Melatonin: The Anti-Aging Sleep Hormone

Melatonin is another of the super hormones, those miracle substances that slow your aging and help you to live more youthful, energetic, disease-free, spiritually inspired and active lives – whatever your age.

But melatonin’s story gets better. Because of all the super anti-aging products flooding onto the market do the explosion of the information age, it can all be very confusing. “What do I take?” “Which supplements are the best?” Good questions.

Anti-aging and Longevity

In fact, Melatonin is one of the only substances ever discovered that significantly extends the lifespan of laboratory animals. Let’s be very clear about this. There are many supplements that can make you look and feel younger – give you more youthful energy – but only a few have been shown to extend actual lifespan by a significant amount.

Melatonin is one of those super hormones that can actually help you to live longer.

In scientific tests, the average lifespan of animals extended about 30%. I have read figures of between 20% and 50%, so 30% is a relatively safe average. That means instead of dying at 70, you greatly increase the probability that you will live until you are 100 if you supplement with melatonin.

It gets better.Melatonin is perhaps the safest substance ever discovered by science. When experimenting with various substances, scientists always try and discover the lethal dose so they have an idea how to prescribe the medication and just how dangerous it is.

When scientists tried to discover the lethal dose of melatonin, no matter how much they gave the animals they could not kill them. In fact, some of the animals even exhibited lower rates of certain cancers! Melatonin is truly safe.

According to Drugs.com, “No drugs have been reported to interact with melatonin.”

So what is melatonin, and why does it help you to live longer? While the exact answer to that question is not known exactly, we have some pretty good clues.

Sleep

Melatonin is the hormone in your brain responsible for inducing sleep. As with most substances in your body, melatonin naturally declines with age. With less melatonin, we get poorer quality sleep. We sleep less deeply and for less hours.

Notice how people as they get older seem to sleep so little? How they are alway restless and getting up in the night? Notice how young kids are always sleeping when they get a chance, like at a football game or rock concert? It’s because of the levels of hormones like melatonin in the brain.

We know that sleep is critical for maintaining good health and youthful vigor. While you sleep, your body goes to work repairing the damage inflicted on your cells and DNA from stress, pollution, oxidation from eating and exercise, etc.

The less we sleep, the less opportunity our bodies have to repair themselves. Over time as we sleep less, the damage to our body accumulates. The DNA in our body’s cells are unable to replicate themselves accurately and slowly become deformed and defective. They lose the youthful perfection of their initial design. This is the aging process at work.

So by taking melatonin and improving the quality of our sleep, we can slow our aging process by allowing our bodies to repair the minute damage that accumulates every day. This accumulation of damage takes its toll over the years in aging, loss of energy and function, and disease.

Insomnia & Sleep Disorders

It follows that melatonin is a great treatment for those people who suffer from sleep disorders such as insomnia. Try taking melatonin before the pharmaceutical medications, because the sleep it will give you is much more natural and healing than the artificial sleep induced by toxic pharmaceutical drugs.

Depression & Anxiety

There is also evidence that melatonin helps alleviate depression, and helps people feel less anxious. Clinical studies show that people who suffer from major depression or panic disorder have low levels of melatonin. It’s also great for people who travel and knock their natural circadian rhythm out of balance, for it is “the primary controller of circadian (day/night) bio-rhythms.” It helps restore natural sleep patterns when transferring between different time zones, helping to reduce “jet-lag.”