I didn't plan to build a supplement company. I planned to sleep.
I spent sixteen years climbing a high-demand civilian career while serving as a Coast Guard Reservist. I deployed in 2019. In November 2023, I went on continuous active-duty orders and never returned to the civilian chapter. My nervous system didn't get a vote on any of it.
Here's what nobody tells you about running two full tracks at once for a decade: your body keeps you online by staying in low-grade sympathetic activation. Mildly elevated cortisol. Mildly elevated heart rate. Mildly compressed sleep. The reason you don't notice is that "mild" feels normal when it's been your baseline for years.
The first sign for me was sleep. I'd get in bed at a reasonable hour. No phone, no TV, nothing keeping me up. I'd fall asleep — and then somewhere between 1 and 2 AM, I'd be awake again. Not from a dream. Not from a noise. Just awake, heart rate already up, the rest of the night spent staring at the ceiling cataloging tomorrow's problems.
I tried the usual things. Melatonin. Cutting caffeine. A meditation app or two. Cold showers. Breathwork. Some of it helped. None of it fixed it. I was given other options that came with their own list of side effects — some of which I experienced. My nervous system was stuck, and no single habit was going to tell it to stand down.
That's when I started actually reading the research on what nervous system regulation depends on at the cellular level. And I found a pattern I hadn't expected: your nervous system runs on minerals. Specifically, it runs on magnesium — which is required for over 300 enzymatic reactions in the body, including every single one that governs muscle relaxation, GABA receptor activity, and the parasympathetic downshift you need to actually rest.
Chronic stress depletes magnesium faster than most people replace it. Low magnesium amplifies the stress response. More stress depletes more magnesium. It's a loop, and habits alone don't break it if the mineral floor is too low.
So I tried every magnesium glycinate on the market. Most were underdosed — 100 mg or 150 mg per serving when the research uses 250-400 mg. Some had fillers I didn't want in my body. A few were well-formulated but cost $60 a bottle for a 30-day supply, which made no sense for a mineral that costs pennies to produce correctly.
After about six months of that, I stopped looking and started formulating my own. What you're reading about is the result.