Is it Safe to Take Melatonin and Birth Control at the Same Time?

The numbers are staggering: Roughly 70 million Americans suffer from chronic sleep problems. While some utilize “sleep hygiene” strategies like meditating before bed, creating a set bedtime routine or avoiding large evening meals, others turn to the supplement aisle to combat insomnia. One common pill of choice: melatonin, AKA the sleep hormone.

Supplementing with melatonin can help reduce insomnia. But like any supplement that changes your body’s levels of hormones or other naturally occurring chemicals, you may need to be careful if you’re taking other supplements or medications that have the same effect. Take hormonal birth control, for instance, which manipulates your levels of estrogen and progesterone, both of which may have an effect on sleep. Here, discover what will happen if you supplement with melatonin while on hormonal birth control and how to create a targeted course of action to reverse your sleep woes.

Melatonin and hormonal contraceptives, such as the pill, implant, shot, patch, vaginal ring, or a hormone-producing IUD, don’t directly interact with one another in the body, but taking them together may impact the quality of your sleep. According to the Mayo Clinic, it is safe to use hormonal contraceptives and melatonin together, but surprisingly, doing so might cause an added sedative effect.

So what is it about the hormones --- progesterone and estrogen --- found in a combined birth control pill that could help you in the sleep department? Well, estrogen plays a key role in regulating body temperature, which influences whether or not your body is able to get into a relaxed and restful state. Progesterone, meanwhile, has a calming, sedative effect that can help you fall asleep. That’s why there’s some potential that layering a melatonin pill into the mix could lead to more noticeable sleep-related effects.

That said, this hasn’t been studied extensively and may not apply to everyone. 

No. There isn’t research that suggests melatonin makes birth control less effective.

Short answer: If you need it. One way to know for sure is to test your naturally-occurring melatonin levels, which you can do at-home testing like the kind offered at Base. Not only will a test determine whether or not low melatonin levels are the cause of your sleep woes, but a Base improvement program will also offer specific recommendations on how much melatonin to take and for how long---instead of simply taking the dose recommended on the back of the bottle you pick up at the grocery store.

What’s more, if low melatonin is not the culprit behind your sleep troubles, which it may not be, subsequent tests can measure other hormones and vitamins that may be to blame, such as cortisol, vitamin D, or DHEA, revealing whether there are other dietary, lifestyle, or supplemental changes that could help you catch some ZZZs.