Asleep in Minutes, Useless in the Morning
Asleep in Minutes, Useless in the Morning
There is a bottle of Koru Sleep on Margaret's bedside table and she has been buying it for years, which is not remarkable until you know what she makes of things people recommend to her.
She is not an easy sell. She had worked through most of a pharmacy shelf before this one, and they all did the job in the narrow sense that she fell asleep. She did, and sometimes fast. Then she would wake up feeling like she had been drinking.
The evidence of how that went sat under the sink in her rental all winter. A red plastic bucket, and not one morning good enough to get it out.
She knew it was there. She would open the cupboard for something else, see it, close the door again and tell herself the weekend would do. The bucket weighs nothing, so getting it out was never the problem.
She taught secondary school for ten years and has run her own affairs ever since. The rental is hers. So is the mess the last tenants left in it, and so is the decision, made a long time ago and never revisited, that she would be the one to deal with it.
She still rides properly, in the kit, on a road bike with drop bars, and has no intention of being talked out of it. She books her own tradesmen and then works around them, which is how she came to be on her knees at half eight on a Tuesday, scrubbing a skirting board while a plumber stepped over her.
People assume that is stubbornness. It is closer to arithmetic. She has watched what happens to people her age who start letting jobs go.
The plan for this part of her life was never to sit down. Not travel, nothing grand, no list of things to do before anything. Just the ordinary business of running her own affairs for as long as her body would let her, and a fairly firm view that the body gets a vote but not a veto.
She had watched it go the other way with people she taught alongside. First someone else does the ladders. Then someone else does the garden. Then the house is too much and there is a conversation with the family about a smaller place, and the whole thing took four years and nobody ever decided it.
What went first was not her energy. It was her mornings.
She would wake at six, as she always had, and find that waking and being awake had come apart. There was a stretch of two hours or so where she was upright and useless, moving slowly round the kitchen with a head full of wool, and by the time it cleared the morning was gone.
Here is the part that matters, and the part she missed for the best part of two years. She was sleeping. Eight hours, no trouble getting under, no lying awake at three staring at the ceiling. By every measure she would have thought to check, her sleep was fine.
So she did what anyone does with a symptom that has no obvious cause. She put it down to her age and stopped looking for a reason.
So the rental waited for the weekend, and by the weekend there was something else, and the something else also waited.
That is how it goes. Not a collapse, a handover, one job at a time, given away so quietly that nobody can name the week it started. And the thing being handed over is not really the cleaning. It is the version of yourself who does the cleaning.
Margaret could feel the two of them competing. The one who books the tradesmen and works around them, and the one who stands in the kitchen at nine with the morning already spent. The foggy one was ahead on points, and the worst of it was that she could not argue with her. You cannot scrub a skirting board on willpower at nine in the morning when your head has not arrived yet.
The morning it became a decision rather than a drift, she was standing at the bench with her phone in her hand, looking up the number of a cleaning company.
She did not ring them. She put the phone down and stood there a while, and what bothered her was not the money. It was that she had got there without noticing. Nobody had told her she could not do it any more. She had simply run out of mornings good enough to start in, and the phone had been the logical next step.
She had been trying things for years by then. She is fair about it: most of them worked.
“I've tried other things and I wake up feeling like I've got a hangover,” she says. That is her word, and she does not use it lightly, because she had not touched a drop in years. She went off quickly and stayed under. The bill arrived at seven.
That was the bit nobody could explain to her. If a thing works at night, why does it send a bill in the morning?
She asked at the counter once and got a shrug and a suggestion to take it earlier. She read the backs of boxes. Nothing on any of them addressed the thing she actually wanted to know, which was not how to get to sleep. She could get to sleep. She wanted to know why getting to sleep kept costing her the first two hours of the day.
The answer, when she finally got it, is that there are two ways to end a day.
There is the override, which presses a switch from outside. It works, which is why it sells, but whatever pressed that switch is still in you at seven and has no idea the night is over. And there is the handover, which gives the body the raw materials it already uses to run a night, then gets out of the way. Nothing foreign is holding you under, so there is nothing foreign to wear off.
Koru Sleep is the second kind, and the reason it takes seven compounds rather than one is printed on the box. It claims three phases of a night, and it means all three.
How the formula works
Sleep onset support
Valerian raises GABA, the brain's own brake, rather than laying a sedative over the top of it. L-theanine supports relaxation without drowsiness.
Deep sleep quality
Passionflower lowers brain activity and is the one credited with holding through the night rather than only starting it.
Morning vitality
Melatonin is the body's timing signal and it thins with age. 5-HTP, vitamin B6 and magnesium glycinate are the means to make it. Zinc helps regulate the signals for when to sleep and when to wake.
Koru Sleep is made in Christchurch, New Zealand.
That is the whole answer to her mornings. Melatonin is a hormone the body makes and the body knows how to switch off. A sedative has a half-life instead, and half-lives do not care what time you get up.
None of which is why she tried it. She tried it because of a rule she has, and the rule is short. What she likes, she says, is that it's just natural.
That disqualifies most of a shelf. It does not, on its own, mean anything works, and she knew that. She had been told things worked before.
So the bottle went beside the bed and she got on with it, without telling anybody, and without expecting the morning to be any different from the mornings she had been having.
It was not the first night. She is careful about that, because she has heard people claim first nights and she does not believe them.
It was a morning a few weeks in. She got up at six, and at some point she noticed she was already doing things. Not thinking about doing them. Doing them. She opened the cupboard under the sink for something else entirely, saw the bucket, and took it out.
That is the whole of it, and it sounds like nothing written down. She would tell you the same. What it amounted to over the following year was the rental getting done when it needed doing rather than when she finally felt up to it.
The bike goes out on the mornings it used to stay in. The tradesmen still get worked around. She has not rung the cleaning company, and the phone with their number in it has been replaced since.
“But no,” she says of this one, “this is good.”
The proof of what she makes of it is not in anything she says. It is in her cupboard.
“I'm on to my second to last one,” she says, “and I always tend to keep it in advance.”
She buys the next one before she finishes the one she is on, and has done for years, which is longer than anything else she tried ever managed. Nobody is checking up on her.
Koru Sleep is in community pharmacies such as Life and Unichem, and you can order it online.
“I depend on it,” she says, which is not a word she uses loosely, and she is not a woman who recommends things. She does tell people, though, which for Margaret is close to an endorsement.
The tradesmen are still going and so is she. The bucket is out from under the sink, and it has not changed hands.
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Seven natural compounds across all three phases of a night: sleep onset, deep sleep quality, and morning vitality. Magnesium glycinate, valerian root, passionflower, L-theanine, 5-HTP, zinc and vitamin B6, all seven in every capsule.
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