In this Sleep Aid review you will find: what is best sleep supplements, how to use it, its ingredients, benefits, side effects, real users reviews, and where to buy it!
Go to bed! And then when you’re in bed – go to sleep!
You owe it to yourself for all of the hard work you’ve been doing. And, really, you owe it to the world, because, after all, no one enjoys the thought of sleepy drivers cruising down the highway amid other sleepy drivers.
It’s a story as old as time: the man who thinks himself immortal, a man above the gods themselves, and yet can’t even beat sleep. This is the gist of the Epic of Gilgamesh, a poem from ancient Mesopotamia, possibly the oldest surviving work of epic literature. Long story short: a man offers Gilgamesh eternal life, but only if Gilgamesh can stay awake for six days and seven nights …and then Gilgamesh falls asleep.
C’est la vie. That’s life (and death).
But it’s a humbling story, proving that even Gilgamesh, a king, is subjected to the same human limits as the rest of us. Gilgamesh needs sleep and so do you.
However, you have an edge over Gilgamesh, because in 2020 you have the option of taking a sleep supplement to better control when you sleep, how long you sleep, and how deep you sleep, allowing for your daytime performance to be at it’s best. Sorry, Gilgamesh – sucks to be an old, primitive Mesopotamian loser.
But you don’t want just any ol’ sleep supplement. You want the best sleep supplement of 2020, one that will provide you the following benefits.
Best Sleep Supplements to Buy in 2020
Melatonin, of course. It’s still our go-to sleep aid, because it’s still working. But not all melatonin is equal. In fact, not all melatonin is actual-factual melatonin but rather a synthesized, simulated version of the real thing.
And there are supplements that do supply the actual-factual stuff, or at least one comes to mind: Performance Lab Sleep, a natural sleep aid supplement that supplies natural melatonin via tart cherry extract.
Altogether, the stack supplies three pro-sleep ingredients:
- Montmorency Tart Cherry Extract (Melatonin)
- L-Tryptophan
- Magnesium
What sets the best sleep supplements apart from your average batch of sleep boosters is ingredient quality and simplicity. If you can do more with less, do less. Too much sleep enhancement ruins your next day’s performance, and, really, isn’t daytime performance the whole point of overnight sleep?
Performance Lab Sleep’s able to do more with less by enhancing the potency of its ingredients, supplying them in their natural, easy-to-absorb forms, and avoiding any unnecessary, junky additives, making it easily one of the best sleep supplements to buy in 2020, as well as a model example of how a sleep aid supplement should look moving forward.
The Benefits of a Sleep Aid Supplements
Aside from the obvious benefit (better sleep), sleep aid supplements may help with various other health and performance measures by promoting the following:
1) Consistent Circadian Rhythm
Consistently sleeping and waking at the same hours establishes a consistent circadian rhythm, the body’s natural, internal regulatory system that oversees daily (and nightly) biological processes roughly every 24 hours.
For example, a healthy circadian rhythm triggers a high spike of stress hormone cortisol upon waking, which quickly declines throughout the day. It also promotes the release of melatonin, the sleepy-time brain chemical, prior to sleep.
Under conditions of inconsistent sleep patterns and/or excess stress (which I’ll touch more upon below), a body’s circadian rhythm may fail to secrete enough stress hormone cortisol in the morning, causing a slow drip of stress hormone throughout the day.
In other words, the body has a difficult time waking in the morning and warding off stress throughout the day.
Likewise, failure to secrete active melatonin levels at an appropriate hour makes sleep difficult to achieve.
Sleep aid supplements may help us at least establish a consistent bedtime, allowing our circadian rhythms to actually establish a rhythm around a predictable bedtime.
2) Recovery and Repair
Athletes, bodybuilders, exercisers, etc. really hurt their performance gains by failing to sleep. High-intensity training is only half of the equation. The other half is recovery.
Gains don’t occur in the gym. They occur overnight in bed.
During sleep, the body redirects its metabolic and hormonal processes towards anabolic muscle growth, releasing the likes of growth hormone while mitigating the negative consequences of oxidative stress and inflammation.
