Sarah Thompson

I used to fall asleep before my husband finished brushing his teeth. That was not a small thing. I did not understand how not small it was until it was gone. I am 44 years old. I have two kids, eleven and eight. I work four days a week as a practice manager for a dental clinic. I am not a complicated person and I do not have a complicated life. I eat well. I exercise. I do not drink much. I do not have anxiety. I am not going through anything particularly difficult. I just stopped being able to fall asleep. Not dramatically. Not all at once. It happened the way most things happen — gradually and then all at once. First it was the occasional night where it took a bit longer. Then it was most nights. Then it was every night, reliably, without exception, lying there in the dark for somewhere between one and two hours while my husband slept beside me like a man who had never in his life wondered whether sleep was going to come tonight. I started noticing what the lost hour and a half was costing me. Not the sleep itself — the aftermath. The morning school run where I was physically present but mentally somewhere else entirely. The way my eight year old would ask me something and I would realize I had not heard a single word because I was running on such thin reserves that my brain had basically stopped processing non-essential information. The meetings at work where I was the person who was supposed to be in charge and I could feel myself grasping for words and thoughts that were right there and somehow not quite reachable. The evenings where my husband would want to talk, actually talk, about something that mattered, and I would be sitting across from him thinking about how much I needed the day to end so I could go lie in bed and probably not sleep for ninety minutes. The version of me that my kids were getting was not the version I wanted to be their mother. She was thinner. Shorter. Less patient. More distracted. She looked like me and sounded like me but she was operating on a fraction of what I actually had to give. I tried what everyone tries. I cut caffeine after noon. I read instead of scrolling. I got blackout curtains. I tried magnesium, the glycinate kind because I read that was the one that actually worked. I downloaded a meditation app and used it for three weeks before I accepted that lying in the dark listening to a man describe a forest was making me more irritated not less. I tried melatonin. It made me fall asleep fine and wake up at 5am feeling like I had been slightly hit by something. I tried half a tablet. Same result, just less dramatic. I went to my GP. She was kind and thorough and suggested sleep hygiene practices I was already doing. She offered a referral to a psychologist in case anxiety was a contributing factor. I am not anxious. I told her that. She nodded in the way that suggested she had heard that before. I was not anxious. I was exhausted and I could not fall asleep and nobody could tell me why. The thing nobody said to me, in any appointment or any article or any conversation about sleep, was this: Lying awake has almost nothing to do with sleep. It has everything to do with your nervous system. I found this out through my sister in law, who is a naturopath. Not because I asked her about sleep. I was not even talking about sleep. I was telling her I felt like I had been operating underwater for the past year and could not work out why, and she stopped me mid sentence. She said the thing you are describing, the feeling of being physically exhausted but unable to turn off, the lying there while your body begs for sleep and your brain completely ignores the request, that is not a sleep problem. That is a nervous system problem. Your brain's arousal system is stuck in an activated state. It does not matter how tired you are. Until the arousal system gets a direct signal to stand down, it keeps running. I said okay, what sends that signal. She told me about something called the olfactory pathway. Your nose, she said, has a direct neural connection to the limbic system. The part of your brain that runs your stress response, your cortisol, your state of activation. Nothing else reaches it that fast. Not a supplement. Not a pill. Not anything you eat or drink. When you inhale specific botanical compounds through the nose they arrive at that system in seconds. And the right compounds tell that system to stop. Not by sedating you. By sending the signal that it is actually, finally, safe to rest. I said that sounds like something you would see on Instagram. She said I know. Try it anyway. She gave me something called Somn. A small nasal inhaler. Six botanical oils. Two breaths before bed. I tried it that night with zero expectation. I did not lie there for ninety minutes. I do not know exactly how long it took. I just remember thinking that I should probably check my phone one more time and then I was asleep. I woke up the next morning at six forty two, before my alarm, and I lay there for a moment trying to understand what had happened. I was not groggy. I was not in that half-submerged state I had normalized for the past year. I was just awake. Properly awake. The kind of awake I remembered from before all of this started. My son came in at seven and climbed into bed next to me and I was actually there. Not performing being there. Actually there, hearing him, laughing at what he said, present in a way I had not been for a long time. I cried a little in the shower afterward. Not because I was sad. Because I had not realized how much of myself had quietly disappeared until I felt it come back. That was four months ago. I use Somn every night. Two breaths. I am asleep within minutes. I have not had a ninety minute night since the first week. My kids have their mum back. Not a tired version of her. The actual one. If you are lying there tonight for the fortieth night in a row wondering when your brain is going to let you rest — you are not just losing sleep. You are losing the morning after it. And the one after that. And every version of yourself that requires more than you currently have to give. The link is below if you want to look into it. It is two breaths. If it does not work for you there is a ninety day money back guarantee so you risk nothing except another bad night. Do not wait for it to get worse before you do something about it. I did. I wish I had not.