I wrote the Medium article about pink noise a couple of weeks ago. However, I have yet one more tip about sleep!

For those of you playing along at home, I hurt my knee back around Thanksgiving. I saw a physical therapist and got most of the structural issues resolved.

However, when I hurt my knee, all the muscles around the joint seized, particularly my calf muscles. I can still feel a knot at the back of the calf, close to where the muscle joins the knee.

So at this point, my knee, structurally, doesn’t hurt.

The muscles in my calf as still so tight I can’t bend my knee fully, and I can’t put weight on it when it is bent.

For the next four weeks, I’m going to be seeing my masseuse once a week, to see if we can get those muscles to relax and let go. I understand that it’s going to take some time. It’s already been months, but it’s likely to be more months before my knee is fully operational.

*le sigh*

I’ve been doing everything I can to help those muscles, including regularly heating them, taking baths, and most recently, I’ve started rubbing magnesium cream into my leg muscles at night. (https://amzn.to/3v0HP0U)

I was very hesitant about the magnesium cream. I take a very small dose of magnesium every day, one quarter of the recommended dose. Any more than that, and the laxative function of magnesium takes over. I’ve tried five or six different types of magnesium and it generally only works as a laxative for me. The form I’m currently taking is supposedly the most gentle on the stomach, and I still can’t tolerate much of it.

So I was concerned that a magnesium cream would end up working as a laxative. The good news is that it hasn’t.

The bad news is that I don’t think it’s helped in the slightest in terms of my muscles actually relaxing.

There is other good news, though.

Supposedly, magnesium helps you sleep. I was taking my magnesium just before I went to bed for a number of months and it didn’t do anything for me.

The cream, though, appears to be helping me sleep, and get better sleep.

Not every night, of course. But I’ve noticed that over the last ten days, I had six days with better than normal sleep. Significantly better.

Yesterday morning I had the strangest occurrence. I’d had another night of really good sleep. So much so, that I didn’t feel tired when I woke up. I kept poking at it, and realized that it wasn’t a feeling that I was used to. At all.

The reason why it was so strange was because I still had some level of brain fog. I’d just assumed that was always caused by the lack of sleep. Nope. It’s an actual symptom on its own that I’m going to have to better address.

So yay for better sleep! For something that’s actually working for me in terms of sleep! Totally unexpected but very, very welcome. Hopefully the cream will continue to do its thing for years to come.