Of course, a sleep aid supplement helps improve recovery by improving sleep. However, a really good sleep supplement also supplies antioxidant, anti-inflammatory compounds that may directly assist with catabolic (muscle-diminishing) factors incurred via high-intensity training.
3) Focus and Concentration
Under conditions of excess stress and/or sleep deprivation, the brain burns through catecholamine levels to maintain adequate levels of alertness, awareness, and concentration. Without sufficient sleep, these catecholamines burn out quickly, and so does cognition.
This explains why it’s difficult to concentrate while tired, making entertainment-related distractions (such as Netflix) much more appealing than all that work you need to do.
Allowing the body adequate rest helps sustain mood- and focus-related neurochemicals necessary to maintain concentration throughout the workday.
This concentration is also important to other cognitive performance measures, such as working memory and computation.
4) Mood and Motivation
Low catecholamine levels, such as dopamine, and low energy levels contribute to poor mood and motivation. Not only is it difficult to stay focused on what’s important but it’s difficult to even care about what’s important when the mind is over-tired.
It’s almost funny: an unfulfilling workday contributes to late nights, which decreases sleep-time, thereby lowering motivation to work and having a fulfilling workday – and so on and so forth.
This is an awful cycle to fall into, sometimes even leading to temporary bouts of depression for the sleep deprived who struggle to find interest in …well, their interests.
Sleep aid supplements help break this cycle.
5) Reduced Stress and Anxiety
Anti-anxiety is almost synonymous with sleep aid. Often what helps combat anxiety also allows the mind to relax and feel sleepy enough to fall asleep. Psychologically, they also help remove all extraneous worries that make us too stubborn to go to bed in the first place.
Funny enough, this is what makes reducing anxiety during the daytime so tricky. Anxiolytics (anti-anxieties) help reduce anxiety at the cost of daytime alertness and energy.
They sedate, so to speak. Rather it’s smarter to relax the mind at night to achieve better sleep, which lessens the likelihood of anxiety in the first place. (Also, side note: L-theanine is a great nootropic for lowering anxiety without sedating the brain… Something to keep in mind.)
Also Read: Best Nootropics Supplements – Top 5 Brain Boosters of 2020
Melatonin and serotonergic sleep aids help relax the brain, improve sleep quality, and enhance mood altogether.
No stress, no worries. Just take it easy and get to work.
When is a Sleep Supplement Necessary?
When you know, you know. Usually, you know when you want to fall asleep, you have the ambition of getting more sleep than you have been getting, and, yet, for whatever reason(s), you’re still not getting enough sleep.
Simple as that.
It could be a stubborn thing. You’re simply too stubborn for your own good, and, despite your proclaimed goal, you still just can’t get your ass to bed. Or it could be something more neurochemical – e.g., you stare at blue light-emitting electronics too late in the evening, preventing your brain from fully shutting off prior to bedtime.
Maybe it’s stress. Either way, an effective sleep supplement may help on all these fronts by slowing down the gears across the board, allowing the brain to fully relax for long, deep sleep.
Of course, for clinical grade levels of insomnia, something more powerful than a natural sleep aid may be necessary. However, pharmaceutical sleeping pills are a desperate measure for desperate times, to be prescribed by a physician.
If given the option (i.e., if you don’t have severe insomnia), natural sleep supplements are healthier and more conducive to daytime productivity than risky, addictive sleeping pills.
Let’s take a closer look at the formula to see what exactly makes this sleep supplement tick.
Checkout Performance Lab Sleep Ingredients
If you can fall asleep with only melatonin, what else do you need? Well, not much, to be honest – just make sure you’re consuming a natural source of melatonin instead of synthetic melatonin.
You’ll also want that melatonin accompanied by a couple more ingredients that not only assist with sleep quality but also morning mood.
And that’s exactly what Performance Lab Sleep provides with its simple, 3-ingredient formula.
Here’s a deeper look at those three ingredients:
1) Montmorency Tart Cherry (as CherryPURE®), 500mg
Melatonin is obviously one of the best sleep supplements, and it has been well before 2020. For many of us, it’s our go-to sleep aid.
