Noreen Malone becomes a guinea pig for "relaxation beverages":
I've racked my brain fruitlessly trying to think of a brand name that is more smarmily of our era than iChill, which conjures Steve Jobs and Jack Johnson hanging out on some Jersey beach together. I ended up taking iChill twice under more prosaic circumstances, once in the afternoon after a box of it arrived for me in my office and my cubicle-mates peer-pressured me into sampling it, and again before bedtime to "unwind from the grind," per its slogan.
Downing a shot of something stiffer would have been less debilitating to my work than that afternoon iChill; within an hour, I was utterly drained and ineffective. Coffee did nothingit couldn't wake me up, or counteract iChill's disgusting "blissful berry flavor". At night, on the other hand, iChill had no discernible effect.
Perhaps that makes sense: iChill contains a whopping 5 mg of melatonin, hundreds of times the natural dose, and as Dr. Czeisler pointed out, supplemental melatonin is far more likely to be effective if it's taken at a time when your body isn't already producing the substancethe afternoonthan at bedtime.