Melatonin is a natural hormone in your body that helps control your sleep-wake cycle. It’s naturally present in your body and helps control your sleep time. Melatonin makes you feel tired and helps you sleep. Your body makes more of it when it’s dark outside.
Melatonin is a natural hormone made by a special part of your brain called the pineal gland. It gets released into your blood.
This hormone helps control when you feel sleepy and when you’re awake. Your body has more melatonin in your blood at night. Some studies show that melatonin supplements could be useful for sleep problems like staying up late, insomnia, and feeling tired after traveling.
As we grow up, our melatonin levels at night go down. Doctors can check how much melatonin is in your blood or spit to study your body’s internal clock.
Scientists have mostly studied how the brain reacts to melatonin changes. They think melatonin does two main things in humans: it helps start and keep sleep at night, and guides other 24-hour rhythms like day and night. People sometimes call melatonin the “sleep hormone” because we tend to sleep better when it’s around.
So, melatonin is a natural helper for sleep and keeping our body’s clock on track, even though we can sleep without it.
In what way is melatonin controlled?
In humans and mammals, the body’s clock sets the rhythm for making melatonin in the pineal gland. This clock is in the brain’s “suprachiasmatic nuclei.” They have genes that keep ticking all day, guided by sunlight coming in through the eyes. These nuclei connect to the pineal gland through a long path in the nervous system, moving through different parts of the brain, then the spine, and finally reaching the pineal gland. When it’s daytime, these nuclei tell the pineal gland to stop making melatonin. But at night, when they’re not as active, they let the pineal gland make melatonin.
Light really matters for melatonin in the pineal gland. First, it can reset a part of the brain’s clock (the suprachiasmatic nuclei) and change when melatonin is made. Second, if you’re exposed to light during your body’s nighttime, you make less melatonin and release it.
How does having too much melatonin affect you?
People make different amounts of melatonin, and this is totally normal and doesn’t cause health issues. If you take too much melatonin, you might feel sleepy and your body temperature might drop. Taking really big doses can also mess with how your reproductive system works. Some studies suggest that really high levels of melatonin might also act like an antioxidant, but we’re still figuring out why.
What happens if you snort melatonin?
Not much is known about melatonin, but snorting this relatively new substance can have many undesirable consequences. No matter how you take melatonin, it has to get into your bloodstream first before it affects your brain. Snorting means it goes through your nose’s lining and blood vessels, then to your heart and the rest of your body, including your brain. But it has to cross a protective barrier between the blood and the brain to really work.
Snorting drugs can make them affect your brain quickly, which makes them more likely to be abused because you feel the effects right away.
Snorting melatonin can hurt your nose and breathing. Using drugs like this for a long time can cause nosebleeds, a runny nose, and even a loss of smell. Some issues might go away when you stop, but using drugs this way over and over can damage your nose’s lining and even make breathing harder. Sometimes, the damage might not fully heal.