatonin than your brain actually needs to coordinate the process I like to call the "hormonal sleep cascade." That overdose lingers in your bloodstream and actually inhibits normal, healthy sleep. It's similar to how one whiskey makes you happy, but ten turn you into The Hulk.

The perfect dose of melatonin is surprisingly small. According to MIT researcher, Dr. Richard Wurtman, most healthy men only need a microdose of around 0.3 mg to reach the blood-serum levels of an optimally functioning brain. Any more than that, and you risk overwhelming and short-circuiting a whole series of neurochemical sleep processes.

Less really is more when it comes to this supplement.

Why Such a Small Amount?

Melatonin isn't like other sleeping pills that drug you, knock you out, and actually short-circuit natural sleep. (Causing nasty side effects in the process.) Instead, it's the signal that it's time to sleep. 

Your brain only needs a tiny amount of melatonin to light that signal. If you lived in a completely natural world free of iPhones, electric light, and Netflix, your brain would produce that tiny amount on its own. But alas, we live in a different world today.

When the melatonin signal goes up, your body's other sleep processes spring into action. Of course, that doesn't happen if you have a melatonin deficiency (caused by excessive light exposure).

HOWEVER...if you shore up that deficiency with just the right dose of melatonin, you'll start to feel drowsy naturally. Eventually, you'll fall asleep and move through the four different phases of the sleep cycle:

1. Phase one is the shortest and only lasts for around 10 minutes. This is when you transition from wakefulness to sleep.
2. Phase two sees a drop in heart rate and body temperature. It lasts for about 20 minutes.
3. Phase three is characterized by a drop in blood pressure and breathing rate. It's also when your muscles relax. At this stage, you're in the deepest sleep, and it's when all the magic happens. Your immune system recharges. Muscle recovery takes place. This is the sweet spot—the truly regenerative part of sleep—and the part that gets inhibited by sleep drugs.
4. Phase four is called REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep. Your brain is active, but your body is totally relaxed. This is also when you dream, as you cycle back into Phase one and start the process over again.

Needless to say, you need to transition through all four phases of sleep to get a good night's rest. Melatonin microdosing keeps that process running without overwhelming it.

But what happens if you take more than a microdose?

Too Much of A Good Thing

Taking melatonin in an appropriately small dose—0.2 to 0.3mg—kicks off the sleep cycle. Then, it leaves your bloodstream in short order.

If you take too much (an overdose) however, it hangs around in your bloodstream for hours. That excess melatonin will eventually attach to a receptor, and fire off a signal flare again: "It's time to sleep!"

And the whole process starts over.

It doesn't matter if you're already sleeping. You've just tricked your brain. You've knocked yourself back into that first phase of sleep. Now, you might never reach the phases of deep sleep that allow you to rejuvenate fully, and you'll wake up feeling mildly hungover.

Large doses of melatonin also tend to have diminishing effects. Doses larger than 3mg can quickly render the body's melatonin receptors completely unresponsive. 

If you overload your melatonin receptors, the hormone stops being effective—even the small amount your brain produces naturally. It'll take days before your brain goes back to normal. A microdose, however, keeps your receptors working like a well-oiled Ferrari.

Other Benefits of Microdosing Melatonin

Melatonin is a pretty amazing hormone. While most of us use it solve sleep issues, it offers plenty of other healthy, maybe even crucial benefits.

Antioxidant Properties

Antioxidants are enzymes that help your body clean and repair cells. Melatonin has been shown to increase the amount of these powerful enzymes in your body.

Antioxidants fight what are known as "free radicals": highly reactive and unstable molecules that damage DNA. While they sound like hippie jam-band groupies, free radicals are actually created during normal cellular functions, particularly as a byproduct of eliminating toxins, or after really nasty sunburns. 

The damage caused by free radicals can lead to many different diseases and health ailments, including cancer, heart disease, and diabetes. Fortunately, melatonin helps obliterate them. 

Support Immune Health

Melatonin also plays an important role in the health of your immune system. Your white blood cells, your body's ever-vigilant guardians against infection and disease, actually have melatonin receptors and the enzymes needed to create melatonin out of tryptophan.

Melatonin has also been shown to increase your body's levels of T-cells—essentially super-soldiers that eradicate host cells carrying many different kinds of disease.

Fight Inflammation

Joints aching after a tough workout? Melatonin is also a powerful anti-inflammatory. It downregulates the expression of 5-lipoxygenase, a key culprit in inflammation activation, and inhibits production of adhesion molecules that drive your body's innate inflammatory response.

If your knees are barking, melatonin helps keep those tweaks and niggling pains from getting worse.

Good For the Head

Melatonin supports brain health in a lot of unique ways, but one amazing example is by strengthening your blood-brain barrier.

This barrier's chief responsibility is to prevent things like bacteria and viruses—which are always present in your bloodstream in tiny amounts—from entering your brain. A weakened blood-brain barrier can lead to things like brain fog in the short term, and in the long term, exacerbate neurological disorders like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. Melatonin has also been shown to help limit cell death and brain damage caused by a leaky blood-brain barrier.

