Sleep aids & melatonin

Hey everyone so I’m sure you all know how Lyme and co infections really ruin your sleep and how you feel once you wake up. The last couple weeks I have been taking sleep aids & melatonin which has really helped me fall asleep and stay asleep. But I am afraid of what it might do to me in the long run and I’m not very knowledgeable about the effects it can have. I’m sure I can find somebody on here that has taken them also and I would just like your opinion on it.

I take the melatonin because my msh is low and I read where that’s what produces melatonin.

I just take a sleep aid & melatonin. Pretty low dose also. It helps me stay asleep instead of waking up in the middle of the night. It also makes me feel a tad bit more refreshed when I wake up.

If you do go the prescription route, Trazodone and Hydroxyzine Pamoate are good go-to's... for sleep/anxiety respectively. Also, low dose 10mg Doxepin has given me sleep when needed. Trazodone and Doxepin double as antidepressants at larger doses, but in smaller doses trigger sleep.

My experience is as insomniaaa suggested -- smaller doses of melatonin work better.

After trial-and-error, here's what helps me stay asleep:

1. Low-Dose Naltrexone (3.0 mg at bedtime)
2. Deep Sleep (One caplet at bedtime)
3. Low-Dose, Extended-Release Melatonin (One 300 mcg tablet at bedtime)

According to Richard Wurtman, MD at the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, the optimal dose of Melatonin is pretty small -- around 300 micrograms. http://wurtmanlab.mit.edu/projects

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Dr. Richard J. Wurtman, a distinguished professor of neuropharmacology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said older people often have trouble getting to sleep because the pineal gland, where melatonin is produced, "gets calcified with age." Taking a little bit of the hormone makes up for the pineal gland's weakness, he explained.

In 2001, Wurtman and his colleagues published a study in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism that suggested that small doses of melatonin -- no more than 0.3 milligrams -- could help older people conquer insomnia.

But it's got to be just this little bit, Wurtman said, because too much melatonin overwhelms and deactivates receptors that transfer the hormone into cells.

Wurtman noted that the Alberta study used doses as high a 6 milligrams. "They are giving 20 times the correct dose," he said. "The higher the dose we gave, the lower the response we got."

Most of the melatonin products now on the market give similar overdoses, Wurtman said. The result: "Your insomnia gets worse after a while," he said. "What you need is low doses that raise blood levels to where they were when they were young. It's the equivalent of hormone replacement therapy for women."
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My OPINION is that taking low doses of Melatonin is likely more safe than not. I'd be more worried about taking prescription sleep aids indefinitely. However, that's between you and your Doctor. You DO need to sleep, obviously!