Will earplugs help you sleep? Not if you eat them

I spotted the bottle of sleep-aid gummies in the discount chemist when I was shopping for a new pair of earplugs.

“For calm and a restful sleep,” the label declared, and I fervently wanted to believe it. The ingredients – passionflower and ashwagandha, whatever they are – are “traditionally used in Western herbal medicine”. This sounded reassuring, but it would have been even more so without the “Western”. Or the “herbal”, to be perfectly honest.

I generally fall asleep without any problem, but I wake up in the wee small hours to, well, wee. Until recently, once I returned from the loo I would pop in my trusty earplugs, slap on my eye hat*, and drop back off to sleep. Over the past few months, however, I’ve gone back to bed and tossed and turned for hours.

My brain, so exhausted at 10pm, parties with adrenaline and anxiety at 2am. It dances through my fears for the future of our planet, moves on to oddly specific worries about my kids (Is my son’s tetanus shot up to date? I wonder at 3am), and then shimmies through a spot of existential angst about getting older.

I do have prescription sleeping pills, and they are a magical carpet ride to eight hours of slumber. I try, though, to ration them out slowly. For one thing, they are highly addictive; for another, every time I ask my lovely GP for a script, I feel weirdly guilty and subversive, as though she’ll discover I’m secretly mixing my pills with meth and selling them to schoolkids for bitcoin on the dark web.

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Could my Western herbal gummies be as potent? Could they, too, transport me smoothly to sleep? Unlikely, I thought. When I opened them, they smelled just like Ribena, which is not widely known for its soporific properties. Still, I was tired, and I was desperate, and my box of sleeping pills was running low, and so I decided to give them a go. Faith in a bottle, I reasoned, is better than no bottle at all.

I resolved to take two of the gummies when I woke in the middle of the night, as their Western herbal powers might not last a full eight hours. I placed them carefully on my bedside table next to my old wax earplugs, which I decided could last another few days. Next to them I placed my glass of water. My eye hat was under the pillow.

I fell asleep easily, and woke as usual about 2am. The gummies! I thought. It’s time for them to shine. I grabbed them from my bedside table and popped one into my mouth as I walked to the bathroom.