Although, it’s often a sleep aid taken out of desperation, given how many people complain about melatonin supplements causing headaches and grogginess in the morning.
Performance Lab’s Montmorency Tart Cherry Extract delivers the melatonin without the usual associated side effects – due to it being a completely natural source of melatonin. And bless these people for that, because natural melatonin is such a reliable sleep quality enhancer.
What distinguishes this melatonin from other common melatonin supplements are:
- Tart cherry melatonin is natural melatonin, not synthetic.
- The dosage is “minimally effective,” not excessive.
You only need enough melatonin to fall asleep. Anything beyond that is overkill, resulting in a still-sleepy mind in the morning and occasionally a headache due to the neurochemical imbalance brought on by too much melatonin.
By standardizing an extract of natural melatonin to a reliable, predictable dosage, CherryPURE® doesn’t waver in efficacy as many other synthetic melatonin supplements do. Not to mention that the extract supplies a range of cherry antioxidants that help with overnight muscle and joint repair, great for the recovering athlete.
Compared to synthetic melatonin, natural cherry extracted melatonin works consistently every time. More importantly, it works consistently well.
2) L-Tryptophan (as TryptoPure®), 250mg
Stress and anxiety are crippling forces, especially where sleep is concerned.
There’s simply no sleeping while the mind’s awake and mulling over all of the day’s worries and tomorrow’s worries and whether or not all of this even matters given that the universe is expanding and entropy is observably everywhere.
While L-tryptophan can’t help with the existential dread aspects of life, it may help ameliorate the stress part, allowing for the mind to comfortably relax prior to sleep.
And, thus, allowing the mind to sleep. As a precursor neurotransmitter, this amino acid seems to improve mood and sleep quality by converting to the following:
- 5-HTP in the brain, where it converts to serotonin, the neurotransmitter famously associated with positive mood, impulse control, and general well-being.
- Melatonin in the GI tract, in addition to promoting the natural production of melatonin in the pineal gland.
Essentially, L-tryptophan assists with sleep quality by aiding in the neurochemical processes associated with mood, relaxation, and natural melatonin production.
It’s a smart complement to Performance Lab’s natural melatonin content, given its participation in the serotonergic pathway, in which melatonin is a byproduct.
Also See: Zinc Benefits – 10 [New] Health Benefits and Dosage of Zinc
3) Magnesium (as Magnesium Bisglycinate, Magnesium Taurate, BioGenesis™), 100mg
Many nootropic nerds are well aware of the importance and massive health benefits of magnesium, an essential multi-purpose mineral involved in hundreds of bio-pathways. Smart pill and stimulant users often keep magnesium pills handy to slow down mental processes at night to achieve sufficient sleep.
For sleep purposes, magnesium supplements seem to work by:
- Inhibiting excitatory neurochemical impulses across the brain and body;
- Relaxing smooth muscle tissue prior to sleep;
- Facilitating a drop in blood pressure via relaxing vascular smooth muscle;
- Blocking acetylcholine activity within the neuromuscular junction to reduce sleep-disruptive muscle twitches.
Ever wake up from a night of binge drinking with uncontrollable muscle twitches? It’s partly because you urinated all of your electrolytes, including magnesium.
Ironically, you may have a hard time sleeping on the day of hangover due to a lack of this mineral.
Performance Lab’s magnesium ingredient actually encompasses three types of magnesium: Bisglycinate, Taurate, and BioGenesis™. Absorption is an issue when it comes to vitamins and minerals. And micronutrients that fail to absorb into the body don’t work as supplements.
These three magnesium types are advanced, high-absorption forms with unique sleep promoting properties, such as magnesium taurate’s addition of taurine, an amino acid associated with mental calm and relaxation.
- To Buy Performance Lab Sleep, Visit: www.PerformanceLab.com
How to Take Performance Lab Sleep
Prior to sleep, of course, and not with stimulants …of course.
Listed on the bottle’s label, the “Suggested Use” directions advise: “Take 2 to 4 capsules, 45-60 minutes before sleep. For best results use daily and consistently.”
What’s great about Performance Lab Sleep is that you can take this sleep aid supplement daily (or nightly, to be more accurate) without fear of developing a “habit,” so to speak. An addiction.
