My understanding is that melatonin helps you fall asleep, but doesn't help you stay asleep.
In general, I have no trouble falling asleep, but I typically wake up once or twice at night and am usually unable to sleep more than 5.5 hours. I've tried 3mg Melatonin tablets in Ecuador, and I've tried a couple of different brands of 10mg time-release Melatonin gummies from the US. None of them had any noticeable effect on me.
The only thing that has worked so far, is physical activity. We just moved to Europe, and the first two weeks was a lot of buying and building furniture, slept great those two weeks. Now that I'm back to my normal office worker life, my sleep has also gone back to not being great.
(I track my sleep using the AutoSleep app on iOS, wearing an Apple Watch at night)
Melatonin has a short half life (~1h), that's why melatonin receptor agonists [1] are a thing. So just mechanistically it's unlikely to help with sleep maintenance.
Do you wake up after 5.5h at a consistent time of the day and the first half of the night is peaceful? If you fall back asleep do you then wake again shortly after?
I mean waking in the night can be many things (apnea, etc), but you could very well have a rather advanced sleep phase.
I recently started exploring supplements. Turns out a lot of what you find in the likes of CVS and Whole Foods can be all over the map: from 0 of the actual ingredient to 10x what’s on the label. Current consensus on reputable brands seems to be Thorne, NOW, Life extensions, and Pure. The last one acquired by Nestle, make of that what you will.
