My Body Was in Bed by 10. My Brain Was Still Doing the Bills at 1am.

Does your mind start racing the moment your head hits the pillow?

Mine did.

All day I was fine. Busy. Cheerful, even.

Then the lamp went off.

And there it all was, lined up and waiting.

The property tax bill. The roof. Whether we took Social Security too early. My son's job. That spot the dermatologist wants to "keep an eye on."

Round and round.

My body was dog-tired. My brain was wide open for business.

For forty years I figured I couldn't sleep because of work. Once I retired, I'd sleep like a baby.

I retired two years ago. It got worse.

Because now there's no paycheck coming. Now the money has to last. Now every little thing feels like it's mine to figure out, and 11pm is when my brain decides to hold the meeting.

I'd lie there next to my husband, who can fall asleep in the middle of a sentence, and do arithmetic in the dark.

I wouldn't tell him. What was I going to say? "I'm up worrying about things I can't do anything about at midnight"?

So I'd say I slept fine. And I'd be short with him by supper.

I'm a practical woman. I worked the problem.

Warm milk. Did nothing but make me need the bathroom.

The worry list. You write your worries down before bed so your mind can let them go. All it did was get mine organized.

A breathing app. A young man with a soft voice told me to picture a beach. I pictured the cost of a beach vacation.

A glass of wine. Worked for about three hours. Then I was awake at 2 with a dry mouth and the same list.

Leaving the TV on. Fell asleep to a detective show, woke up to an infomercial.

I'd already decided what the real trouble was. It was stress. Plain and simple. Real things to worry about.

No pill was going to fix my 401(k).

That's what my friend Carol said. We've walked together three mornings a week for twenty years, and she reads everything.

"A capsule won't fix your roof," she said. "But can I tell you what I read about worry? Because it changed how I think about it."

Here's what she told me. I looked it up myself later, and it's real.

When you're stressed, your body goes through magnesium faster. More of it goes out when you go to the bathroom.

Magnesium is one of the things your nervous system uses to calm itself down. It's like the brake pedal. So when you run low, your body gets jumpier. The same worry hits you harder.

Which burns through more magnesium.

Which makes you jumpier still.

Researchers have a name for it. They call it a vicious circle. They've been writing about it since the early 1990s.

I pictured a car with the gas pedal stuck and the brake pads worn thin. That was me at 11pm. The worries were the gas. And I had no brakes left.

Then Carol added the piece about our age. The National Institutes of Health says that as we get older we take in less magnesium, absorb less of it, and lose more. Nearly half of American adults fall short from food alone.

So you take a woman in her sixties. Add two years of fretting about money.

No wonder I couldn't switch off.

My worries were real. But my body had lost the thing that lets it put them down for the night.

She'd been taking magnesium glycinate before bed for about a year. Glycinate is the gentle kind. It doesn't upset your stomach the way the cheap stuff does.

The one she uses is Sleep Support, from Stay Able:

• 275 mg of magnesium, from 2,500 mg of magnesium glycinate
• No melatonin. Not a sleeping pill.
• Made in the USA

Three capsules with water, about an hour before bed. I take mine when I start the dishwasher.

My worries did not go anywhere.

The roof still needs doing. The tax bill still came.

And the first several nights, I didn't notice a thing. Carol said, "Give it a few weeks. You didn't get this wound up overnight."

She was right. Somewhere in the second or third week, bedtime felt different.

The thoughts still showed up. But they didn't grab me by the collar. My jaw wasn't tight. My shoulders weren't up around my ears. I'd think, "Yes, the roof, I know," and the next thing I knew it was morning.

It's the difference between your worries knocking on the door and your worries kicking it in.

I still have a bad night now and then. A big enough worry will keep anybody up. But most nights now, I read two chapters and I'm gone.

And that roof looks a lot more manageable at 8am after a full night's sleep than it ever did at 1am.

We got three quotes. It's getting done in the spring.

It's not a sedative. It won't knock you out, and it won't make your problems smaller.

It's not a treatment for anything. If worry is running your days as well as your nights, please talk to your doctor.

And if you have kidney trouble or take prescription medicine, ask your doctor or pharmacist before you start.

• You're tired all evening, then wide awake the minute the light goes off
• It's money, family or health going round in your head
• You've figured it's "just stress" and nothing can help
• You don't want a sleeping pill

One bottle is $37.99 and lasts 30 nights. On Subscribe & Save it's $29.99 a month with free shipping.

About a dollar a night. Less than the glass of wine, and it doesn't wake me up at 2.

Best of all, you get 100 days to decide. If it's not for you, send it back and get your money back. One less thing to worry about.

From the Stay Able website, word for word:

You can go to bed tonight the same as last night. Lamp off, list on. Doing arithmetic in the dark while your husband sleeps.

Or you can give your body back its brake pedal and see what bedtime feels like in a few weeks. If nothing changes, you're out nothing.

The bills will still be there in the morning. You may as well meet them rested.

P.S. Stress uses up magnesium, and running low on magnesium makes stress hit harder. Nobody ever told me that. I'd have started years ago.

Sources: how magnesium intake, absorption and loss change with age, and how many US adults fall short, NIH Office of Dietary Supplements, Magnesium fact sheet; stress and magnesium, the "vicious circle", Pickering et al. 2020, Nutrients.

Dramatization. Susan Miller is a persona and her story is illustrative. Individual results vary. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.