Anthony Marino

Writing at Deep Sleep Daily

About

Operations manager, suburban Atlanta. Forty-six years old. Spent the better part of 15 years treating sleep as something other people needed more than he did.

The shift came at a routine checkup about three years ago. Blood pressure had moved somewhere my doctor described as worth taking seriously, and he showed me a cortisol chart on his monitor that has lived in my memory since. His words: it looked like someone running from a bear. I drove home from that visit, got into bed, and was awake until past 3 AM. Which felt like a fair summary of where things stood.

The next 18 months were different. I started paying actual attention to sleep, testing natural supplements one at a time, keeping a notepad on my nightstand. The cheap kind from the pharmacy. I tracked what I took, roughly how long falling asleep seemed to take, how many times I woke up, a morning score. Not scientific. Just consistent enough to be useful when the same supplement kept showing up at the top or the bottom of the numbers.

I wore a smartwatch that added another data layer. Most nights it corroborated the notebook. A few times it caught things the notebook missed. I crossed-referenced third-party testing info on ingredients when I thought it was relevant -- sites like Labdoor and ConsumerLab exist for exactly this kind of checking.

Some things worked. More things didn't. One supplement caused 2 AM wake-ups so reliably I started noting it in the margin with a red pen because I thought I was misreading the pattern. I wasn't. After enough of that, the notebook started looking like something worth making legible.

My wife, for context, sleeps without apparent effort and has zero idea what the problem is. She also considers the notepad excessive. She is probably right about the notepad.

Not a doctor. Not a sleep scientist. Not affiliated with any brand reviewed here. Just an operations manager with a notebook, a smartwatch, and a medicine cabinet she considers equally excessive.

Articles by Anthony Marino

Disclosure

Some outbound links on this site are affiliate links -- meaning I get paid a small commission when you buy through them, at no extra cost to you. I don't collect or store any data about which links you click. For more on how the editorial side handles affiliate relationships, see my Editorial Policy.