I was standing on a kitchen chair in my pajamas at 3:08 AM last March trying to pry a 9-volt battery out of a smoke detector when I realized I couldn't remember the last time I'd slept through an entire night.
Not a single one. Not in 6 months. Maybe 9. Maybe a year. I genuinely could not tell you.
The smoke detector was chirping that slow chirp. The one that goes off every 47 seconds and you can't ignore. I'd dragged a dining room chair from the kitchen table across the linoleum, climbed up barefoot, and started fighting with a plastic cover that wouldn't come off. My hands weren't working right. My eyes weren't focusing right. The chair wobbled.
And I stood up there in a pair of grey sweatpants and one of my husband's old Vermillion High School T-shirts and I started crying.
Not loud crying. The other kind. The kind you do at 3 in the morning when you don't want to wake anyone up and you're already so tired your whole face has given up.
My daughter Ava came downstairs at 3:14 AM. She's 16. She'd heard me through the floor of her bedroom.
She walked into the kitchen, looked up at me on the chair, looked at the smoke detector still chirping, looked at my face, and said: "Mom. How long has it been since you actually slept."
I couldn't answer her.
I think that was the moment.
Let me back up.
My name is Renae. I'm 54 years old. I live in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in a 3-bedroom ranch on the west side near the Empire Mall. I've worked at the Sanford Health billing office for 22 years. I'm a coding specialist. I spend my days in a cubicle reading EOBs and figuring out why somebody's claim got denied for a missing modifier. I'm good at it. It's quiet work and I like quiet work.
I have one daughter. Ava. She's a junior in high school. Honor roll. Plays the cello. Saves her McDonald's gift cards from her grandparents for a year so she can buy clothes she actually wants. She's a good kid.
My husband Greg is a foreman at the John Morrell plant. He works second shift. He leaves the house at 2:15 PM, gets home at 11:48 PM, eats a sandwich in front of the TV, and is in bed by 12:30. He sleeps like the dead. He has slept like the dead for the 26 years I've known him. He could sleep through a tornado siren. He has, actually, twice.
I have not slept like that since 2019.
I want to tell you what my nights had become. Because if you have nights like this, you need to hear somebody else say it out loud. Because it's the kind of thing you don't tell people. You don't tell the woman at the desk next to you that you've been awake since 2:47 AM. You don't tell the cashier at the gas station that you watched the clock change from 4:13 to 4:14 to 4:15 for 18 minutes last night. You just say "I'm tired" and people say "me too" and you both move on.
But this wasn't tired. This was something else.
I would fall asleep around 11. Then I'd wake up at 1:14 AM. Or 2:47 AM. Or 3:08 AM. Some random time. And I'd lay there.
I'd lay there with my eyes wide open and my mind running through everything. Bills I hadn't paid. A conversation I'd had with my sister 11 years ago that I wished had gone differently. The face my mother made when she was dying in 2017. The way Ava's room used to look when she was 4 and she had a Dora the Explorer rug.
Just running. Running and running and running and never stopping.
I'd try the tricks. I'd count backwards from 300. I'd do the 4-7-8 breathing the woman on Instagram said worked. I'd get up and drink water. I'd get up and read on the couch until my eyes hurt. I'd lay back down. I'd try to fall back asleep. Sometimes I'd manage 47 minutes around 5:30. Sometimes I'd just lay there until Greg's alarm went off at 6:15 and I'd get up and start the coffee.
I was running on fumes. And the fumes had stopped working.
My doctor put me on trazodone in 2022. It worked for a while. Then it didn't. He switched me to mirtazapine. That worked for 4 months. Then it didn't, and I gained 19 pounds, and I went off it. He suggested Ambien. I tried it twice and woke up with no memory of the previous evening both times. I threw the pills away.
