alt Hacker NewsMagnesium supplementation solved my sleep issues.
I have seen many doctors, including sleep specialists, regarding insomnia. They all pointed to one source as the reason for the sleep issues: stress. And they all wanted to put me on prescription sleeping pills. I said no to that. Sleeping pills can cause dependence, and they often treat the symptom rather than the underlying cause. As a software developer, I am used to finding and fixing the underlying problem instead of relying on the quick fixes these doctors were offering me.
After much research, I figured out what I believe was the underlying problem, and the fix for it. The underlying problem was magnesium deficiency. As a software developer, I spend much of the day doing mentally demanding work. This is the kind of stress the doctors were talking about. Stress can increase the body's demand for magnesium and may contribute to low magnesium levels.
The cells in our body depend on minerals such as calcium and magnesium for normal function. In muscle and nerve cells, calcium helps switch the cell into an active state, while magnesium helps keep that activation under control and supports the return to a resting state. When you are low on magnesium, your muscles may remain tense and your nervous system may have a harder time settling down. That can contribute to muscle stiffness and difficulty sleeping.
The solution, in my case, was magnesium supplements. They fixed my muscle stiffness issues and my sleep issues. A special form of magnesium called magnesium L-threonate may be especially helpful for the brain because it appears to raise brain magnesium levels more effectively than some other forms.
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> Sleeping pills can cause dependence, and they often treat the symptom rather than the underlying cause.
I found gwern's take on Melatonin interesting: https://gwern.net/melatonin
A small excerpt:
> One might object that they do not wish to tamper with their natural sleep, even if melatonin is a normally-secreted hormone.
> Sad to say, I would point out to such readers that they are already profoundly tampering with their natural sleep cycle, and indeed, all of Western civilization is tampering with it; most of my readers do not even sleep multiple times during the day, as ‘Nature intends’ and as humans have usually slept through history, but rather in a single 7–9 hour long block.
> [...]
> Finally, there are multiple lines of research suggesting chronic sleep deprivation is prevalent among young adults (including historical comparisons). It is striking that unemployed adults sleep a full hour longer than the employed , and that when normal adults are placed in settings without artificial light like camping or without any time indicators, they sleep longer than before - exactly as if they were sleep deprived.
100 the same.
I tried magnesium before but didn’t see any effects after a week so threw in the towel. Then I read a comment by someone here that had the exact same symptoms as me (brain wouldn’t turn off), explained the underlying cause, suggested L-threonate, and explained that it’s a long-term deficiency and might take some time to build up sufficient reserves.
I have had insomnia my entire life, since I was a child. I would go to bed around midnight and fall asleep at 3am, if I was lucky. I simply could not get my brain to disengage.
Within a month of supplementation, I thought I noticed a bit of improvement. By two months, my insomnia was gone. Not better. Gone. I fall asleep within minutes now.
> Magnesium supplementation solved my sleep issues.
Which type, if you don't mind my asking? And how long did it take before you felt the benefits? I took it for a month once (forget which type) an hour before bed and nothing changed.
> A special form of magnesium called magnesium L-threonate may be especially helpful for the brain because it appears to raise brain magnesium levels more effectively than some other forms.
The study that made this claim was performed by the person who patented magnesium L-threonate and sells it at a high price. They go after any company that tries to sell cheap generic versions. The study was in mice and only showed small increases.
Magnesium L-threonate doesn’t get absorbed into your body and go into your brain as a lot of the supplement podcasts and social media posts have been implying. Magnesium supplements like this dissociate into their components in your digestive tract. Magnesium and threonate get absorbed separately. So if magnesium L-threonate has some special properties, it would be because threonate does something to improve absorption or maybe has other effects in the body, but that’s a big if. Remember that the person claiming it works better has been making a lot of money off of that one study.
If you have the cash and don’t mind paying the price then there’s no reason to switch. Many people find that magnesium glycinate, which is cheap, works just as well if not better. Glycine supplementation has been found independently to improve sleep, so taking a magnesium supplement that dissociates into magnesium and glycinate might be helpful in its own way.
