melatonin, EllisTangents

Supplements are a thing

September 3, 2021August 12, 2021 EllisLeave a comment

Supplements Are A Thing

And it’s worth knowing about, because your clients might bring it up.

ETHICS NOTE: Don’t recommend them! That’s outside our boundaries of competence!! If you want to help clients in other areas, become a teacher of how to recognize credible sources and read the scholarly literature!

Here I’ll give you some research about mental-health related supplements that have happened to come up from my clients recently (links attached, of course!!). Probably this will end up being a series, but who knows?

St. John’s Wort – best known as an antidepressant, it turns out it works as well as prescription antidepressants (SSRIs). And a general positive shift in emotional processing, even with non-depressed people.
- Mixed results for OCD
- May be useful in helping with withdrawal from benzos?
- Note: interferes with hormonal birth control and may cause mania !
Magnesium – seems everyone’s talking about how magnesium is good for sleep and maybe muscle recovery, but it turns out it might be good for depression, anxiety, and general wellbeing!
Fish Oil – good for… everything? Depression, anxiety, cognition, the ADHD literature is mixed
- Maybe in prevention of neural damage from alcohol abuse?
Melatonin – Just see the melatonin post ! 🙂 Additional note to that post – Exogenous (i.e., the kind you put in your body) melatonin spikes high and then plummets. Endogenous melatonin rises through the evening through your first hour of sleep and then maintains a steady amount until you wake up and slowly decreases. Best natural melatonin improvements come from pulling off the “brakes” of blue light in the evening!
- Also, if they REALLY want to take it, at least have them take it at sunset, for crying out loud.

Comment below: Any supplements your clients are talking about, that you’ve looked into? Share your info! Anything you’d like me to look into for a future post?

Childrens Melatonin

September 25, 2020August 12, 2021 EllisLeave a comment

1 milligram!

I found this at my nearby Walgreens, and I was unbelievably thrilled! Children’s melatonin!

“Now, wait,” you’re saying. “That doesn’t sound like the Ellis I’ve been reading.” (And if you’ve ever heard even a small piece of my “Bad Pharma” rant, you’re especially confused.)

The reason I’m excited is NOT because I think we should be giving kids melatonin. I pretty frankly don’t think we should, at least unless all the other behavioral/psychological/family issues have been worked out and the problem is still there. Unsurprisingly, I’ve never had a family committed enough to go through that process.

Also, it doesn’t do very much, in children or adults. Here’s a meta-analysis for you – increases sleep time by 8 minutes. (It might work better in older adults?)

I AM excited, though, because there’s an easy-to-access 1mg dosage that adults can choose. I consistently have clients asking me about using melatonin. Of course, the first thing they get is a talk about sleep hygiene and a sleep hygiene info sheet! But, if they insist that they’re going to use it, they get a secondary talk about how the typical 3mg and 5mg dosing wildly, outrageously increases the amount of melatonin in your system (I mean 50x and more!). And when we flood our bodies with something that our bodies already make, our bodies quit making it. (This is how hormonal birth control typically works, btw. And it’s why testicles shrink when men are given supplemental testosterone.) Do clients with sleep problems want to shut down their bodies’ own melatonin production?? I doubt it.

Get this – I put “melatonin supplement” in Amazon and the first option was TEN MILLIGRAMS! I’m so pleased to at least have a less insane option to point clients toward.

You may want to read the National Sleep Foundation’s article about sleep and melatonin, as well.

Comment below with sleep tips, or general pharma rants. There will be more posts to come in this area, of course!

Just close your eyes and rest…

July 17, 2020June 12, 2020 EllisLeave a comment

“Just close your eyes and rest.”

This is what we need to tell our kids, and ourselves. Trying to demand that you fall asleep, or that awful thing where you think “if I could just go to sleep NOW, I’d get 5 hours. … if I could just go to sleep NOW, I’d get 4 ½ hours…” NOT HELPFUL. Changing this language is just the beginning of the wide array of strategies we can use to help clients get restful sleep – something that’s associated with pretty much every physical and mental health measure there is!

Sleep hygiene is maybe the thing that’s most applicable to virtually every client – more so even than journaling, I’d say! It’s a shame, I think, that many accessible resources for sleep hygiene are quite poor (even though they’re usually pretty accurate). I’d like to share with you the sleep hygiene handout I made for my clients – feel free to share (but, you know, obviously don’t SELL!).

It’s geared toward adults, but could pretty easily be modified. It doesn’t mention sleep meds (which are often antipsychotics or antianxiety meds – BEWARE; also the sleep specific meds like Ambien have some really alarming side effects!) or pharma sleep “helpers” (like antihistamines or melatonin). It also doesn’t mention some of the sleep re-set techniques for when sleep has gotten really out of control, e.g., the 24 hour re-set or the 5.5 CBT-I strategy .

Comment if you teach sleep hygiene to clients, or if you’ve learned a new sleep hygiene technique you can share!