I tried melatonin gummies. I tried valerian root. I tried CBD oil under my tongue. I tried magnesium glycinate. I tried tart cherry juice. I tried Calm by Natural Vitality. I tried a weighted blanket that cost $89 and made me hot. I tried lavender essential oil in a diffuser. I tried a white noise machine. I tried a brown noise machine. I tried sleeping on the couch. I tried sleeping with no pillow.
Nothing worked. Or things worked for a little while and then stopped working.
I read 14 articles about sleep hygiene. I knew about the blue light from screens. I knew about magnesium. I knew about caffeine half-life. I'd done it all. Every recommendation. Every trick. Every supplement at the Hy-Vee on Minnesota Avenue.
I want to tell you what it does to a person. To a 54 year old woman with a husband and a teenage daughter and a job and a mortgage and a mother who passed 8 years ago and a sister who lives in Omaha. It hollows you out.
Not the way grief does. The other way. It hollows you out so slowly you don't notice it's happening. One day you laugh at something and the laugh sounds tinny, like it came from somebody else's chest. One day you forget your debit card PIN at the gas pump and stand there for 4 minutes before you remember it. One day your daughter says something funny at dinner and you smile but you don't really hear what she said.
You become a hologram of yourself. The shape is right. The lights are dim.
That's where I was on the night of March 4th when the smoke detector started chirping at 3:06 AM.
Ava stood in the kitchen looking up at me. I climbed down off the chair. I sat at the kitchen table. I put my head in my hands. She got the smoke detector down herself, because at 16 she's taller than me, and she popped the battery out, and the chirping stopped.
She sat down across from me at the table.
She said, "Mom. You haven't been sleeping for like, a year."
I said, "I know."
She said, "What are you going to do."
That was the question that put me on the floor. Because I had no answer. I had tried everything I knew to try. And my daughter was sitting across from me at 3:18 AM asking me what I was going to do.
I cried for a while. She just sat there. She didn't try to fix it. She didn't lecture me. She just sat.
After a while she said, "I'm gonna text Aunt Jen tomorrow."
Aunt Jen is my sister. She lives in Omaha. She's 6 years older than me. We're not close the way some sisters are close. We're close the way sisters are close when their mother is dead. There's a kind of communication that happens between sisters in that situation that doesn't need a lot of words.
Ava sent her the text at 7:14 AM the next morning. I saw it on her phone when she put it down for breakfast.
It said: "Aunt Jen, I think Mom needs help. She hasn't slept in like a year and I found her crying on a chair last night. Don't tell her I told you."
My sister called me at 11:27 that morning while I was at my desk at Sanford.
She didn't say anything about Ava's text. She said, "Renae, what are you doing for lunch."
I said, "Eating a yogurt at my desk."
She said, "I'm driving up Saturday. I'll be there by noon. We're going to lunch at Minerva's and then you and I are going to talk."
She got there Saturday at 12:11 PM. We sat in a booth at Minerva's and she ordered a chicken Caesar wrap and I ordered the same thing because I couldn't focus enough to read the menu.
She looked at me across the table and she said, "Renae. You look terrible."
I started crying right there in the booth.
She didn't ask me what was wrong. She already knew. She'd been through it herself. That's what I hadn't known.
She told me she'd had a stretch from 2021 to 2023 where she couldn't sleep either. Different reasons. Hers had started after her divorce. But the pattern was the same. Waking up at 2 or 3 in the morning. Running through everything. Trying everything. Trazodone. Mirtazapine. The whole list I'd just been through.
She said she'd tried something different in late 2023. She said her chiropractor in Omaha, a woman named Dr. Bourassa, had told her she'd been recommending an Indian fruit to her patients with sleep issues for about 18 months and that the results were the most consistent thing she'd seen.
Jen had been skeptical. She'd been to that chiropractor for 7 years for her lower back and she trusted her, but she'd also been through every supplement at the GNC by that point. She didn't want to try one more thing.
She tried it anyway because Dr. Bourassa had given her a bottle for free and said "If it doesn't work bring it back."
It worked.
