I'm a firefighter. For nine years my sleep schedule was whatever the tones decided — down at 1 a.m., up at 3:40, a call at 5, then expected to be a normal person on my days off. My body stopped knowing what time it was.
So I tried everything, in the order everyone tries it. Ten-milligram melatonin gummies — roughly twenty times what anyone needs — and waking up feeling worse than the shift did. Magnesium powders that tasted like pond water. A $60 tub of “sleep complex” that wouldn't tell me how much of anything was actually in it.
What finally moved my circadian rhythm was in the research, not on the label. Real glycine, at the dose the studies used. Half a milligram of melatonin, not ten. But there was nothing in that whole category I looked forward to drinking at 9 p.m. after a bad night — it was all chalk and lavender and being told to calm down.
So Sleepover is the thing I wanted on my own counter: the doses from the studies, in something that tastes like the popsicle you ate on the curb in July. My schedule is still a work in progress. Bedtime isn't.
