After 18+ Months Of Terrible Sleep, This Sleep Supplement Finally Helped 

I've always described my sleep as "normal." Like most people, I go through periods of rough nights, but I also have many stretches of goods ones. So the most I'd ever really do for my sleep is follow a (very) basic sleep hygiene practice: Eat a few hours before bedtime if possible, dim the lights in the evening, have a few wind-down rituals while I was getting ready for bed, and get some morning sunshine.

My partner Chris, on the other hand, struggles immensely with sleep. Several years ago, I put him onto mindbodygreen's sleep support+ to help.* It'd consistently been one of our best selling and highest-rated supplements, so as I told him, "it's worth a shot!"*

Turns out I was right. He now never misses a night, except when he forgets to pack it on trips and boy does he notice it.

I've taken my fair share of supplements over the years—collagen powders, beauty supplements, vitamin D gels, prenatals, multis—but I had not needed a sleep aid. So I never added it to the roster.

My sleep struggles happened well before our daughter was born. Like many pregnant women, hormonal fluctuations and general comfort stoped me form getting a real nights sleep for months on end. Then of course, she arrived. On Christmas day. The best day of my life, and the greatest gift I'll ever receive.

In the early months, I was up every two to three hours—pumping, pumping, and pumping again. I was in the throes of my breastfeeding journey and working hard to maintain my low milk supply. I couldn't afford to miss a session. Not one. The fear of my supply dropping even further kept me on the kind of internal alarm system that keeps you from from feeling rested. Even as you're falling asleep, whatever little sleep you can get, you're always anticipating the next wakeup.

This is a specific kind of exhaustion that's hard to describe to someone who hasn't lived it. It's not just being tired. It's being tired while also being perpetually on call. Your body doesn't know how to fully let go.

Just when things started to improve—when my daughter was sleeping longer stretches and I thought I could too—she had a medical emergency. It happened at night.

I'm not going to go into the details here. What I will say is that it changed the way I slept. Even after she recovered, even after things stabilized, even when we got to the bottom of what caused it—my nervous system didn't let go. I slept on the floor of her nursery in case it happened again. I'd wake up at the slightest sound. I'd lie awake running through scenarios. Sleep stopped feeling like rest and started feeling like a test I kept failing.

At some point, my partner and I had an honest conversation about it. Something had to change. Waiting it out wasn't working.

So we made a plan. I moved off the air-mattress on her floor and back into our bedroom. We got a new monitoring set-up in the nursery to give us more peace of mind. I got a light mask, the kind that fully blocks out every sliver of morning light so I could sleep in on days when he got up with her in the morning. We did breathwork together before bed. I restarted talk therapy, which helped me deal with the heavy feelings I was dealing with.

Here's the thing about being a new mom, especially one whose child has had health scares: you cannot be "off" at night. Not even a little.

My fear with sleep supplements or aids was that they could make you groggy. "Knock you out" as some folks say. I didn't want that. I was afraid that I'd be slow to snap to action if I needed to. That I'd feel foggy or heavy in a way that would compromise my ability to be a parent. It felt like a real risk.

Chris, my other friends, and co-workers who took sleep support+, assured me that wouldn't be the case. To start, it doesn't contain melatonin. That was the first thing that made me reconsider.

I want to be honest here, because I think a lot of supplement reviews skip right to the part where it solves their whole lives.

The first week or so, I was still skeptical. I kept taking it. By the second and third week, something started to shift. I was falling asleep more easily. The lying-awake-running-through-scenarios part got shorter. I started waking up feeling like I'd actually slept.*

The thing I was most afraid of—feeling groggy, off, or "knocked out"—didn't happen. I woke up clear. Alert. Present in a way I hadn't been in a long time. On the nights my daughter needed me, I was fully there.

sleep support+ is not a magic fix. It didn't undo 18 months of disrupted sleep overnight. And it works best as part of a broader approach, which in my case included therapy, a better sleep environment, and a lot of patience with myself.

But it helped. And it did so without making me feel like I had to choose between sleeping better and staying sharp.*