“Melatonin Self-Experiment Results” by silentbob

Throughout the first half of 2025 I did a blinded experiment to see how low to moderate melatonin intake affects me. In this post I summarize my findings.

Tl;dr: In my blinded self-experiment on melatonin, conducted over n = 60 days and analyzed with hypothesize.io, I found significantly positive effects for time to fall asleep (averaging ~25 instead of ~35 minutes, p ~= 0.001) and feeling awake the following morning (5.74/10 instead of 4.95/10, p = 0.006; but: this effect only persisted for the lower of two dosages, and did not persist throughout the rest of the day; could well be a false positive, as I didn’t correct for multiple hypothesis testing) for a dosage as low as 0.15mg of melatonin, taken on average ~1h before going to bed.

Feel free to jump ahead to the Results section if you don't care much about my methodology.

Experiment Setup

I [...]

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Outline:

(01:14) Experiment Setup

(04:51) Hypotheses

(05:43) Results

(07:15) Limitations

(09:26) Detailed Results

(09:30) Sleep Quality

(10:41) Fall Asleep Duration

(11:46) Wakefulness after Waking Up

(12:55) Wakefulness at Noon

(13:36) Wakefulness at 4pm

(14:14) Wake-Up Time

(15:27) When Best to Take Melatonin

(18:29) Learnings for Future Self-Experiments

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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First published:

June 25th, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mHEMgNHYADjpzEizk/melatonin-self-experiment-results

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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