I have started drinking tart cherry juice and eating a kiwi before bed. The theory being that kiwi’s have serotonin and tart cherry juice has melatonin that help you sleep. Seems to be working for me. It just seems weird to me that they have serotonin and melatonin. I’m also wondering what other hormones can you get from plants?
It’s all just chemistry. Many compounds/molecules/whatever basically self-assemble and then from there the kinds of reactions are limited by chemistry.
From there evolution took over and found ways of doing things. Once it found those ways, it got past to everything that came after. Melatonin originally evolved in bacteria as an antioxidant.
From there it became useful for other things like regulating growth and as stress response as well as managing circadian rhythms and such like.
Another fun thing about Melatonin is also that nocturnal animals produce it basically the same way - dim light makes them produce melatonin while bright light flushes the melatonin out of their system. The melatonin itself just affects their nervous system in the opposite way and acts like a stimulant, so they get less sleepy when they have a lot of it. I think that’s kinda neat and maybe a bit counterintuitive if you have never thought about it before. I sure know that I would have either expected nocturnal animals to have their own separate compound or to produce melatonin at daytime.