For 31 years I've stood in front of students and explained why we sleep, and what happens when we don't. I've written the papers. I've given the lectures. I am, on paper, one of the people you would ask. So when my own sleep fell apart two years ago, I felt like a complete fraud. And the thing that finally fixed it was something I had never once put in a single lecture. I'm 61. I live just outside Oxford with my wife. I've got two grown children and a grandson who thinks I know everything. For a while there, I was terrified he'd find out I didn't. It started quietly, the way I'd warned my students it does. Waking once in the night, then dropping back off. Then it was waking at 3am, every night, with my mind going like a train. And no getting back to sleep. The days got harder. I'd stand up to lecture and lose my thread halfway through a sentence. I forgot a student's name I'd known all term. I reached for a study I'd quoted a hundred times and it simply wasn't there. By the afternoon my head was full of wool. The sharpness I've traded on my whole career was deserting me, and that frightened me more than I let on. I went to my GP. He offered me sleeping tablets, the way I knew he would. I said no. I've read more about those than most, and I wasn't about to start a habit I'd spent years warning other people off. But there was a worse reason I couldn't take them. I could not sit there and admit that the sleep professor couldn't sleep. How do you tell a colleague that? How do you stand at a conference on healthy sleep, knowing you got three hours the night before? So I hid it. I told nobody. I bet some of you know that feeling exactly. The thing you don't mention to your husband or wife. The quiet panic you keep behind a normal face all day. The route you change to avoid bumping into someone who'll ask how you are. And like a fool, I threw money at it. I'm almost embarrassed to total it up. Sleepy teas, the chamomile and the valerian, a few pounds a box, week after week. A sunrise alarm clock for £70 that just woke me up earlier. A sleep tracker ring for £200 that told me every morning exactly how badly I'd slept. A weighted blanket for £90 that made me too hot. Blackout blinds. A meditation app I paid for monthly and never opened. And a tub of cheap magnesium from the chemist that did precisely nothing. Add it all up and it was well over £600. Six hundred pounds, from a man who lectures on sleep, to still be staring at the ceiling at 3am. And not one person knew. Then came the lecture that broke me. The first Monday of October, the big opening lecture of term. A packed hall of new students, a talk I'd given for fifteen years. And halfway through, I just stopped. I lost it completely. I stood there with my notes shaking in my hand and no idea what came next. The silence went on too long. A young lad in the front row quietly read my next line back to me off the handout. I thanked him and carried on. But something in me had broken. That night my wife came down at 4am and found me at the kitchen table, my tea gone cold. I finally told her the truth, and that I was frightened. She didn't say much. She just sat with me, the way you sit with someone who's had a fright. A fortnight later, Priya came to stay. She was one of my doctoral students years ago, and she's a sleep doctor herself now. She watched me drag myself down for breakfast, grey, and she didn't miss it. She never did, even as a student. She said, "You taught me how sleep works. Can I tell you the bit that isn't in the curriculum?" I said go on. It isn't every day your old student offers to teach you. She said most people are quietly low on magnesium, and on vitamin D, and never know it. And most of what's sold is the wrong kind entirely. The cheap forms, oxide and citrate, are what's on every shelf. Your body can barely use them, so they mostly just send you to the toilet. The calming forms are different. Magnesium glycinate and taurate are the ones that actually settle the nervous system. She put it more plainly than I ever had. A racing mind at night is like a kettle that's boiled but never clicked off. The right magnesium helps that switch finally click, so you drop off and stay off. The cheap stuff was never going to do it. Then she told me the part I should have known, and didn't. Two of the things that drain a man my age are bad sleep and being low on vitamin D, and they pull each other down. A lot of your testosterone, the thing behind your drive and your energy, is made while you are in deep sleep. And to make it, your body needs vitamin D, the one most of us in this country are short of. No wonder I was running on empty. My sleep had gone, my vitamin D was on the floor, and the two were feeding off each other. So I did what I tell my students to do. I went and read the actual papers, not the headlines. There's a proper trial where older adults took magnesium daily for eight weeks, and their sleep measurably improved, falling asleep quicker and staying asleep longer. That was Abbasi and colleagues, in 2012. There's another, out of the University of Chicago, where men who slept five hours a night for a week saw their testosterone