Sleep maxxing: melatonin addition (part 1)
The Biochemical Blueprint to Producing Melatonin Naturally
Melatonin is one of the most underrated molecules in the human body.
It's not just the “sleep hormone.” It’s the brake pedal for your entire nervous system.
It increases your brain’s sensitivity to GABA, the neurotransmitter that tells your body to relax and drift off. It lowers excitatory chemicals like noradrenaline, orexin, and cortisol—the stuff that keeps your brain on high alert. It stabilizes mast cells, reducing histamine-driven restlessness. And it protects your brain against glutamate excitotoxicity, the kind that can keep you wired all night.
It’s also a powerful antioxidant and helps to lower inflammation while improving mitochondrial function.
In short, melatonin is the molecule that keeps the lid on everything that makes sleep shallow, broken, or nonexistent.
But here’s the catch...
Most people are trying to force melatonin with pills instead of producing it naturally.
And that comes with consequences:
You wake up groggy or unmotivated
You feel sedated instead of restored
You might experience vivid dreams or nightmares, headaches, dizziness, and paradoxically waking up in the middle of the night.
Your natural melatonin production may downregulate over time
And you miss out on everything upstream—like serotonin, methylation, gut health, and circadian alignment
Melatonin supplements can be helpful short-term…
But they’re not the fix.
They don't retrain your circadian rhythm. They don't address why you're not making melatonin in the first place. And they don’t solve the deeper issue, which is that your nervous system is overstimulated, inflamed, under-fueled, and off-rhythm.
This is why natural melatonin optimization is so important.
Because when your body makes its own melatonin at the right time, in the right amounts, you don’t just sleep…
You enter parasympathetic recovery mode.
You wake up calm, focused, and energized.
You regain your emotional bandwidth and mental clarity.
And you feel like a human again.
In this article, I’ll show you how to naturally increase melatonin by fixing the bottlenecks most people ignore.
Let’s start with why your body “steals” tryptophan away from melatonin in the first place…