Sleep Better with Magnesium

One of the best ways to boost your intelligence is with better sleep.

Melatonin is definitely the best first-line treatment when you have trouble sleeping. But what if that doesn’t work for you?

I’ve never responded to straight Melatonin supplements and always wondered how that could possibly be. Presumably my body produces and responds to endogenous Melatonin. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t sleep.

Apparently a rarely recommended second-line treatments for those who don’t respond to Melatonin is Magnesium.

There’s good randomized controlled trials on elderly patients (those mostly likely to suffer from insomnia) that have enormous effect sizes in sleep onset, restfulness, and serum Melatonin levels by administering 500 mg of magnesium an hour before bed.

Why does this work? Probably because the pathway that produces Melatonin gets rate-limited if you’re chronically deficient in Magnesium. And studies show that almost all Americans are deficient, since no regular foods have enough Magnesium to reach your RDI by eating anything like a normal diet (e.g., 7 avocados, 16 glasses of milk, or 3 cans of kidney beans)

I’m getting good results at inducing sleep with Magnesium L-Threonate. I’m taking that instead of regular magnesium because it has better bioavailability and has purported beneficial effects on memory.

This may not work for others, but I recommend trying things out if you’re having trouble sleeping. Sleep is important and ideally you want something more natural than Benadryl for when you really need to sleep.

Author Description

Louie Helm is a Machine Learning Engineer

18 Responses to “Sleep Better with Magnesium”

March 10
Matthew Piziak

I just used melatonin yesterday to adjust to the daylight savings shift. About 1 milligram and it worked like a charm.
March 10
William Eden

Melatonin receptor knockout mice can still fall asleep, FYI.
March 10
Simone Syed

I take melatonin, magnesium, and potassium an hour before bedtime… Helps me STAY asleep. However, I can’t GET to sleep with out that Benadryl shooter, or with the aforementioned supplements alone.
March 10
Derrick Lin

It’s very much worth reading the research on chronobiology — I consider light therapy the best first-line treatment
March 10
Desiree D. Dudley

4/5 people are deficient in magnesium in the US. It’s also part of why people are D and calcium deficient.
March 10
Eliezer Yudkowsky

3 capsules = 144 mg elemental magnesium? It seems like it’d be pretty hard to get to 500mg that way.
March 10
Eliezer Yudkowsky

Also, the basic difficulty with magnesium is that most of it tends to be laxative, and magnesium glycinate, which supposedly isn’t, smells like fish in my Soylent, possibly due to reacting with potassium iodide…
March 10
Louie Helm

I only take 2 capsules for ~100mg. This seems acceptable for food eaters who want to bridge (most of) the gap between dietary intake and requirements without getting a laxative effect. Magnesium and Vitamin D may be things you want more in the morning and at night (respectively) if you believe the (admittedly sketchy) research literature about their effect on sleep. I would likely reduce those two in any customsoylent I was making and continue supplementing at least part of my intake of those separately for that reason (because my sleep is brittle already and can’t handle poor dietary hygenine like eating vitamin d late.)
March 10
Ben Kuhn

“And studies show that almost all Americans are deficient, since no regular foods have enough Magnesium to reach your RDI by eating anything like a normal diet (e.g., 7 avocados, 16 glasses of milk, or 3 cans of kidney beans)”

Interesting! Why is the RDI so high, then? What kind of foods did we used to get the appropriate amount of magnesium from that we don’t have access to anymore?
- March 10
  Louie Helm
  
  I believe the answer is that evolution didn’t care that our bones got depleted and our nervous systems got worn out by age 40.
- March 11
  Alli Smith
  
  My doctor told me it’s because we keep farming the same land and the magnesium in the soil has been depleted. Foods that are supposed to be high in magnesium just aren’t anymore. (I don’t see why this wouldn’t apply to other minerals as well. Maybe it does.)
March 10
Alexei Andreev

Byron Johnson
March 10
Andre Watson

Magnesium blocks NMDA receptors when the neuron is polarized, preventing calcium influx until a membrane depolarization occurs through another ion channel
March 10
Desiree D. Dudley

Err, yes, but Mg2+ can help with D levels, which can in turn help with calcium+. Also, check out delta 6 desaturase significance with respect to fatty acids as well as associated neuropathy, possibly even ADHD.
March 11
Stephen Bachelor

Just eat insufficient fiber, then the laxative effect will be a bonus!
March 14
Sean O HEigeartaigh

Louie, if you ever have time, I’m sure I’m not the only one who would be really interested in hearing your full improving-sleep practices (sleep has always been a bit of an issue with me, but now becoming a major problem due to stress/workload-related issues).
March 14
Louie Helm

Besides Mg, the most helpful thing I do is probably having my bedroom windows blacked out (covered w/ reflective tape and spackle). This helps me get deeper, more restful sleep when I do finally fall asleep, even if onset or other things don’t work out ideally.
May 25
John_Maxwell_IV

This sales page from Natural Stacks recommends magnesium glycinate in particular for deeper sleep: http://naturalstacks.com/products/magtech I happened to have some lying around and have been using it to seemingly good effect (in addition to a pretty small dose of melatonin).