fall, by as much as if they'd aged ten or fifteen years. And one more where men low in vitamin D who topped it up saw their testosterone climb with it. This wasn't magic. It was just biology I'd been too proud and too tired to apply to myself. Priya wrote a name on the back of an envelope before she left. Kavera's Triple Magnesium Complex with Vitamin D. I'll be honest, the scientist in me was sceptical. So, like an idiot, I hedged my bets. I ordered the Kavera, but I also grabbed a cheap magnesium off the supermarket shelf and a different one online. Then I judged the whole idea on the cheap ones, which of course did nothing. When I finally went back to the proper one and took it every evening, the difference began. By day five, I fell asleep before midnight. The first time in months, and I only noticed because it had been so long. By day ten, I slept clean through. No 3am jolt, no lying there running tomorrow's lecture in my head. By week two, I gave a full lecture and stayed sharp the whole way. I remembered every name and every reference, and walked out feeling like myself. By week four, the afternoon fog had lifted. My energy and my drive came back, the things I'd quietly put down to just getting older. One morning my wife looked up from her coffee. She said, "You did the crossword." I said, "Did I?" She said, "You haven't touched the crossword in two years. You used to do it every single morning." I hadn't even noticed I'd picked it up. That's when it really landed. I saw my GP again a few weeks later for something else. He looked at me twice and asked what on earth I'd been doing, because I looked ten years younger. I told him the lot. He didn't roll his eyes, which from him is high praise. He said, "Whatever it is, keep at it. You're a different man to the one I saw in the spring." It's been a few months now. Two capsules with my evening meal, and that's the whole of it. The 3am waking is gone. The fog is gone. I stand up to lecture and the words are there, the way they always used to be. And I sleep like I haven't since my forties. I'm still me. Still over-preparing every talk, still hopeless in the garden, still driving my daughter mad with advice she never asked for. But I'm not the frightened man at the kitchen table at 4am anymore. Sharp again, and rested, and steady. I'd stopped believing I could be all three. Turns out I just had the wrong thing in the bathroom cabinet. For two years I assumed this was simply what 61 was, and that I'd manage it quietly until I retired. I was wrong. And here's the thing I have to say as plainly as I can. Not all magnesium is the same. I wasted weeks on the cheap kind that just sends you to the toilet. The one that worked had the calming forms, glycinate and taurate, plus the vitamin D, all in the one capsule. If Priya hadn't stayed that weekend, I'd still be hiding it. Still lying awake, still losing my thread in front of a room full of teenagers. I've quietly told three colleagues in my department. All three were running on the same empty I'd been running on. Two have come back already and said it's the first thing in years that's touched their sleep. The third has started getting to the gym again at 60, which he hadn't done in a decade. I'm sharing this because I spent 31 years teaching this subject and was still too proud to admit my own body had stopped listening. If it helps one tired person reading this at 3am, it was worth writing. ~ Professor Richard H., Oxford EDIT: I did not expect this many of you to read it. So many have asked where I get mine, so here it is: https://kaveralabs.com/magnesium-3x-complex (They're running a deal at the moment. I've just reordered a few months' worth.) P.S. A few things I wish I'd known before I started. I didn't realise they do a money-back guarantee. If it does nothing for you, you send it back and you're not a penny out of pocket. Most people pay full price, but there's an offer on at the moment, which is how I stocked up. On the multi-month option it works out to less than a coffee a day, and far less than the £600 of gadgets I wasted first. The catch is that Kavera Labs is a small, certified lab. They make it in small batches because the formula takes time to get right, so it does sell out, and last time I reordered I had to wait a week for it to come back in. So I'll apologise in advance, because when you click the link you might find it's gone for now. I'd still click and check. And whatever you do, don't grab the cheap magnesium off the supermarket shelf thinking it's the same thing. It isn't. It's the oxide kind I threw money at for months. It'll do for you exactly what it did for me, which is nothing but a trip to the toilet. P.P.S. I'm writing this at a quarter to five in the morning, but for the right reason this time. I woke up early, rested, with a clear head, and couldn't sit on it. So this is for whoever's reading it wide awake at 3am, the way I was for two long years. It isn't your fault, and it isn't just your age. You've very likely just been low, and taking the wrong kind. Go and get the right one. Check if Kavera is in stock: https://kaveralabs.com/magnesium-3x-complex
