Does the sleepy girl mocktail (magnesium with cherry juice) help you sleep?

Cherry juice naturally contains a small amount of magnesium, but it is not a rich source. The 'sleepy girl mocktail' combines cherry juice with magnesium powder, and its popularity on social media has far outpaced the available research. There is simply no study that has tested this specific combination.

The magnesium component has the most support, but even that is limited. In older people with sleep problems, three small experiments together found that magnesium helped people fall asleep on average about 17 minutes faster compared with a placebo. That sounds promising, but all three studies had methodological shortcomings, and the total number of participants was only 151. In people with diabetes, a larger experiment (290 participants) showed that magnesium reduced the severity of insomnia. In healthy adults without a specific condition, no well-designed study has yet demonstrated a clear sleep benefit.

People who already get little magnesium through their diet appear more likely to benefit. A large population study found that people with the highest dietary magnesium intake were 36% less likely to sleep too little than people with the lowest intake. But that is an observational association: people who eat a lot of magnesium-rich foods often also live more healthily in other respects.

Cherry juice as a separate ingredient cannot be assessed for sleep on the basis of the available studies: that evidence is simply absent from the source texts. Anyone considering trying magnesium as a supplement for sleep would do well to know that it has the greatest chance of success in people with a deficiency or a specific condition. For healthy people without a deficiency, the effect on sleep has not yet been convincingly demonstrated.