Another grateful melatonin user here. That stuff got me through college, and I've successfully recommended it to friends (mostly the stereotypical geeks like myself who, left to their own devices, will keep pushing back bedtime a couple of hours every day ad infinitum). Just prepare yourself for some strange dreams for the first couple of months.
Could you expand on this please? I'm one of those geeks that keeps pushing bedtime back. (Right now I'm waking up around 9pm and going to sleep around 1-2pm. By mid-to-late week I'll probably be back to a regular 8am-midnight.
If you take a melatonin tablet about half an hour before what you want your bedtime to be, then by the time bedtime rolls along, you should be sleepy enough to get to sleep quickly. At least, that has been my experience, and the experience that others typically report.
This is very useful if you're someone whose bedtime tends to be pushed gradually back because you're not ready to sleep yet -- the easy act of taking a pill can make it less difficult to go to sleep at a consistent time. It can also be useful in periodically resetting your bedtime, by going to bed a few hours earlier.
This may or may not help you, though. You have a pretty high rate of bedtime drift. Could you elaborate on how it happens? Do you just not feel tired when you should? If that's the case, then melatonin might help. Other things you could try include:
1. Use something like f.lux to make your monitor use lower-energy colors at night. Melatonin production is photosensitive, so artificial lights with a lot of blue (such as LCD backlights) can throw that out of whack if they hit your retinas.
2. Exercise vigorously every day, in the evenings. Even if this doesn't help with sleep, it's a good idea, so why not?
And in general, when trying to figure something like this out, it can help to keep logs so you have some data you can analyze later, to see what's working and what isn't. Good luck.
When left to my own devices I simply sleep when I feel tired. My normal cycle will be something like sleep for 6-12 hours and stay up anywhere from 16 to 20 hours. Sometimes I'll take a nap for an hour or two somewhere in there. As far as I can tell there's no real pattern day to day but on average I drift a couple hours or so around the clock every day. Every couple of weeks I'm back to a "normal" schedule.
When I have a 9-5 job though I end up tired one day and fine the next. I end up getting up at 8 or so and going to sleep at either 11 or so because I was really tired or 3-4 am because I wasn't.
f.lux actually did help a lot. I was much worse when I didn't use it (I could never get to sleep early so I was always tired.)
Anyway, I'll do some research into melatonin supplements, thanks for the lead.
