I was on Steve Gibson’s GRC website looking for his Anti-Stress Maximum Relaxation Breathing Pacer page. But before I found breathe.htm, I found his Healthy Sleep Formula page.
Huh. I hadn’t seen this page before. Further huh: adding niacinamide ‽
Well, I tried it, and it worked well. Last night, I got the best sleep I have had in many weeks. Lately, I’ve had a hard time getting more than three hours of continuous sleep. Last night, I got six.
I didn’t do it precisely as Steve Gibson described, because I’m a little frugal and already have melatonin here at home. I have 5 mg tablets instead of the suggested 1 mg. Because I listen to the Andrew Huberman podcast, and I know that Doctor Huberman does not like high dosages of melatonin, and 5 mg is considered a high dose. So as soon as I run out of the 5 mg tablets, I’ll switch to the 1 mg dose.
What surprised me about Steve’s addition of niacinamide is that I’ve always thought of niacinamide as an energy booster. So the idea of it helping me sleep was completely unintuitive to me.
Way back when, I had heard advertising for NAD supplements from a different podcast. The price was super expensive, though. A little research on NAD said that niacinamide was a precursor. I already knew that niacinamide had an A.K.A. for niacin, an A.K.A. for vitamin B3.
I also knew that my (now ex-) wife had taken vitamin B3 shots for weight loss. They did help, because they boost the metabolism. Those 5-hour Energy Drinks you find at convenience stores and truck stops are mostly a liquid form of vitamin B3 plus caffeine too.
So I’d bought a bottle of niacinamide pills a while ago. $12 for an eight-month supply, if I took it daily. That’s a bargain.
Later, my brother, who went to college for chemistry, saw the bottle on my counter and said to me, “So, you’re taking nicotine, eh?” Puzzled, he said I should compare the chemical formula and structure of nicotine versus niacinamide.
Indeed, it turns out that niacinamide is an A.K.A. for nicotinamide. Heh.
As unintuitive as it was, I tried the combination of a melatonin pill and a niacinamide pill with my nightly medications. Man, I slept well last night.