I Ran On Three Hours Sleep For Months. Here's What Finally Switched It Off.

 I want to tell you something I don't think I've said directly on this blog yet.

For a long time I ran on about three hours sleep a night. Not by choice. Not because I was busy or because I had somewhere to be or because I was one of those people who genuinely function well on less. I ran on three hours because my brain simply would not stop.

The moment my head hit the pillow it was like someone turned a switch on. Every thought I'd managed to hold at arm's length during the day came flooding in at once. Things I'd said. Things I should have said differently. Problems I couldn't solve tonight but couldn't stop trying to solve anyway. Worries that had no clear shape, just a weight, just a low hum of something isn't right even when I couldn't name what the something was.

I'd lie there watching the hours tick by. 1am. 2am. 3am. Eventually falling into something shallow and broken that technically counted as sleep but didn't do what sleep is supposed to do. And then dragging myself up a few hours later to do another day on a tank that never got properly refilled.

If you've been there you know the specific particular exhaustion of it. It's different from normal tiredness. It's a kind of fog that sits behind your eyes. A slowness that follows you everywhere. A feeling of being slightly outside your own life, watching it happen rather than living it.

And the cruel irony of overthinking and sleep deprivation is that they feed each other. The less you sleep the more your brain struggles to regulate emotion and manage anxious thoughts. The more anxious your thoughts the less you sleep. Round and round, night after night, with no obvious exit.

What I tried that didn't work

I tried the obvious things first because that's what you do.

I tried going to bed earlier. I'd lie there for longer, which just meant more time for the thoughts to run. I tried reading before bed, which helped me fall asleep sometimes but didn't stop the waking up at 3am with my mind already in fifth gear. I tried cutting caffeine, which made a small difference but nowhere near enough. I tried those meditation apps that everyone recommends, and while I don't want to be dismissive because I know they help some people, for me lying still and trying to clear my mind when my mind absolutely refused to be cleared just made the frustration worse.

Nothing touched the root of it. Because the root wasn't a behaviour problem. It wasn't about what I was doing before bed. It was about what my nervous system was doing all the time, day and night, whether I wanted it to or not.

What actually changed things

A friend mentioned something to me that I'll be honest I was sceptical about at first. I'm not naturally someone who reaches for supplements. I tend to assume they're expensive placebos dressed up in good packaging.

But I was tired enough, literally tired enough, to try anything.

He told me about ashwagandha and magnesium. Two things that had made a difference for him. Not as miracle cures, not as something that fixed everything overnight, just as things that quietly helped his nervous system find its way back to something calmer.

I looked into both of them properly before trying them because that's how I'm wired.

Ashwagandha is an adaptogen, which means it helps the body adapt to stress rather than just masking it. It works by reducing cortisol, the primary stress hormone that keeps your nervous system in high-alert mode. Chronically elevated cortisol is one of the main reasons overthinkers struggle to sleep. Your brain is flooded with a chemical that is literally designed to keep you awake and vigilant, and no amount of counting sheep overrides that signal.

Magnesium plays a different but equally important role. It's involved in over 300 biochemical reactions in the body and one of its primary functions is nervous system regulation. Most people under chronic stress are deficient in it without knowing it, because stress depletes magnesium and low magnesium makes stress worse. Another loop, but this one you can actually break.

I started taking both. Not with huge expectations. Just with the quiet hope of someone who had been exhausted for long enough to try something new.

Within less than a week something shifted.

I don't know how else to describe it except that the volume turned down. The thoughts were still there, I'm not going to tell you everything went silent because it didn't, but they were quieter. Less urgent. Less like something was pulling at me constantly and more like things I could actually choose whether to engage with or set aside.

And the sleep. The sleep changed in a way I hadn't experienced in months.

Not just falling asleep more easily, though that happened too. But the quality of it. I started waking up having actually been somewhere deep, the kind of sleep where you surface slowly rather than snapping awake already tense. The kind that actually restores something.

I noticed it in the gym before I noticed it anywhere else. Recovery between sessions was faster. I was less sore. I had more in the tank. Sleep is when your body repairs itself and I had been depriving my muscles of that repair for months without realising how much it was costing my physical performance as well as everything else.

What I actually take

I want to be specific here because vague supplement recommendations aren't useful to anyone.

For ashwagandha I use this one and it's the one I'd point anyone towards who asks me: Ashwagandha. It's a quality product, properly dosed, and it's what made the difference for me personally. I'm not recommending it because it's an affiliate link, the link exists because I was already recommending it.

For magnesium the form matters more than most people realise. Magnesium oxide, which is the cheapest and most common form, is poorly absorbed by the body. You want magnesium glycinate or magnesium bisglycinate, which are the forms that actually reach your nervous system effectively. This is the one I use: Magnesium.

I take the ashwagandha in the morning with food and the magnesium in the evening about an hour before bed. That timing isn't arbitrary, ashwagandha is best taken with a meal and magnesium's calming effect works best when you take it in the window before sleep.

What I want to say to anyone where I was

If you're lying awake tonight with your thoughts running laps, I want to say something that I needed someone to say to me when I was in it.

This is not just how your brain works. This is your nervous system in a state of dysregulation that has a cause and that can be addressed. You are not just an anxious person who will always be an anxious person. You are a person whose system has been running too hard for too long and needs some genuine support to find its way back to balance.

That support looks different for different people. For some it's therapy. For some it's lifestyle changes. For some it's addressing the source of the stress directly. And for some, myself included, part of it is giving your body the physical support it needs to regulate itself, because no amount of mindset work lands properly when your cortisol is chronically elevated and your magnesium is depleted.

Three hours a night is not sustainable. Your brain needs sleep to process emotion, consolidate memory and regulate everything that makes you functional and human. You deserve more than three hours. You deserve to actually rest.

Start somewhere. Even somewhere small. Even somewhere skeptical.

I was skeptical too.

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