Cellular Support

Mitochondria, the part of the cell that produces energy, rely on melatonin to do their job. This is especially important in cells found in your heart, liver, and kidneys. Optimum melatonin function in these cells helps regulate blood pressure, blood circulation, and electrolytes, keeping them at normal, healthy levels.

Melatonin also helps protect the cells in other parts of your body, for example allowing you to better regulate insulin levels. That's right—proper melatonin levels inhibit progression of chronic diabetes. In fact, this is similar to the way melatonin helps regulate sleeping patterns. During the day, you'll have higher insulin sensitivity. At night, you'll have increased resistance.

Why is Melatonin Important?

Maybe you're still skeptical that sleep aids don't quite jive with your healthy lifestyle. That's cool. You should be. A lot of them are filled with unnatural drugs that have strong side effects.

Melatonin—in the right dose—is different. It's a completely natural substance. Everyone's brain makes it daily. When you use a supplement to shore up a deficiency, it allows you to get the sleep you need (real, natural sleep) without having to overload your body with "hypnotic agents" and other artificial junk.

Let's examine how.

The Hormonal Sleep Cascade 

At the molecular level, melatonin is made of an amino acid called tryptophan. It's the catatonia-inducing chemical that takes hold after you indulge in a heaping portion of turkey on Thanksgiving.

Getting good sleep, however, is a team effort. Melatonin doesn't act alone.

It all starts with your brain's pineal gland—a pinecone-shaped nugget located near the brain stem. It monitors light levels and governs your body's sleep/wake cycles. Think of it as similar to NBA coach Steve Kerr: it patiently watches what's happening on the court, coordinating strategy in real time.

When it senses oncoming darkness, the pineal gland sends a signal to the rest of your body that it's time to sleep.

Melatonin is that signal.

We can think of melatonin as like Steph Curry, the unassuming superstar in the process. Everything else takes action depending on where it is, what it's doing, and what it's saying. If it isn't on the court at all, the offense breaks down. Game over.

Enzymes and tryptophan are the Sleep Team's world-class role players. Much like Draymond Green creates space and funnels the ball to Curry, enzymes turn tryptophan into melatonin and this gets the offense started...or, so your brain can downregulate into a restful state.

The key takeaway here is that melatonin can't win alone. It can't force you into natural sleep, but it will get you there...with a little bit of help along the way. It simply lets your body know that it's time to rest, but is still—unquestionably—the most important player on the team.

Sleep Foul: The Hormonal Cascade Breaks Down

Unfortunately, as I mentioned earlier, you can accidentally and unknowingly disrupt your body's melatonin cycle. We all do this constantly, every time we pick up our phones or flip a light switch.

Exposure to any kind of light—whether from the sun, a blue sky, or the inside of your refrigerator—will cause a delay in melatonin production. (Like putting Steph Curry on the bench.) This light tricks your pineal gland into thinking it's daytime and that you don't need to sleep for hours.

Blue light emitted by computer screens and smartphones is typically the culprit. It's the same wavelength as daylight from a bright blue sky. Trust us: if you want natural, healthy sleep, you have to avoid the temptation to mindlessly scroll Instagram before bed. Perhaps more than any other reason, this artificial light is responsible for the melatonin deficiencies that keep everyone up at night. 

Aging and metabolic disorder are also typical culprits. Decades of eating cheap junk carbs can lead to cell breakdown throughout the body (e.g. neurodegeneration, heart disease, and cancer). And this seems to play a role in downregulating melatonin production as you get older. So, if your sleep hygiene is on point, but you're still struggling to rest at night, it's likely an age-related or metabolic issue with your melatonin levels...even if you're otherwise active and healthy.

The good news is that a microdose of melatonin can solve these problems. (Though you probably want to clean up to your diet too.)

Ideal Time To Microdose Melatonin

To reach that Goldilocks spot where your melatonin levels are "just right," take a microdosed supplement 1-2 hours before you aim to be lights-out asleep. Not before you want to go to bed, but before you want to be asleep. This more closely mimicks natural melatonin production, so when you finally lay your head on the pillow, your brain will be 100% ready for a snooze.

Are you taking melatonin to help fight jet lag? It's awesome for that, and the timing is the same: take it around an hour before you'd like to be asleep in this new timezone. This way, it'll reach a peak amount in your bloodstream at the exact time you need it. 

In my experience, this eliminates the worst possible jet lag (twelve time zones) in a max of 4 days. There's no better way to reset your clock.

The Melatonin Supplement You Need

Ready to try a proper microdose? We've already prepared it for you. It's exactly why Hibernate exists.

With 0.25mg of melatonin—along with healthy doses of magnesium, zinc, and vitamin D—Hibernate is meticulously formulated to give your brain the ingredients it needs to manufacture healthy sleep. 

No drugs. Optimal doses. No more no less. 

Give it a try and turn the lights off at night. I'm confident it'll be life-changing for you, just the way it was for me.