Sleep better

Protect a consistent wake time and enough time in bed before you touch a supplement. Move caffeine earlier, keep alcohol out of your sleep experiments, and screen for apnea if you snore, gasp, or wake unrefreshed. The pills are the last 10%, not the first.

In this stackConsistent wake time, an 8-hour opportunity, morning light, caffeine cutoff 8–10 h before bed. Screen for apnea if you snore or wake unrefreshed.

The idea that light drinking protects your heart was largely an artifact of comparing drinkers against a sicker mix of non-drinkers. Better-designed analyses — genetic (Mendelian randomization) studies and bias-corrected meta-analyses — find no mortality benefit at low intake and clear harm as intake rises. Alcohol is a Group 1 carcinogen and raises blood pressure. There's no safe level that improves health, and less is unambiguously better. The action here is simple: drink less.

In this stackRemove it from sleep experiments — it fragments sleep and masks what's working.

Subtraction, not a supplement.

Consider magnesium only after the real sleep levers are in motion. Glycinate is a common evening choice; keep it around 100–200 mg elemental. Watch the supplemental upper limit of 350 mg/day, avoid unsupervised use with kidney disease, and separate it from certain antibiotics and thyroid meds by a couple of hours.

In this stack100–200 mg elemental glycinate in the evening, if intake is low or sleep quality is mildly off.

Roughly 3 g of glycine before bed has a small, thin signal for improved subjective sleep quality and less next-day fatigue, based on a handful of small trials. It's cheap, tastes faintly sweet, and is very low-risk — but the evidence base is tiny, so keep your expectations proportional.

In this stack~3 g before bed. Thin evidence; low stakes.

Melatonin nudges your circadian clock more than it knocks you out. It's a reasonable tool for jet lag and delayed sleep phase, taken in a low dose (0.3–1 mg) a few hours before your target bedtime. It is not first-line for chronic insomnia, sleep clinicians actually recommend against that use, and OTC product dosing is notoriously unreliable. Safe short-term; long-term safety is less studied.

In this stack0.3–1 mg, timed — for circadian shifting (jet lag, late phase), not sedation.

L-theanine is the amino acid behind tea's 'calm but awake' feeling. At 200 mg it has a modest signal for reducing acute stress, and paired with caffeine it slightly sharpens attention while blunting jitter. The effects are small and the trials are short, but it's cheap and very low-risk — a reasonable thing to try, not a proven nootropic.

In this stack100–200 mg in the evening if a busy mind is the problem.

Caffeine reliably improves endurance, power, and alertness — it's the most evidence-backed legal ergogenic aid there is. Up to ~400 mg/day is safe for most healthy adults. The catch is timing: with a ~5-hour half-life, caffeine taken even 6 hours before bed measurably degrades sleep. Treat it as the drug it is — powerful, useful, and easy to mistime.

In this stackNot a sleep aid — a thing to time. Move the last dose earlier before adding anything.