Do Natural Sleep Supplements Work?

Search for natural sleep supplements and you will find ranked lists: the seven best, the ten best, this year's top five. This page used to be one of them.

The problem with a ranking is that it implies the items on it work, just some better than others. When you check the guidelines, that is not what you find.

What the guidelines reviewed — and rejected

The American Academy of Sleep Medicine's 2017 guideline on insomnia medicines looked at fourteen options. Three of them are sold as supplements, and all three got the same answer.2

Melatonin. The guideline suggests clinicians not use melatonin for trouble falling asleep or staying asleep in adults with chronic insomnia.2 It may still help with short-term sleep problems caused by jet lag or shift work — a different problem from chronic insomnia, and one where timing rather than sedation is doing the work.3 We cover nightly melatonin use separately.

Valerian. The same guideline recommends against valerian for treating chronic insomnia, on the grounds that there is not enough evidence it improves sleep outcomes in adults with the condition.2

L-tryptophan. Also recommended against, and for the same reason: a lack of evidence of benefit in chronic insomnia.2

What the AASM did not assess — and why that is not good news

The AASM guideline did not look at the supplements below. The VA/DoD guideline did, and its 2025 update recommends against kava, suggests against cannabis, chamomile, melatonin and valerian, and found too little evidence to recommend for or against magnesium.5 NCCIH, which reviews exactly this kind of product, is the other place to look.

Chamomile. Traditionally used for sleep, usually as a tea. There is no conclusive evidence from clinical trials that it helps insomnia.1 People have used it for a long time; trials have not shown that it works.

Magnesium. This has the least discouraging evidence of the group. NCCIH cites a 2021 review suggesting magnesium may help older adults with insomnia fall asleep faster — but the reviewers rated the studies low quality, and they measured only how long it took to fall asleep, not whether people stayed asleep.1

Cannabis and CBD. A 2020 review of twelve studies and 250 participants found insufficient evidence to support cannabinoids for chronic insomnia.1 The 2025 VA/DoD guideline suggests against them.5

Kava. Here the issue is safety rather than effectiveness. NCCIH states that kava use has been linked to liver injury that is sometimes serious or even fatal,1 and the VA/DoD guideline's recommendation against it is its strongest grade of all the supplements listed.5

Some supplements from the earlier version of this page are gone. We could not find an NIH or guideline source for them, so rather than describe them in vague, hedged language, we left them out.

The quality problem sitting underneath all of it

Supplements in the US are regulated as food, not as medicine. What is in the bottle is less predictable than with a prescription drug.

A 2017 analysis of 31 melatonin supplements found that in most of the products tested the amount of melatonin did not match the label, and that 26% contained serotonin.63

And melatonin is the most studied supplement in this group. It is reasonable to assume the rest of the shelf is no better.

What NCCIH says instead

After reviewing these approaches, NCCIH puts it in a single sentence:

"The treatment most strongly recommended for insomnia remains multicomponent cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I)."1

The American College of Physicians agrees. Its guideline says all adults with chronic insomnia disorder should receive CBT-I as their first treatment — a strong recommendation based on moderate-quality evidence.4

If you have tried supplement after supplement without much improvement, the evidence suggests that is not surprising. It is not a personal failure. The approach with the strongest evidence behind it is a completely different kind of treatment.