Magnesium builds up in the body. Some people are deficient and get strong effects from initially correcting the deficiency. Take high doses for too long and you can start accumulating enough to get into excessive magnesium range, which brings problems. That was previously a rare observation but it’s occurring more as people get into magnesium supplements from podcasts that encourage constant high dose protocols and repeat claims that everyone is severely deficient. Keep the dose moderate.
> And they all wanted to put me on prescription sleeping pills. I said no to that. Sleeping pills can cause dependence, and they often treat the symptom rather than the underlying cause. As a software developer, I am used to finding and fixing the underlying problem instead of relying on the quick fixes these doctors were offering me.
“Sleeping pills” could mean a lot of things. Few doctors will put a patient on long-term hypnotics with high dependence liability like Ambien in the 2020s. Most doctors are hesitant to prescribe them at all in the current environment, and when they do it’s short term. I would be very surprised if you went to multiple doctors who offered to prescribe you something like that as a new patient without a complicated history. Even the people with significant long term insomnia complain about how hard it is to get doctors to prescribe those.
What they usually recommend is weaker medications with somnolence as a side effect, but the effect is weaker and doesn’t target pathways prone to addiction. Trazodone, doxepin, and a few others are common. These are not in the same category as what people think of as “sleeping pills” like Ambien that have higher dependence and addiction liability. They should not be dismissed together as one big category of drugs that are all bad for you.
For me glycine helps amazingly. It's an amino acid that the brain needs during sleep. I take about 5 grams in water about an hour before I go to sleep. I'm not sure how much the glycinate in magnesium glycinate has the same effect.
Oddly, it has the opposite effect as sleeping pills on me, it doesn't make me sleep more but I'm more rested when I wake up. It even happened a few times that I only slept 5 hours but still could focus well at work and bike intensively for an hour in the evening, without glycine that was impossible.
At 20 euro/kg I think I'll take it for the rest of my life, and it probably will add a few years to my life.
Does this need to be supplement or can I "just eat the right food"?
Or is there a "maximum low level deficit" which you will never leave with just eating the right stuff?
(Like VitamineD deficit - it can get so low, that you cant fix it by "just going more into the sun")
Magnesium is a great supplement in general. You can definitely have too much in your system and that is undesirable, but a bit before bed time along with 1-3mcg of melatonin work well for me. It is nice after workouts. I use magnesium glycinate in powder form, which is more bioavailable than some forms as well.
I also find sauna before bed is good. I have a bed chiller so I can crank up the sauna before bed and not sweat a lot. Generally if I sauna and take the aforementioned supplements I sleep well. Exercise also seems to help me out a lot. If I exercise during the day, and a 4-5 times that week in general, I tend to sleep well.
Good for you. Personally I just take four zzzquil ultras every night.
Holy Dunning–Kruger effect...
As a software developer, I am a much better doctor than actual trained doctors, and am definitely immune to any placebo effects.
Yes, magnesium has helped.
For me, avoiding high histamine foods as well as histamine liberators had helped tremendously.
The theory:
Anti-histamines like Benadryl make you sleepy by blocking histamine.
Well, instead of blocking the histamine, get rid of it in the first place by avoiding histamine foods (for example aged or preserved meats).
Nice ad!
> As a software developer, I am used to finding and fixing the underlying problem instead of relying on the quick fixes these doctors were offering me.
Bro Science, HN Edition in one sentence. Nice.
I can also vouch for magnesium and the l-threonate variant. I take both before bed along with glycine powder, phosphatidyl-serine, l-theanine, l-tryptophan, ashwagandha, and saffron. No melatonin, no sleeping pills. Finally getting decent sleep for over a year now.
On the other hand, reducing supplementation solved my sleep issues. I was taking Magnesium at night, and D+C+Fish+CoQ10+Iron+B12 in the morning.
I don't know what the hell I was taking too much of, but I didn't have a good way to test it. I wish the body had some indicators.
It's funny you talk about treating the root cause, and take magnesium, instead of addressing the workplace stress factor.
Speaking of which, I think it's a great idea for everyone to get their vitamin levels checked. Your doctor is unlikely to order such a blood test unless you are in an extreme situation, but it's cheap (around $100) to get a pretty extensive panel done.
I did it recently and found out basically all my b vitamins were in the toilet along with my vitamin D level. I started taking a b complex vitamin and D3 supplement and found immediate improvements to brain fog and exhaustion.