By now we’ve seen that the pandemic has zero boundaries when it comes to our personal lives and has even ruined sleeping by messing up our pre-pandemic circadian flows. But a new study suggests that even before the pannie, more and more Americans were relying on higher doses of melatonin just to catch some Z’s — despite the fact that they’re often unregulated and sometimes spiked with chemicals such as serotonin. Now, I know that having more serotonin sounds ideal, but the kicker is that the supplement can actually worsen insomnia.
The study, which was published earlier this week on the JAMA Network, found that the number of Americans who reported taking melatonin grew from just 0.4% to 2.1% from 2005 to 2018. Of those, the amount of people who consumed more than the recommended 5 mg/d of melatonin nearly quadrupled during the same time.
