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Drinking your own urine first thing every morning may ‘promote tranquility
during meditation’, according to two Australian researchers. Urine is rich
in melatonin, a hormone which can make people feel slightly sedated. This
could explain why traditional yogis of the Indian subcontinent recommend
the practice, known as amaroli (Medical Hypotheses, vol 36, p 195).

Melatonin is released by the brain’s pineal gland during the night;
its production is shut off by light shining into a person’s eyes. No one
is quite sure what melatonin does, but it plays some role in setting our
various daily (circadian) rhythms and may even be part of the body’s ‘master
clock’. A dose of melatonin can act as a modest pain killer and can make
people feel sleepy. It seems to lessen the trauma of jetlag if taken at
bedtime after a flight.

M. Mills and T. Faunce of the University of Newcastle in New South Wales,
speculate on why yogis drink urine. They say that taking melatonin, in urine
or otherwise, just as you wake up, may ‘convince the body that it has had
more sleep’. This is handy if your daily regime includes meditation at 4
am. It might also reduce the pain of sitting absolutely still for two hours,
say the scientists.

Melatonin must be taken regularly for several weeks to reset sleep cycles,
and similarly the traditional yogic texts urge that ‘auto-urine’ be taken
daily over a month. Melatonin might also slow brain-wave activity, so enhancing
meditative practices, say the researchers.

It might even be true, as the yogis maintain, that quaffing the urine
of prepubescent children is even more effective than drinking your own.
Mills and Faunce say that the night-time production of melatonin falls at
puberty as sleep quality declines.

The psychologists speculate that drinking one’s own urine before dawn
could restore blood melatonin to night-time levels. They suggest a double-blind
experiment to test their theory. In the experiment, some yogis would drink
their night urine while others, unbeknown to themselves or the scientists,
would consume their stored daytime urine instead. A comparison of the levels
of melatonin in their blood and their mental states should then settle the
question.