Wow, and this didn't get pm'ed to me??? ;P :: teasing :::

Okay, so the whole no-steady-sleep-schedule. I deal with that, too. It's a losing battle, don't bother trying to fight it until you actually -have- the privalege. Instead of trying to schedule your sleep, schedule your melatonin. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Do you typically go to bed the same length of time after finishing your day? (As in, you get home from school and athletics, spend roughly the same amount of time on homework (give or take say 45 min), and then wait a certain amount of time after homework is done to go to bed). If so, you can still train your body to read the ques form the different tasks. It might be as simple as "Okay, JDA's studying. Based off that the body knows there's approximately _____ minutes before sleep time." Add to this a sleep trigger and you're golden. Take a daily shower at night before bed. If you take a 15 minute shower 45 minutes before bed, then take your melatonin after you've bathed, your body will learn to translate showering to a spike in the melatonin...which will mean you'll be more prone to sleeping within an hour or so after your shower.

Regardless, take the melatonin 30 minutes before going to bed. If you wake up in the middle of the night it's fine to take more, especially if the dose is low. You're starting at 1mg (common starting dose). You can try taking 2 at bedtime to avoid waking up if you think you're getting resistant to it. It's common to wake up in the middle of sleep during the first month of taking it. Melatonin is a quick acting med moreso than a build-up med.

Melatonin won't typically cause you to oversleep, especially if you have an active morning routine with an alarm clock. What's important is the getting sleep throughout the night. If you don't want to up your dose, yu can also get the Extender Release version of melatonin. It's designed to slowly release half the pill over the night to keep you asleep. You will eventually have to up your dose, but take it day by day.

For staggering and skipping, once you have set up a routine for taking the med (like with the nightly shower thing), after say a month, you'll want to be aware of when it starts requiring more tonin on a regular basis to have the full effect. When that happens, continue the trigger schedule of showering 45 min before bed but change up when you take the meds and how much. Maybe alternate the weeks so that on odd days you take half of what you'd normally take, and even days are a full dose. Occasionally skipping doses (sporadically, as if you've forgotten them) will help keep your body from learning the rhythm. But you don't need