By Roy, founder Last updated 01/10/2026
You are standing in the kitchen at 9.45pm deciding what to take. You have a bottle of melatonin someone brought back from the States, or a pack from the chemist, and you have heard about Settl. Here is the honest version of that choice.
Settl is a nightly sleep powder. One scoop in cold water before bed. It is built to do four things: get to sleep faster, wake less at 3am, sleep deeper, wake up refreshed. There is no melatonin in it, and that is on purpose.
Melatonin is a hormone your body makes when the light drops. As a supplement it is a timing signal. It tells your body that night has started. That is a real and useful job, and it is a narrower job than most people think.
What each one is for
| Melatonin | Settl | |
|---|---|---|
| Main job | Shift when you fall asleep | The whole night, from the wind-down to the morning |
| Best case | Jet lag, a new shift roster, a body clock that has drifted late | Tired but wired at 11pm, the 3am wake, a flat morning |
| The 3am wake | Not what it is built for | Built for it. 900mg inositol and 1,000mg sodium hold the back half |
| The next morning | The groggy morning is the complaint we hear most | No melatonin, so there is nothing to clear in the morning |
| What is in it | One hormone | Seven actives, every dose printed on the tub |
| Legal status in Australia | Pharmacist-only or prescription, depending on your age and the dose | A food. Sold online, delivered to your door |
| Habit | Doses creep. Plenty of people end up on 5mg or 10mg nightly | One scoop, same every night |
Where melatonin wins
If your problem is the clock, melatonin is the right tool. You landed from London on Tuesday and your body thinks it is 4pm at midnight. You just moved from day shift to nights. Your sleep has slid to 2am and you need to drag it back. In those cases a small dose, taken early, does a job nothing in Settl is designed to do.
If a doctor prescribed it, keep taking it and talk to them before you change anything. Settl is a food, not a medicine, and it does not replace anything you were prescribed.
Where melatonin stops
Three things come up over and over from people who have used it for years.
It gets you down, not through. Melatonin tells your body to start the night. It does nothing in particular at 3am, which is when most of the people who find Settl are waking. If you fall asleep fine and the problem is the ceiling stare at 3.10am, melatonin was never aimed at your problem. Why you keep waking up at 3am covers what is actually going on.
The morning. The dose that feels strong enough at night is often still in your system at 7am. People describe it as fog, or feeling like the night did not finish. Settl leaves nothing to clear in the morning, because there is no sedative in it. The wake-up-refreshed outcome is the one customers mention most once they have swapped.
The creep. Melatonin is sold as natural, so people treat a nightly 10mg gummy as harmless. The bottles bought online are mostly imported and the doses on them are far above what a body makes on its own. Is melatonin over the counter in Australia? explains why the chemist will not just hand it over.
What Settl does instead
No sedative. Seven actives that each cover one part of the night, with the dose on the label.
| Part of the night | What is in the scoop |
|---|---|
| Getting to sleep | 200mg L-theanine, 3,000mg glycine, 50mg chamomile extract 45:1 |
| Staying asleep | 900mg inositol, magnesium glycinate at 146mg elemental, 200mg potassium |
| Waking up clear | 1,000mg sodium, so eight hours without water does not wake you dried out and needing to get up |
Zero sugar. No proprietary blend, so the amount on the label is the amount in the scoop. Packed in Sydney, in a TGA-licensed GMP facility. The full panel is on the ingredients page, and why Settl has no melatonin is the longer version of the reasoning.
Who should pick which
Pick melatonin if you are crossing time zones this week, you are changing shifts, or a doctor has put you on it.
Pick Settl if you fall asleep and wake at 3am, you lie there tired but wired, you have had the groggy morning one too many times, or you have quietly accepted that broken sleep is just the deal from here.
Both? Some people use melatonin for the first few nights of a new time zone and Settl every night. That is fine. They are not doing the same job.
Try it on our word, not yours
Thirty nights to change your mind. Take it every night for a month. If Settl has not become part of how you go to bed, email hello@besettl.com.au and we refund your first tub in full. Keep the tub. Nothing to post back.
First tub $69.99, then $89.99 a month, inc. GST. Cancel, pause or skip any time. Start For $69.99
Or buy a single tub, $99. One-time order. Nothing renews.
Order by 2pm Sydney time for same-day dispatch from Sydney.
Cheers, Roy