Nine common sleep supplements, compared on the same terms.

Melatonin is the most misunderstood product in the category. It isn't a sedative. It's a hormone your body already makes to signal that night has arrived, so taking it works as a time signal. That makes it useful when your body clock is the problem: jet lag, night shifts, a schedule that has drifted late. Across nineteen clinical trials, melatonin helped people fall asleep only about seven minutes sooner than placebo on average. If your clock is fine and your problem is waking at 3 a.m., melatonin wasn't designed for your problem — and many people take it nightly for years without knowing that. One more reason not to: a large 2025 health-records analysis presented at the American Heart Association meeting reported an association between long-term nightly melatonin use and higher heart-failure risk. It's a preliminary, unpublished finding that can't prove cause and effect — but it's a good reason not to take any supplement nightly for years without asking what it's doing for you.

Magnesium, L-theanine and glycine all have real evidence behind them, and the details matter. Magnesium's strongest studies were done in older adults who were deficient in it — good evidence for that group, not proof it will help a well-nourished forty-five-year-old. L-theanine and glycine help some people fall asleep more easily. None of the three has been shown to increase deep or REM sleep. They can help you get to sleep; they haven't been shown to change what the night gives you after that.

Oral GABA gets an honest answer rather than a confident one: it's unclear how much of it reaches your brain when you swallow it, and human sleep trials are mixed. We'd rather say that than pick a side.

Valerian and ashwagandha sit side by side on the shelf and are marketed almost identically, but the evidence is very different. Ashwagandha has meta-analysis support for a small but real improvement in how people rate their sleep, strongest at higher doses taken for eight weeks or more. Valerian shows no consistent benefit in objective studies. It pays to read past the front of the box.

CBD isn't one thing. Results don't transfer between products, doses or formats, so "CBD helps you sleep" has no useful meaning on its own. CBN is being marketed much faster than it's being studied: one 2024 trial reported better self-rated sleep — a finding about how people felt, not about their sleep stages.

Our own formulation — the finished product, not just its ingredients — was tested in a randomized, placebo-controlled trial published in a peer-reviewed sleep medicine journal, with sleep measured by a wrist-worn wearable rather than a questionnaire. Participants who started with low levels of restorative sleep saw up to twice as much deep and REM sleep. Three things belong with that number: it describes the low-baseline group, not the average participant; a wearable is a good objective measure but not a laboratory sleep study; and the result belongs to this formulation, not to CBD in general.

One more fact about the category: most sleep supplements have never been tested as finished products. The individual ingredients may have research behind them, at whatever dose those studies used, but the specific combination in the bottle usually doesn't — the FDA doesn't require supplements to demonstrate effectiveness before they're sold. That's why "clinically studied ingredients" on a label is a much weaker claim than it sounds.