Its ingredients are safe and all-natural, and the experience (which I’ll detail below) isn’t so much “psychoactive,” as you’d expect from pharmaceutical grade sleeping pills, but rather quite subtle.
Quite simply, you take Performance Lab Sleep when you want to sleep, and this supplement helps you fall asleep and stay asleep. Easy peasy.
What About the Additives?
Yes, what about them?
Really, there’s not much to talk about here in terms of sheer numbers. However, what additive Performance Lab Sleep does have is worth talk about at great length. But I’ll limit myself to only a few words: Performance Lab’s Plantcaps® capsules are great.
A huge problem in the supplement industry is the subtle insertion of junky, risky additives to otherwise healthy, natural formulas.
There’s nothing like this in Performance Lab Sleep.
Whether sleep aid supplements or daytime energy boosters, or anything in between, many supplement products advertise themselves as natural health enhancement stacks, yet they encase their formulas with FD&C colorants, manufacturing lubricants, and God-knows-what-else.
If these additives don’t introduce any adverse health risks to the formula, odds are they’re at least tampering with the formula’s bio-availability and efficacy.
Performance Lab’s Plantcaps® are constructed out of fermented tapioca (pullulan – a prebiotic fiber), registering in the body as a food source and thus doing nothing to impair the formula’s absorption rates. Since they are prebiotic fiber, they’ll actually help improve your digestive comfort too.
The unsung heroes of this stack: the capsules.
Are There Any Side Effects?
None in my experience. And, frankly, I’d be surprised to hear of any.
Naturally, many of us use synthetic melatonin supplements with caution. We like them for their reliable sleep boosting effects, but we don’t like to take them too late in the night, lest we wake up groggy and foggy and irritated and ugly, in that baggy, sleepy sort of way.
Performance Lab’s use of natural melatonin, paired with L-tryptophan, mitigates much of the mild side effects associated with this ingredient.
My Experience
When you try one Performance Lab supplement, you’re soon enough trying them all. Or at least this has been my experience.
What’s particularly great about the Performance Lab line of supplements is how easily they stack together, and how you can customize your personal Performance Lab stack mix-and-match style.
However, regardless of my mood (yes, my choice in supplements can be quite *moody*, so to speak), Performance Lab Sleep has remained as part of my daily supplement regimen.
Good sleep is the best approach to mental and physical performance enhancement. And this has certainly been true in my case.
I’ve often espoused the immense health benefits of simply getting good sleep, yet I just as often would have a hard time actually heading to bed at a decent hour.
Performance Lab Sleep surprised me with how well it works at shutting up my anti-sleep stubbornness. It’s like it helps turn down the noise in my head so that the only thing I have to worry about is slipping into bed and falling asleep.
And the best part: waking up the next morning. No grogginess like with other sleep aids I’ve tried.
Also See: Best Pre Workout Supplement Reviews – Top 5 Products In 2020
After a night of Performance Lab Sleep-enhanced sleep, I feel like I somehow snuck an extra hour or two of sleep between the time I fell asleep and woke up. Simply falling asleep isn’t the only benefit to this supplement. The quality of sleep also improves, throwing your body into super-sleep mode.
Now, when the alarm goes off, I skip the “Snooze” button and I get up.
Prior to focusing on my sleep, I viewed cognitive enhancement merely as a matter of stimulation. I sought supplements and compounds that’d help wake up my brain during the daytime for better focus and work productivity.
However, Performance Lab Sleep has offered me a better, healthier solution to staying awake during the day: getting better sleep at night.
No doubt, I enjoy getting as much done as possible during the waking hours. This makes bedtime seem a barrier to – and not a necessary component of – my success, to my sense of daily fulfilment.
So, every now and then, I have to remind myself of how pleasant (not to mention necessary) relaxation and sleep can be. Performance Lab Sleep serves as this pleasant reminder.
Click here to buy or learn more about Performance Lab Sleep!
References:
https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/adult-health/in-depth/sleep-aids/art-20047860
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/sleep-aids
https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/are-drugstore-sleep-aids-safe
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6029681/