Who writes this

I'm Alison. I'm 51.

Until a few years ago I slept like a rock. Head down, out cold, straight through to the alarm. Then somewhere around 48 it stopped. Now I wake at 3am, and I'm not anxious or tired. I'm just awake, and more alert than I've been all day.

I'm not a doctor and I've never worked in a sleep lab. What I am is someone who went looking for an answer and found forum threads where fifty people trade home remedies and not one of them cites a source. So I started reading the research instead and writing down what I found, starting with the thing nobody told me. Sleep architecture changes with age. I didn't get worse at sleeping. The mechanism changed.

If something here is wrong, there's a link at the bottom of every article to tell me.

What this site is

Second Sleep is for people who used to sleep through the night and now don't. Every article starts from a specific, coupled symptom, heart pounding, hunger, heat, needing the bathroom, and explains the mechanism behind it with named, dated sources. Where a product genuinely fits, I say so and I say why, drawback included.

What this site isn't

It isn't medical advice, and it isn't written by a clinician. It doesn't diagnose anything, and it doesn't promise a fix. If a symptom described here could be sleep apnea, or anything else that needs a doctor rather than a website, that's stated plainly in the article, not softened.

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