As a frequent flier, I have a little in-flight ritual that starts right after meal service: close the window shade, unfurl my Rumpl puffy blanket, don my Ostrich neck pillow and Dore & Rose sleep mask, and pop a melatonin gummy.
Sometimes, the latter allows me to conk out for the entirety of the flight—we’re talking the full 15-hour Dallas to Doha route. Other times, it backfires spectacularly, and I land having gotten no sleep and feeling groggy, sluggish, and resentful.
It turns out that just because many travelers take a gummy or a pill to help them sleep doesn’t mean it’s always the right move. The science behind sleep—and how it functions in the unusual conditions of long-haul air travel—is more complicated than it seems.
We asked four medical sleep professionals to weigh in on when it’s a good or bad idea to take a sleep aid, melatonin included, during air travel. Here’s what they had to say.
What do melatonin and other sleep medications do?
According to Dr. Neal Walia, a sleep specialist at UCLA Health (a network of clinics and hospitals in California), melatonin is a hormone your brain naturally produces in response to darkness. It helps regulate your circadian rhythm, the body’s internal clock that helps determine when you feel sleepy and when you feel alert.
“It works to promote the sleep pathways in your brain and inhibit the signals that wake you up,” Walia says, adding that it has “shown to be most effective for adjusting sleep schedules, such as for night owls who are hoping to adjust their sleep schedule to fall asleep earlier over time, or for people hoping to avoid jet lag by adjusting their schedule before or after a flight into a different time zone.”
Unlike prescription sleep medications, which act as sedatives, melatonin doesn’t knock you out. Instead, it signals to your brain that it’s time to start winding down. In other words, melatonin doesn’t induce sleep so much as permit it. Given that, supplemental melatonin is often pitched as a “natural” sleep aid and is available over the counter in gummy, pill, and even dissolvable strip form.
Then there’s the pharmacy’s worth of other sleep aids travelers sometimes turn to: prescription pills like Ambien or Ativan, antihistamines like Benadryl, or even CBD.
“They promote sleep by acting on different chemicals and receptors involved in the sleep process,” Walia says. “Some are better for falling asleep, some to stay asleep.” Whatever you plan to take, he adds, be sure to check with your doctor first.
Pros and cons of taking melatonin or another sleep aid while flying
From a scientific standpoint, melatonin is most useful not as a sleep aid per se, but as a tool for circadian realignment. This is where it can be a legitimate asset on long-haul international flights, particularly eastbound ones, which require the body to fall asleep earlier than it normally would. In those cases, a well-timed dose of melatonin (usually taken a few hours before your target bedtime in the new time zone) can help shift the body’s internal clock more quickly.
Dr. Jamie Zeitzer, a research professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, sleep medicine at Stanford University, says that for many people, melatonin has a “strong psychological conditioning response. People think that it will help them sleep, and that mindset is sufficient to relax them enough to actually let sleep occur.”
But here’s the catch: Melatonin is highly timing-sensitive. Take it too early or too late, and it can not only fail to help but actually make jet lag worse by reinforcing your body’s current time zone. If you’re flying westbound, you may confuse your circadian system rather than recalibrate it.
“This can disrupt your sleep schedule later that day, similar to taking a nap in the evening can make it harder to fall asleep,” Walia says.
What complicates matters further is that melatonin supplements in the United States are not regulated by the FDA in the same way as prescription medications, Walia said.
“One prior study on melatonin supplements showed that the actual amount of melatonin in a supplement can vary wildly compared to the dosage presented on the label,” Walia said. (A 2017 analysis published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine tested 31 melatonin supplements and found that the actual content varied from what was on the label by minus 83 percent to plus 478 percent.)
The best approach, says Dr. Andrea Matsumura, a sleep medicine physician and medical director of Cascadia Health (an integrated-healthcare provider in Portland, Oregon), is to use melatonin as part of a broader jet lag management plan: shifting your sleep schedule a few days before departure, timing light exposure appropriately, and taking low-dose melatonin. For long flights, melatonin works best when you treat it not as a quick fix but as one piece of a puzzle that includes hydration, sleep hygiene, and realistic expectations.
Other sleep aids—such as diphenhydramine (Benadryl), zolpidem (Ambien), or benzodiazepines like Ativan—can be more forceful at helping users fall asleep. But they, too, have side effects, ranging from dehydration to grogginess to sleepwalking. It’s for those reasons, Walia says, that the medications are not routinely recommended for flying, adding that because the side effects vary per person, taking them “should involve a discussion with your doctor who is familiar with your medical history.”
Matsumura adds that while the drugs “flood the brain in a particular way to where they’re causing sleep, they don’t necessarily help you get to the right stages of sleep.” In other words, even if you get a full night of sleep, it may not be as restful or restorative as you need.
Dr. Catherine Darley, a naturopathic sleep expert and founder of Skilled Sleeper online courses, notes that if you do take something to sleep, “make sure there’s enough time for the medication effects to end before disembarking. This is typically eight hours.” She also notes that it’s a good idea to “avoid mixing the medication with alcohol.”
Whatever you do, Walia says, don’t let the first time you try melatonin or a sleep medication be on an airplane—experiencing side effects at 30,000 feet can be especially problematic.
Whether you take melatonin or another sleep aid on a flight is ultimately up to you, although Zeitzer says, “How alert you need to be when landing, how much it matters whether you sleep more (though not as naturally), and how much anxiety a lack of sleep causes you should all go into the equation of your decision.”
