Everyone can appreciate a delicious beverage, and if it helps you navigate Dry January while also making it easier for you to fall asleep, what’s not to love? TikTok is currently all about the so-called "Sleepy Girl Mocktail," a drink made with tart cherry juice and a bunch of link-in-bio supplements. But will it actually help you sleep? Well…maybe.
How do you make the Sleepy Girl Mocktail?
After completing entire minutes of TikTok research, I can report that the Sleepy Girl Mocktail has three key ingredients:
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Tart cherry juice
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Seltzer
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Magnesium supplement powder
The various TikTok creators making this drink each put their own spin on it. Sometimes you use a specific amount of tart cherry juice and then add seltzer to fill your glass; sometimes the other way around. You can toss in a fancy ice cube. You can use a flavored seltzer. And you can, of course, argue that you should use this brand or type of magnesium instead of that one.
Supplement marketing seems to be driving this trend. (Whichever one the creator recommends is usually available for purchase if you click through to their storefront.) One of the top results for the mocktail recipe on TikTok is from Moon Juice, which sells a $10/ounce magnesium powder. (A normal price for magnesium supplements is more like $1/ounce, as in this one-pound tub from Nutricost. Just saying.)
Does tart cherry juice really help you sleep?
Maybe. Tart cherry juice contains a small amount of natural melatonin, and melatonin is a hormone that our body uses to recognize when it’s nighttime. Melatonin supplements are widely available, and you can pick up some melatonin pills or gummies at any old grocery store if you’d like to see how it affects your sleep.
That said, melatonin can have side effects if taken in large doses, and it isn’t a quick fix for a messed-up sleep schedule. It's best to think of it as one potential tool you can use to get better sleep—one part of a larger picture.
Many fruits do contain melatonin. Tart cherry has higher levels than most, so it’s fair to ask whether tart cherries, or their juice, really help you sleep. Several studies have done just that, and they don’t provide conclusive evidence either way. A 2010 study on 15 older adults with insomnia found that tart cherry juice may help with sleep, but not as much as melatonin supplements, sleep medications, or cognitive-behavioral therapy. Examine.com, which collects the results of a wide range of supplement studies, could only conclude that tart cherry juice is “possibly” helpful for improving your sleep quality.
Does magnesium really help you sleep?
The verdict on the sleepy time benefits of magnesium is also unclear. There is some evidence to suggest magnesium may help with sleep, but as with tart cherry juice, the evidence isn’t very strong, and many people find that it has no effect on their sleep.
One thing we do know about magnesium is that, taken in large doses, it can have a laxative effect. Sometimes people take magnesium supplements specifically for this reason—it’s sometimes recommended as a treatment for constipation. This laxative effect is more pronounced in some forms of magnesium than others. For example, magnesium carbonate, magnesium chloride, magnesium gluconate, magnesium hydroxide, and magnesium oxide are the most likely to trigger it, according to Examine.com, but effects vary from person to person. On TikTok I saw creators saying to avoid magnesium citrate because it “cleans you out,” but the conventional advice is that magnesium citrate is the least likely to have a laxative effect.
Whichever supplements you choose, you may want to experiment with a small dose before stirring a heaping spoonful into your Sleepy Girl Mocktail.
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