Not the first night. Not even the first week. She said it was around the 18th day. She'd gone to bed around 10:30 and she woke up to her phone alarm at 6:30 and she laid there for a minute trying to figure out what was wrong, and then she realized: nothing was wrong. She'd slept 8 hours. She hadn't woken up at 2 or 3. She hadn't laid there for an hour at 4. She'd just slept.
She'd been on it ever since. The brand she took was Alevia. She had a bottle in her purse. She set it on the table between us. Green label. Said it was amla. From an Indian gooseberry.
She slid it across the table.
She said, "Renae. Try this for 90 days. They have a money back guarantee. If you're still waking up at 3 in the morning after 3 bottles, send the empty bottles back and they'll refund you. But you're going to need to give it the 90 days. It's not Ambien. It's not a knockout. It works on the back end."
I asked her what the back end meant.
She said, "Read about it tonight. You'll get it. I tried to explain it to David and he didn't get it because he doesn't have this problem, but you're going to read about it and you're going to get it because you've been living it."
I took the bottle home.
I read for 4 hours that night, which I want to be clear is something a normally-functioning person would not do at 9 PM on a Saturday, but a normally-functioning person hadn't been writing my paragraphs for a while.
Here's what I figured out. In language that finally made sense to me.
The reason I couldn't sleep wasn't really about sleep. It was about energy. Specifically, the energy your cells use to run themselves. That energy gets made inside every cell in your body by tiny structures called mitochondria. Mitochondria are your body's power plants. When they're running well, every system in your body has the fuel it needs to do its job. Including the systems that regulate sleep.
When your mitochondria get worn down, by decades of stress and processed food and poor sleep itself and just being alive in 2026, your cells start running on empty. And the systems that run on the most energy, like your brain, like your nervous system, like the parts of you that govern things like circadian rhythm and stress response and the ability to drop into deep sleep, those systems start running poorly.
So you go to bed. And you fall asleep, because your body is exhausted. But then a few hours in, when you should be cycling into deep sleep, you don't have the cellular resources to make that transition. Your nervous system, running on fumes, stays in a low-grade alert state. You pop up at 2 or 3. Your mind starts running because your nervous system is stuck on. You lay there.
I had been trying to fix the symptom. The melatonin, the trazodone, the white noise, all of it was trying to knock me out from the outside. Nothing was touching what was actually wrong, which was that my cells didn't have the energy to do what cells are supposed to do at night.
Amla, what I read about, works on the inside. It supports a pathway in your body called AMPK. Think of AMPK as the foreman that tells your mitochondria to get back to work. When AMPK is active, your mitochondria can start producing cellular energy more efficiently, the way they did when you were younger. That energy gets back to your nervous system, your brain, your sleep systems. The body can finally do what it was designed to do at 3 AM, which is be unconscious.
On top of that, amla has one of the highest antioxidant profiles of any food ever measured. The same oxidative stress that wears your mitochondria down in the first place, amla helps protect against. So it's not just trying to get the power plants running again. It's also protecting them from the thing that wore them down.
When I read this, sitting on my couch at 1:14 AM on a Sunday, I started crying again. The same way I'd cried in the booth at Minerva's. Because nothing I had ever taken or read or tried had addressed why I was waking up at 3 in the morning. It had all been trying to club me back to sleep. Amla was the first thing I'd come across that addressed why I was awake.
I started taking it the next morning. March 7th. A Sunday. Two capsules with breakfast.
Week one I felt nothing different. Same wake-ups. Same 3 AM. Same staring at the ceiling. I almost messaged Jen on day 6 to ask if she'd lied to me. I didn't, because Jen would have known I was at the part where you almost message her.
Day 11 I woke up at 4:47 AM. Which was 2 hours later than usual. I laid there waiting for the racing mind to start. It started softer. Quieter. I fell back asleep at 5:30 for 41 minutes.
Day 14 I slept until 5:11 AM.
