But that is only because melatonin is a stress hormone. It is produced in response to the stress of your body exposed to darkness, without exposure to natural light. Darkness is actually highly stressful to the body, and the body’s response is to sleep, which is anti-stress.
Let me clarify that—melatonin does not promote sleep, it simply turns on around the time that your body needs to sleep, in response to the stress of darkness.
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If you take just one thing away from this post, please let it be this: when you take melatonin supplements, you are ingesting a synthetic hormone and therefore disrupting your body’s own natural hormonal balance.[...]
Increases heart rate and perpetuates the stress cycle. Melatonin stimulates increased adrenaline, cortisol, and aldosterone—three of the primary stress hormones. It slows the metabolism, and causes the release of free fatty acids into the bloodstream, which further stimulate the stress response.[...]
Synthetic melatonin supplementation inhibits your body’s metabolic rate. When the metabolism goes down, adrenaline goes up in direct response. And when adrenaline goes up, so does melatonin, which further slows the metabolism. This perpetuates the stress response of the sympathetic nervous system, which worsens your sleep quality.
