If for instance, you're somebody who falls asleep just fine, but wakes up in the middle of the night, around two or 3 a.m. or any time for that matter, and has trouble falling back asleep, there are two categories of supplements that you might want to consider. The first is myoinositol, typically taken as 900 milligrams of myoinositol.

Myoinositol can help shorten the amount of time that it takes to fall back asleep if you wake up in the middle of the night. Myoinositol has other beneficial uses as well for mood, et cetera. If you'd like to see many of the different effects that have been explored in the scientific literature for myoinositol, you can go to examine.com.

It's an excellent site, not just for inositol, but for all supplements for that matter. Talks about the human effect matrix. That is the different effects of different supplement compounds on different aspects of hormone, brain, and body health, where the evidence is strong, where the evidence is weak, has links to studies, and so on.

Again, it's examine.com, amazing website, wonderful website. It's provided such a rich resource for me and for many, many other people. Other people who wake up in the middle of the night will wake up because their dreams are very intense, or they were having dreams that were so vivid that suddenly they were jolted from their dreams.

Those people would do well to avoid certain supplements. So in a moment, I'll talk about the value of a supplement called theanine for falling asleep. But theanine, which typically is taken in dosages anywhere from 100 milligrams to 400 milligrams, depending on body weight and experience and what you find to be most effective for you, minimally effective for you.

Well, theanine can be great for many people, but for people who have excessively vivid dreams, those excessively vivid dreams can lead to immediate waking and sometimes a little bit of anxiety upon waking in the middle of the night. So some people who wake up in the middle of the night, so jolted mentally and physically out of sleep because of their intense dreams would do well to avoid theanine supplementation.

I've talked about this a bit before, but it's something that I think a lot of nighttime, middle of the night wakers might be familiar with and would want to take into consideration. Now, for those of you that are not waking up in the middle of the night or not having excessively vivid dreams, but are having trouble falling asleep, two supplements in particular have been shown to be effective for shortening the transition time to sleep and allowing people to ease into sleep more readily.

And those are magnesium threonate, which is interchangeable with magnesium bisglycinate. Magnesium bisglycinate and magnesium threonate both have transporter systems that allow them to readily cross the blood-brain barrier and they lead to a mild form of drowsiness, mild in the sense that it's not going to prevent you from operating a motor vehicle or kind of any conditions under emergency that might arise in the middle of the night, or if they did arise during the middle of night, you'd still be able to function, so it's not like a sleeping pill.

But people who take those often find that their transition time into sleep is much faster and their sleep is also much deeper. Incidentally, those supplements are also thought to be useful for cognitive support and neuroprotection, although there's less data on that. Okay, so that's for falling asleep, that's one category, either magnesium, magnesium threonate, or bisglycinate would be interchangeable for assisting the transition time into sleep.

And then the other supplement is apigenin, A-P-I-G-E-N-I-N. Apigenin, which is a derivative of chamomile, I've talked about this in various podcasts before, also acts as a bit of a anxiety-lowering compound, which is essential prior to sleep for people to essentially turn off their thinking or to be able to reduce the amount of ruminating and problem-solving and future anticipation that they're doing, which is a requirement for falling asleep.

So what's the rational approach to supplementing in a way that allows you to fall asleep more quickly and stay asleep? Well, would you immediately take magnesium threonate and apigenin together? Well, that depends. If you have the budget and you just simply want to fall asleep quicker and you don't care which of those two ingredients is going to be more effective for you, well, then you could try one, for instance, magnesium threonate, and try it for perhaps a week and see how that affects your latency to sleep time, that is how quickly you fall asleep, or you could try apigenin in the first week, or you could combine them both, or you could try magnesium threonate for a week, then switch to only apigenin for a week and evaluate which one works better for you.

If neither works for you, I do recommend trying the combination together. Again, this is just the way that any scientist would design an experiment to try and understand which variables, that is, which ingredients are most effective for the result that you want, as opposed to just lumping them together and taking them.

That said, a lot of people want excellent sleep so badly that they just say, "Okay, I'm just going to take magnesium threonate, I'm going to take apigenin, I'm going to take theanine. If my dreams are too vivid and I'm waking up in the middle of the night from excessively vivid dreams, I'll drop the theanine." And many people actually derive great benefit from that approach.

But because today we're talking about the most rational, cost-effective, and biologically effective approach to supplementation, if you're not sleeping as well as you would like to, or if you want to explore what sleeping even more deeply might do for your mental health, physical health, and performance, well, then it makes sense to think about the various supplements for falling asleep versus remaining asleep, what to include, what not to include, and to do that systematically.

And again, I think one week's time of taking something, provided it doesn't induce any negative effects, right? If something induces a negative effect, I recommend ceasing taking it immediately. But if something does not produce any negative effects, then I think you want to try a single ingredient formulation for about a week while not varying anything else, not changing anything else in your overall protocols of nutrition or supplementation.

I mean, it's impossible to clamp everything perfectly from week to week, but don't change anything else dramatically and just add that supplement for a given week, see how it benefits your sleep. Maybe add in a second supplement if you like, or rather swap and try a different supplement for a week and then see what works best and see if the combination works even better.

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