This Week In Lights Out: Four Fixes, Three Of Them Free
The air in your room, the form in your bottle, the light on your face, and the dose nobody ever checked for you.
Four letters this week, and a pattern I did not plan when I sat down to write them. Every culprit turned out to be something sold to you or something printed on a label, and every fix was smaller than the problem it solved. Here is the whole week in one place, in case a night got away from you.
Four culprits, four fixes, and not one of them needed a subscription.
MONDAY
Your closed bedroom door is costing you deep sleep.
Deep sleep slid from 20.4% of the night down to 14.4% as the carbon dioxide in the room climbed, so open the door and let the air have somewhere to go.
TUESDAY
The magnesium in that viral recipe is the laxative one.
Citrate empties a bowel and bisglycinate reaches a brain, so make the swap and take 250 mg of elemental magnesium around an hour before bed.
WEDNESDAY
The cortisol panic is pointed at the wrong thing.
Ten minutes of outdoor light before 9am sets the hormone curve that decides whether your afternoon ends at the biscuit tin.
THURSDAY
Almost nine in ten melatonin gummies are mislabelled.
Aim at 0.3 to 0.5 mg taken about 90 minutes before bed, and stop buying a hormone in candy form.
If you only do one thing this weekend, open the bedroom door and let the room breathe.
That one is free, it takes four seconds, and it had the largest measured effect of anything I wrote about this week. Then, if you have five spare minutes on Saturday, try this.
WEEKEND CHALLENGE
Empty the sleep drawer onto the kitchen counter.
Every bottle, tub and half finished bag of gummies. Turn each one around and write down two things for each, the form and the elemental dose. Inside five minutes you will know which ones were never going to work. Then hit reply with the worst label in the pile, because I want to see what the industry has been selling you.