Video Transcript:

Hello, everybody Happy New Year! I'm Megan Esser, Registered Holistic Nutritionist with ITL Health. Things have been very crazy for me in the last number of months with having children at home constantly from school due to having a COVID symptoms or COVID cases in their class and now schools are closed. So, I apologize that I haven't done videos as consistently as I wanted to. Right now, I have a quiet moment but it's very difficult for me to get that so I will try my best.

The question I'm going to answer today is magnesium or melatonin better for sleep? This is a very common question because you read about each supplement a lot for sleep. Now the answer is they both do different things. So, it's hard to say which one's better even though you know what I’m going to say. So, melatonin is a hormone that our body produces that signals to it that it's time to go to bed. So, our own natural circadian rhythm will start to produce more melatonin as the night wears on, especially if we have a consistent sleep schedule.

When is dark, when the sun goes down our levels of melatonin naturally rise. So, melatonin will help you fall asleep but it will not help you stay asleep. So, if you have trouble with staying asleep or a restless sleep or waking up in the night, melatonin is not the best supplement for you. Magnesium helps shut down your central nervous system to get you into that deep restful sleep and it also helps calm your muscles. So, it helps twofold, it helps kind of your body relax and it helps your mind and central nervous system relax.

So, if you have trouble falling asleep and staying asleep, definitely you need magnesium. And a lot of people find that magnesium helps them fall asleep as well. And again, that's because it helps relax your central nervous system, your muscular system so it puts you in that relaxed state so your body can actually sleep. A lot of us have trouble sleeping because our mind is going or let's say our muscles are twitching or we have restless legs or something. So, magnesium will help for a lot more sleep issues than melatonin will.

Now if you're deficient in melatonin, it will really help you fall asleep. But a lot of times people have a hard time sleeping until they take melatonin when it's really a magnesium deficiency that they have. So, I would always encourage people to try magnesium before melatonin. Magnesium is essential for 80% of enzymatic processes in your body. So, you can be sure that if low magnesium is causing you trouble sleeping there's a lot of other things that could be going wrong in the body more than just sleep.

But sleep we really notice and we really have to stay on top of otherwise, it’s very difficult to function. So that's the basic difference between melatonin and magnesium. So, I would say that magnesium is a better sleep aid than melatonin. If you have any questions don't hesitate to contact us and let us know what you want us to answer.