For someone who spends her days helping people improve their health, I was surprisingly poor at protecting its most fundamental pillar: sleep.
My advice to clients on improving sleep naturally was always grounded in evidence. I recommended limiting caffeine after midday, eating magnesium rich foods and finishing dinner a few hours before bed. I still stand by every one of those recommendations. What I hadn’t accounted for was that understanding the science of sleep is very different from creating the conditions that allow it to happen.
Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash
For four years I worked across both the UK and Australian time zones, often from 8am until midnight. Most evenings ended the same way with my laptop closed, straight to bed, then a few hours later, one eye open reaching for my phone. A rhythm I convinced myself I could sustain, until my body decided otherwise. At the end of 2025 I experienced stress-related seizures. Since then, sleep hasn’t been something I take lightly.
Why is sleep so important?
When clients tell me they’re struggling with their eating habits, my first question is rarely about food. It’s almost always, “how have you been sleeping?” That’s because sleep quietly underpins almost every aspect of our physical and mental health. Far from passive, it’s one of the body’s most active maintenance periods. Sleep scientist Professor Matthew Walker describes it as our “life support system”, the window during which the brain consolidates memories, clears metabolic waste through the glymphatic system, regulates emotions, supports immune function and restores the nervous system.
From a nutrition perspective, even a few nights of disrupted sleep can reduce insulin sensitivity, destabilise blood sugar and alter the hormones that govern hunger and fullness, leaving us reaching for energy-dense, processed foods the following day. It affects concentration, decision making and willpower, making healthier choices harder than they need to be. Sleep doesn’t sit alongside the rest of our health. It underpins it.
Photo by Bruno van der Kraan on Unsplash
Why do so many of us struggle to get good quality sleep?
Modern life constantly tells our brains it’s still daytime. Emails arriving at 10pm, late night scrolling and Netflix autoplaying one more episode. General practitioner, Dr Rangan Chatterjee describes these as “micro stress doses”, small, seemingly harmless moments that accumulate through the day and keep our nervous systems quietly on high alert. Add to that the blue light from our screens, which delays melatonin release, and it becomes clear why so many of us climb into bed exhausted but neurologically wide awake. This was exactly the cycle I’d fallen into.
What happened when I spent 48 hours off-grid?
I arrived at Tiny Ikigai, Into The Wild Escapes nature immersion cabin in Victoria’s Yarra Valley to experience the Deep Sleep Reset, created in partnership with Life Unhurried. An hour from Melbourne, the cabin sits among rolling hills with birdsong for company and a freestanding bath overlooking the valley. Waiting inside was a thoughtfully curated Sleep Pack with cosy bed socks, a silk eye mask and sachets of SLEEP, PLEASE, Life Unhurried’s warming cacao blend with magnesium and botanicals.
By the time I arrived, dusk was already settling over the valley and a mob of kangaroos had begun gathering in the paddocks surrounding the cabin. I made a simple dinner, curled up with a book and prepared a warm mug of Sleep, Please before bed.
From a nutrition perspective, I liked that the blend centred on ingredients with plausible roles in relaxation, combining magnesium, which supports normal nervous system function, with cacao, a natural source of polyphenols and other bioactive compounds. While no single ingredient is a magic bullet for better sleep, ensuring adequate magnesium intake can support the body’s natural processes involved in winding down.
“What stayed with me wasn’t so much the ingredients themselves, but the quiet ceremony of making it. Heating the milk, stirring the cacao and sitting down with a warm mug became a gentle cue that there was nowhere else I needed to be.”
This is precisely how our biology is designed to work. Darkness, quiet and predictable routines support the gradual release of melatonin and activate the parasympathetic nervous system, our “rest and digest” state. Without consciously trying, I had removed many of the things that had been keeping my brain switched on. That first night, I slept for around seven and a half hours, waking only once at around 3am to the sound of rustling leaves outside the cabin. Surprisingly, this is a common experience when sleeping somewhere new. Researchers refer to it as the First Night Effect, a phenomenon in which part of the brain remains slightly more vigilant in an unfamiliar environment. It’s thought to be an evolutionary safety mechanism, allowing us to stay just alert enough to respond to potential threats while we sleep.
The following morning, sunlight streamed through the big square windows that framed the bed. Instead of reaching for my phone, I made tea and took it outside. Morning light is one of the strongest cues for regulating our circadian rhythm, it signals to the brain that it’s daytime, suppresses melatonin and sets the biological clock that determines when we’ll feel sleepy again that evening.
The rest of the day was deliberately empty. I thought I’d struggle with that. Instead, I found myself sitting on the bed looking out of the window for long stretches, watching the clouds move across the hills without feeling the need to fill the space.
Before the stay I had been reading The Brain at Rest by neuroscientist Dr Joseph Jebelli, which explores the brain’s Default Mode Network, a network that becomes highly active during rest, mind wandering and day dreaming. For years, scientists assumed these moments represented the brain switching off. We now know the opposite. During periods of quiet rest, the brain consolidates memories, processes emotions, makes sense of our experiences and supports creativity. It made me wonder how often I’d interrupted that process by instinctively reaching for my phone the moment a quiet pause appeared.
That second evening followed the same gentle sequence with a simple dinner, a warm mug of SLEEP, PLEASE, an hour or two of reading and an early bedtime.
Repeating the same routine became another signal to my nervous system that it was safe to unwind. I climbed into bed just after 10pm, pulled on the silk eye mask and woke naturally at 8am.
“There was no sleep score to celebrate or app to congratulate me the next morning. Just the unfamiliar feeling of waking up properly rested, the sort of sleep I’d almost forgotten was possible.”
So, what does a sleep routine actually look like?
The most useful thing my stay confirmed is that better sleep rarely requires more, it usually requires less. Mine became a short, repeatable sequence that included a warm drink, dimmed lights and reading instead of screens. Simple enough to do at home. Alongside that, the evidence-based foundations remain the same:
- Get morning sunlight early, ideally outside within an hour of waking
- Avoid caffeine after midday
- Reduce bright and blue light in the hour before bed
- Keep the bedroom cool and dark
- Avoid heavy meals late in the evening
- Include magnesium rich foods (examples include dark leafy greens, seeds, nuts, cacao, or consider a magnesium glycinate supplement if sleep quality is consistently poor).
*The hero ingredient in SLEEP, PLEASE is cacao and it also includes 180mg of magnesium glycinate per serve, making it an excellent addition to an evening wind down ritual.
What I brought home with me
Of course, I can’t recreate an off-grid cabin in the Yarra Valley every night, but I can recreate some of what made sleeping there feel so effortless.
Since coming home, I’ve become much more protective of the hour before bed. I’m trying to close my laptop earlier, swap scrolling for reading and make a warm drink part of my evening wind down rather than expecting my brain to switch from work mode to sleep mode the moment my head hits the pillow.
Maybe that’s the real luxury I brought home with me, not better sleep for one weekend but a ritual worth bringing into every evening.
The Deep Sleep Reset is available until the end of August 2026 – book your hibernation in one of Into The Wild Escape‘s 62 tiny homes across Australia and add on one of our curated Sleep Packs to experience the full effect.
