Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Kronopath 1274 days ago
I have no idea why people take Ambien when low-dose (<0.5mg) melatonin exists over-the-counter in abundance in the US.
5 comments

The only time I took Ambien, I discovered the next morning that I had apparently awakened at some point and attempted to eat a tea bag. Yeah, no thanks.
First I heard of it, my friend’s mother got a prescription and found herself waking up with bags of flour and empty jars of mayonnaise in bed with her. More recently I had a colleague who grew extremely habituated/addicted to it, which did not end well.
Low dose melatonin is not a miracle cure. It can help reset when you fall asleep, but cannot help you stay asleep.

I'll still never touch ambien again, but there are many reasons that melatonin may not be enough.

People in my family have tried taking melatonin for sleep. It gave them hallucinations.

Not everybody reacts the same way to different chemicals, even the ones our bodies produce naturally.

One of the reasons that might have happened is that a lot of OTC melatonin is actually way too high of a dose. You need like a .5mg dose, but most of it that I have seen in stores is in the 3-5mg range, which is quite a bit more than what you need.
Yeah. I had an awful time with it. I can’t describe my dream because it doesn’t belong here at all, and while it wasn’t a nightmare so to speak, it was extremely unsettling.

It has a sort of vividness and trueness to real life that, given the subject of the dream, was totally unwelcome in my mind and eerily blended the dream world and real life. I’d never experienced anything like it.

Somehow the dream also felt long. Not long for a dream, but like an actual day passed. It was a seriously unsettling experience.

Melatonin has been ineffective for me and several people I know. Low dose, regular dose, all sorts of protocols.
Melatonin helps you stay asleep. Ambien helps you get to sleep.