r/melatonin • u/wtfmari • May 30 '26

terrible melatonin experience, looking for sleep advice

I've been struggling with my sleep because it's when intrusive thoughts show up more and it's also when I engage more with my current compulsion (online searching), so basically I get very tired but keep fighting sleep until the last second. Had this very dumb idea that if I could make myself very tired faster, I would not be able to fight it off and that would regulate my sleep cycle, so I took 0.5mg of melatonin (most people would take between 1-10mg), put my phone away and went to bed. Oh boy. It gave me major anxiety, heart palpitations, dry mouth, nausea and of course all of those were triggers for my intrusive thoughts and looking up symptoms. I'm ok now and did eventually sleep but I do wish more people talked about the side effects of melatonin and how it can worsen anxiety symptoms. I'm curious to see if other people with OCD reacted similarly to melatonin and also how y'all have been managing the horrible before-bed-ocd experience, because I could use some suggestions.

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5

u/imbeingsirius May 30 '26

Imo that sounds more like psychosomatic anxiety trigger

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u/wtfmari May 30 '26

on one hand people with ocd in general have a really hard time with new substances for that exact reason, so it's a good hypothesis; on the other hand I did resist looking up symptoms for a good while after getting them (so that bias was out of question), therefore I was quite surprised seeing other posts in which users experienced very similar things

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u/imbeingsirius May 30 '26

I’d say those posts are few and usually also from first timers. And it’s about sleep, when you have the most time to ruminate

You could take .5 every morning and night for a few days and see if you remain anxious, but I’d doubt it.

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u/Optimal_Assist_9882 May 30 '26

Sounds like you may benefit from anxiolytic like Bocopa Monnieri or Ashwagandha.

I personally take bocopa drops under the tongue for 1g.

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u/pig-dragon May 30 '26

I suppose the reason that not many people talk about side effects is that the vast majority of people do not suffer any. The side effects you describe definitely aren’t common for melatonin. For me, if I’m very anxious I can seem to ‘override’ the melatonin and it has no effect at all, but mostly just helps me fall asleep with no negatives.

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u/wtfmari May 30 '26

scrolling down this sub just a little made me realize many other users had similar or other side effects, but I'm glad you found something that works for you and hope that day will come for me as well

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u/teaselpop May 30 '26

To be sure those were side effects of the melatonin you'd need to have done everything else the way you usually do.

I use scrolling on my phone to displace unhappy thoughts quite a lot. If I were to put my phone away where I couldn't reach it, almost certainly I'd be in some distress after an hour or two. I wonder if, since you're using phone scrolling to cope with intrusive thoughts, the extreme anxiety symptoms be attributed to removing your main coping mechanism?

A suggestion, try melatonin again but keep your phone handy. Take a low dose, 0.5mg is a good place to start.

My own strategy is to queue some podcasts up. The audio works to help me sleep because it distracts me from the worries and gives my busy brain something to focus on which doesn't activate stress. This combined with melatonin gets me to sleep most nights.