My dad and I have an intimate relationship with melatonin, the “sleep hormone”, and most especially ridiculous doses of melatonin. Dubbed “the master antioxidant” by independent researcher Doris Loh, beyond regulating sleep it’s got a variety of healing benefits for the cells that are waaay too much to list. One of the ones I’ve found myself curious about is: Does melatonin help with mold detox?
Certain mold doctors recommend melatonin due to its anti-inflammatory properties as an antioxidant, and serious inflammation. 2 years ago in 2023, while we lived in Houston, Texas, my dad dove deep into the rabbit-hole of high-dose melatonin to combat COVID exposure and his autoimmune disease…and that coincided with the start of the unhealthiest year of our life.
But first, let’s rewind back to 2020…
Exhibit A: Mold Exposure in a House
Man, mold nearly killed me. It wrecked me in more ways with one, in ways I couldn’t see.
For one, the stay in a friend’s house. Those two months of hell culminated in itchy swollen eyes, a fountain of clear mucus discharge, more tears than you can ever get cutting an onion, swollen sinuses through which I could barely breathe, nose strip usage that’d make Alex Hormozi wince, countless garbage bags of blown tissue, and the inability to stare at any screen for more than a few seconds.
Someone asked me, “Why do you stare like that?” My answer…yeah. I had nothing else to stare at.
I was barely alive. I couldn’t look at anything with eyes open. I couldn’t rest with eyes closed.
As soon as I stepped outside the house into an industrial zone filled with exhaust and toxic dust, I felt better. No, not because of the air pollution — DESPITE it.
The only thing that helped me live inside this house was a whole-plant, high-bioavailability liquid hemp extract, and regrettably, that formulation went out of production a year later.
We had to get out.
Exhibit B: Mold Exposure in an Apartment
Three years later…the Houston apartment from hell. Oh my god, the first-floor apartment from hell. Where do I start? Where do I begin? Let’s list all the symptoms:
- Couldn’t focus for hours on end
- Irritability
- Near-constant arguments
- Brain fog
- Hair-trigger temper
- Headaches
- Fatigue
- Runny nose
- Sneezing
- Worsening sleep deprivation…to where we’d only get up to 2 hours of sleep a night. Both of us.
- Waking up at 3 AM in the morning
I tried, and tried, and tried to focus…but I was nearly dead inside. My dad was suffering beyond all belief. He could barely work.
The worst part? These symptoms were insidious. For months, we weren’t sure what the hell was going on. You sure as heck don’t know where it comes from, because it’s so gradual and stealthy.
We didn’t see absurd amounts of mold. We didn’t see big, black spots… well, other than the ones in the grout in our shower.
But the moment we saw a bulging, leaking baseboard in our bathroom, a lightbulb went off in my dad’s head. He remembered a dude he came across on LinkedIn called Matt Kelly — a “Mold Specialist” with a self-quiz to identify mold symptoms.
Mold is invisible.
We took the quizzes, checked off all the symptoms we’d experienced over the past 6 months, and were shocked. I scored 80% and my dad scored 100%.
Unfortunately, the management refused to do anything about it. In a bizarre turn of timing, a family matter popped up that urgently required we move out.
As soon as we hit the road out from Houston and we had to sleep in the car, we we had several hours of the best, deepest sleep we had in well over a year. And that wasn’t in the most comfortable of seats. In a car.
You know what was different? We were in an environment without mold.
I am so beyond grateful for that experience.
Unfortunately…after months of being mold-free in Canada, we’re experiencing the same symptoms again. Guess what else lines up? Yep, all of those symptoms occurred in homes with mold growth. And worst of all — we are experiencing sleep deprivation like crazy. Waking up at 6 AM…again.
During the summer, we opened the windows, and that seemed to take care of things…until the autumn came, and then the winter. Uh-oh.
It’s been an uphill battle with this disease. So, when we could do nothing else, and we’ve had to stay at home, what do we make do with?
Melatonin to the Rescue
That’s right: melatonin. Remember that article I linked above? You know, the one on high-dose melatonin? We take the PureBulk powder in doses of quarter-teaspoons, which amount to 750-800mg per scoop.
“Hold on now, Alexander… are you crazy!?”
Both myself and my dad are neurodivergent. I’m autistic and ADHD, and my dad is ADHD (he believes he might be autistic too). We spend our lives coping with melatonin deficiency (and unbalanced levels of the things we need to regulate our emotions). Neurodivergent immune systems are a more sensitive beast than normies’ immune systems, in that we are at far greater risk of inflammation, with higher levels of certain inflammatory proteins in the blood, gut and brain. That’s the reason why I had such a severe allergic reaction to gluten & wheat at age 7 — an allergy that my parents permanently addressed by putting me cold-turkey on the Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD).