Day 17 I slept until 6:02 AM. I sat up in bed and looked at the clock and didn't trust it. I checked my phone. 6:02 AM. I'd slept 7 hours and 14 minutes.
I want to tell you what that felt like.
It felt like coming up out of cold water.
I went downstairs that morning and made coffee and Greg was still asleep upstairs and Ava was still asleep down the hall and I stood in the kitchen and watched the coffee drip into the pot and I felt like a person.
Day 22 I slept 8 hours. Day 23 I slept 7 hours and 47 minutes. Day 26 I slept 8 hours and 11 minutes.
Day 29 Greg came home from second shift, ate his sandwich, came up to bed, and said, "Renae. You're snoring. You haven't snored in years."
He was right. I hadn't. Because I'd been too on alert to ever drop deep enough into sleep to snore.
Day 34 Ava came down for breakfast on a Saturday, looked at me at the table, and said, "Mom. You look so different."
I asked her what she meant.
She said, "Your face. It's not, like. Held."
She didn't have the words for it. But I knew exactly what she meant. My face had been held for two years. Held in the way you hold your face when you are trying to keep something together that wants to fall apart. It had relaxed.
It's been 11 weeks now.
I sleep through the night 6 nights out of 7. I still wake up sometimes around 4 AM when something is on my mind. But I fall back asleep. The racing mind is gone. The hollow is gone. My face isn't held.
Ava told me last week that her cello teacher asked if I'd had work done. Ava laughed and said, "No she just started sleeping."
If you're reading this at 3:14 AM right now, on your phone with the brightness turned all the way down so it won't wake the person next to you, I want you to hear me.
This is not normal. The thing that has been happening to you at 2 or 3 in the morning for the last year or the last two years is not just stress. It is not just menopause. It is not just aging. It is not the thing you have to learn to live with. There is something happening underneath it that has a name, and there is something that addresses it that you have not tried yet.
Alevia has a 90-day money-back guarantee. Three bottles. If you are not sleeping through the night at the end of 90 days, you send the bottles back and they refund you. The melatonin I bought 7 different times at the Hy-Vee didn't come with a guarantee. The Ambien didn't. The trazodone didn't. The $89 weighted blanket didn't come with one either, and it's still folded in my closet.
This does.
P.S. You'll know it's working before you can prove it. For me it wasn't the first 8-hour night. It was a Tuesday morning around day 19 when I woke up and realized I'd slept past Greg's alarm. He'd left for work without me hearing him. He hadn't been able to do that without me hearing him for 4 years. I sat in bed and cried in a way I hadn't cried in a long time. The way you cry when something has come back that you thought you'd lost forever. Mark the day when it happens for you. You'll want to remember.
P.P.S. About that 90 day guarantee. 90 is unusual. Most companies give you 30. 30 days is not enough time for a nervous system that has been running hot for a year or 3 years or 7 years to actually unwind. Sleep is one of the last things to come back, because your body has to trust that it's safe to let go. That takes longer than 30 days for someone who's been through what you've been through. 90 is the right number. The only reason a company gives you 90 is because they know what happens in those 90 days. They've watched it.
P.P.P.S. Jen told me Alevia is a small company and they sometimes sell out. She had to wait 6 days for her third bottle in January. I keep two bottles in the cabinet above the coffee maker now where I used to keep the melatonin. One open, one sealed. I am not going back to 3 AM on a chair in my pajamas. Not for one night. Not for anyone.
P.P.P.P.S. If you have a sister, a mother, a daughter, a friend who has been telling you for 2 years that she's "just not sleeping well lately," please send this to her. Don't add a message. Just the link. She's been awake for a long time. She doesn't have the energy to read a paragraph from you about it. Just send the link. She'll know what to do with it.
The dining chair is back at the table. The smoke detector is back on the ceiling. Ava is in her room doing homework. Greg is at the plant. The house is quiet.
And tonight I will go to bed at 10:47 PM, the way I used to. And I will sleep.
👉 alevia.com/amla/33
