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Why Does Magnesium Help You to Sleep?
If you’ve ever been afflicted with insomnia, you know what a frustrating thing it is to not be able to fall asleep or stay asleep, even when you’re tired. You go to bed because you know it’s time to go to bed, but you lay awake for hours or even all night, unable to actually fall asleep. This leaves you tired and dragging the next morning, which makes you even more stressed out, which contributes to the perpetuation of the cycle. Sleep deprivation is harmful to your health, not to mention feeling like torture, so it’s no wonder that everyone wants to know, “What do I need to do to be able to go to sleep at night?” While there are many different factors that play into our ability to sleep, magnesium is the one that we’ll look at in this article.
It’s a well-known fact that magnesium helps people to go to sleep. Magnesium invokes that sleepy, relaxed feeling that we have before we go to sleep, which helps to trigger sleep to actually happen, even when we’re stressed out. It can help you to go to sleep faster, stay asleep longer, and feel more rested when you wake up. Some people are even able to use only magnesium in the absence of any other natural sleep aid (like melatonin, for example) in order to help them to sleep. But why is magnesium so helpful when it comes to falling asleep? In order to understand this, it’s important to know what magnesium is and how it works.
What is Magnesium?
Magnesium is a chemical element in the periodic table, and it is technically a metal. Unlike melatonin, which is a collection of elements joined together into the structure of a hormone, magnesium is just a pure, irreducible substance. Your body cannot synthesize magnesium and most obtain it from your diet. Also, your body is constantly losing magnesium as it gets flushed out daily by the kidneys, requiring you to constantly consume more magnesium in your diet in order to have enough of it in your system.
How Does Magnesium Work With Enzymes?
Your body contains hundreds of different types of enzymes, which are proteins that are constructed to perform a specific chemical reaction, depending on their specific shape. Some enzymes only become activated to do their jobs when they have a “cofactor” plugged into them, which changes their shape slightly and causes them to begin conducting their normal business. If the cofactor is removed, the enzyme goes back to an inactive state or changes the job that it performs. Magnesium is a cofactor in more than 300 different enzymes, meaning that it is required to be present in order for those enzymes to do their jobs. These enzymes perform functions in everything from digestion to activities in the cell, but some of them have to do with helping you to go to sleep.
Why does Magnesium Help Us to Sleep?
One thing that magnesium does is that it helps to reduce cortisol (the stress hormone that can keep you “wired and tired”). This can help you to get out of that frustrating cycle of adrenal hormone imbalance. Magnesium can also relax your muscles (reducing the instance of restless leg syndrome) and stabilize abnormal nerve excitation (calming you down). However, not everything is known regarding all of the precise functions of magnesium as related to sleep. Sleep is a complex and many-faceted thing, and just how and why we sleep is not even fully known yet.
Whether or not we completely know why and how it works, magnesium is one of the ingredients in the Energy by Science sleep capsules. This product contains 50 mg per serving of magnesium as amino acid chelate (which is a much more bioavailable form of magnesium than the much more common magnesium oxide). This dose of magnesium, along with the other ingredients in our natural sleep aid, helps you to fall asleep without drugs and wake up rested. Try our sleep aid capsules today! You’ll notice the difference in how you feel, and you’ll love having the sleep you need. Get to sleep when you need to with the all natural sleeping pills from Energy By Science.