Our immune systems are at greater risk of flaring up, and being kicked into dysfunction, from mold exposure. Melatonin, being “the master antioxidant”, plays a key role in combatting this systemic damage.
Back to our experience. Back in Houston, we were taking up to a total of 15 grams throughout the day, and we found it helped.
At a bare minimum, we take a total of 1.5g of melatonin daily, and we always take it with liposomal vitamin C. Usually, these days, I take up to 3g a day, and my dad takes more. Doris Loh’s protocols for melatonin, both against COVID and in daily use, suggest a weight-based dose, so that’s what we do.
One night, I went to bed shaking, moving, and tossing and turning. I could barely sleep.
The next morning, I got up at 6 AM and couldn’t stand still.
This is unusual. I don’t have to try to stop myself from moving and I can fall asleep. What’s going on? Is my mind too active?
Actually, no. There was something going on in my immune system. I just couldn’t figure out what it was.
Normally, my regular dose of melatonin would help me have a sound sleep. But that didn’t work at all.
So, Does Melatonin Help with Mold Toxicity?
Yes, according to my anecdotal results.
The first morning, after hours of kicking myself in the ass, I got up and had 2 quarter-teaspoons of PureBulk melatonin with 1 gram of Natural Factors liposomal vitamin C (check price on Amazon). It didn’t work.
The second morning, when I got up at 6 AM, I did the same, but with 3 quarter-teaspoons of melatonin. That’s 2 grams. I got even more sleep in the morning than I seemed to have gotten all midnight. It worked!
When I went to bed that same day, I took that same 2-gram dose before going to sleep — this time increasing my vitamin C dose to 1.5g. My dad took a total 6 grams of melatonin within less than 4 hours.
SUCCESS. We both had the soundest sleep we’ve had in a long time. I woke up to see this sleep graph on my Apple Watch, and was so excited, I shared it with friends on Facebook:
It’s bad to live in a home with mold toxicity, but clearly the antioxidant properties are helping our immune systems cope with all the stuff that’s going on inside.
Give melatonin a shot. If you find you get TOO sleepy, well… it’s a sign you’ve been sleep-deprived. More on that in High-Dose Melatonin: Why We’re Taking 1,000+ mg a Day (And You Might Want To, Too).
There are other things we’re doing to address mold toxicity, such as getting our home ERMI-tested to check for the presence of mold. Wanna find out the results? Stay tuned for more!
Update — December 31, 2025
We’ve been spending our holiday vacation in Niagara Falls, and we chose to stay in a 107-year-old traditional bed and breakfast in Lincoln. Unfortunately, as it turns out.
Inside the old B&B, we barely slept, and I experienced extreme “200 km/h irritation”, severe brain fog, forgetfulness, and stuttering. All of these symptoms disappeared while we were away.
It turned out that the home had poor indoor air quality due to a lack of proper ventilation. There was a barely adequate furnace, the windows had to be mostly shut, and our room needed to be heated using a portable heater. I reported the symptoms in Matt Kelly’s mold group of 107,000 members worldwide and got dozens of responses, most of which attributed my experience to mycotoxins. If not mycotoxins, it was Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) and excessively high levels of indoor CO2!
Melatonin to the rescue. While we needed the windows open at a bare minimum, and dressed up accordingly in freezing temperatures, the only thing that helped us sleep was melatonin — again, per Doris Loh’s protocol. We had almost hourly doses of 750-800mg each, and before bed, I increased my dose to 2.2 to 3.7mg. Only when I increased that before-bed dose did I get any sound sleep.
By the time we left and checked into a much healthier, more modern hotel, we noticed something. After just one night, we forgot to take melatonin in the morning. We still felt good. We didn’t feel sick, we weren’t tired, and our minds were intact. Even after being ‘behind’ on our melatonin dose. In fact, we’re already 3 nights into this hotel, and both my dad and I found that we’ve only had to take 1.5g of melatonin before bed.
This goes to show that melatonin really does help us in moldy homes. While the ideal solution is to get out of a contaminated home as early and as often as possible, high doses of melatonin at least provided us with some comfort when we went to bed.
The contrasting experience between the B&B and the hotel highlights the fact that melatonin does serve its purpose as a ‘master antioxidant’. It helps repair the oxidative stress caused by the mycotoxins and VOCs we breathe in unhealthy air, especially when our immune and nervous systems were already primed by prior mold exposure.
I have quite the story to tell about our experience: I Nearly Died in a 107-Year-Old Niagara Bed and Breakfast (coming soon!) This stay changed our life. It might help you reconsider where you choose to travel for the sake of your health.