Hi there, it's Matt Walker here and welcome back to the podcast. Today is all about the m word, and before your mind jumps to any lurid m, word possibilities at what I mean is that our topic du jour is melatonin first. We're going to understand what melatonin is then. We'll speak about how melatonin works.
And what melatonin does and does not do for your
sleep, and then finally,
we'll speak about melatonin supplementation.
Melatonin is a hormone and it's often called the hormone of
Darkness or the vampire hormone. Not because it makes you look. Longingly at people's necklines and want to bite in
simply
because melatonin comes out at night, which brings us directly on to how melatonin actually works. Now, during the day we are hopefully exposed to
plenty of natural light.
Light. And as light, enters your eye, it will inhibit the release of melatonin and the
absence of melatonin will. Therefore tell your
brain and your body that it's day time, and that it's time to be
awake fast forward to the evening, and we have the arrival of
darkness and darkness releases the
brakes on melatonin.
And so the floodgates open up and we need
Witness in the evening to trigger the release of melatonin and as melatonin is released in the evening. It will tell your brain and your body that it's night time, and that it's time to sleep. The problem. However, is that in some ways? We are a dark deprived Society in this modern era. And many of us get too much artificial light exposure in the evening, which can impact our natural melatonin.
Vowels. So as a tip
rather than a hack, I don't really like the word hack. But
as a tip, try to dim down half of the lights in your home in the last hour before bed, and also stay away from those screens and you'll be surprised at how sleepy this can make you feel. So, that's a little bit about what melatonin is now. Let's speak about what melatonin does and does not
do for your sleep.
Melatonin helps.
Schedule the timing of your sleep, but melatonin does not significantly change the quantity or the quality of your sleep and to better explain this think of the analogy of the 100-meter
race in the Olympics.
Melatonin would be the starting official who Begins the great sleep race and starts that great sleep race, but melatonin does not participate in the race. It
Itself, that's a completely different set of brain
systems.
The supporter of today's podcast is inside tracker. Now, if you've been listening to this podcast for some time, you probably know that I am, I'm a little obsessed with health, both tracking and maintaining that of my own and of course helping other people do. So that's part of my life mission, but one part of that commitment to myself is tracking what is
Going on inside of my body and that is were inside. Tracker has come into play for me inside? Tracker is a service that analyzes your
blurred and even your DNA to understand exactly what is
happening inside of you. And there are well. I think there are several things that differentiate inside track of for me as a surface relative to anyone else out there
first. It's a low
friction.
In /, no friction service, what I mean by that is they will conveniently come out to your home and do the blood draw right there. So you don't have to go
anywhere next. They will then take that
sample and they will run a set of Diagnostics on your blood and your DNA
and in doing
so they extract
at least two
things first. They provide a
full set of
results. Describing your varied, blurred your
Metabolic your hormonal Health metrics and they will
also give you reference
ranges to help you understand. Am I inside of those standard healthy ranges or am I outside of those healthy standard Rangers? The second part is the part that I think I like most about the service inside, tracker doesn't just tell you what your data is and what your relative ranges
are it then points you towards a set
of actionable suggestions.
That you can do in terms of changing your lifestyle, to see if you can try to adjust some of those
numbers and bring them more
into an optimized range that sits within the healthy standards. So if you want to try inside tracker, just go to
inside
tracker.com forward slash Matt Walker and you will get 25% off their programs. So that's inside tracker Dot.
Calm forward slash Matt Walker and you can use their services as you need and also at a discount if you use that link, and now, let's get back to the podcast.
Which then brings us swimmingly on to the issue of supplementation. Although melatonin is naturally released by your brain each
night. You can also buy melatonin in certain countries as a supplement and some people will try to use it as a sleep aid, but melatonin isn't quite as effective. As you may think. For example, if you pull together,
All of the recent scientific studies on sleep and melatonin, which
is a technique that we call a meta-analysis.
We've discovered that melatonin only increases the speed with which you fall asleep by three point, nine minutes, and only increases the quality of your sleep, or what we call your sleep efficiency by just 2.2%. This is very understandable since as I
And the role of melatonin is primarily in regulating the timing of your sleep, rather than being involved in the generation of sleep itself. That's not to
dismiss, by the way, the placebo effect. The placebo effect is
one of the most reliable effects in all of pharmacology, but I just want to give you the data here. It's also important to understand that melatonin is not well regulated as a
Implement in several countries as a result, the Purity and the strength of melatonin that you buy is often unreliable. Indeed, one study published. Several years ago, examined, over 30 different suppliers of melatonin relative to what was stated on the bottle concentrations. In each one of the pills ranged from 83 percent less than that listed to.
Seventy-eight percent more than what was stated on the bottle and even within one supplier within one vendor, there was almost as much variability from one batch to the next. So if you're looking to optimize your sleep, it's probably best to focus on the basics. The things that we know make a real difference, things, such as regularity, going to bed at the same time and getting up at the same time.
I'm keeping your bedroom cool at night, getting that darkness in the evening that I mentioned. And then you can reverse engineer that trick, by getting plenty of natural daylight in the morning hours. And finally, try to get some form of physical activity each. And every day, these things are much more likely to help your sleep rather than looking to melatonin for some kind of sleep assistance,
and don't worry by
We'll have a whole episode on sleep tips. How you can optimize your sleep and
both some conventional and
unconventional advice from me.
So there you have it. The hormone
of Darkness, the vampire hormone.
And with that, I will simply say, thanks again to the sponsor of this episode and critically. Thanks so much to you for listening and subscribing to the
Podcast. I feel so, incredibly fortunate. I really do to be doing this. So thanks very much again and take care.
