I spent ten years in medical training. I practiced. Then I walked away from it to build this.
Part of the reason was what I kept seeing. Someone comes in exhausted. They can't fall asleep, or they wake at 3am and can't get back down. The answer in the room was almost always a prescription. Then, a few months later, something else to manage what the first thing was doing to them.
Nobody was asking the question I couldn't put down: why is this person's body stuck in the on position?
The other part of the reason is that I was that person.
I've slept badly my entire life. Wired at midnight, flat by mid afternoon, awake at 3am staring at a ceiling I could describe from memory. It wasn't a stressful season. It was just how my nights worked.
So I tried what everyone tries. Melatonin got me down and did nothing about 3am, and I woke up feeling worse than if I'd slept badly on my own. Magnesium from the drugstore. A stress gummy. A meditation app I quit inside two weeks because I couldn't tell whether it was doing anything at all.
Eventually I did the one thing my training was actually good for. I went and read the research.
Three things stood out. The stress gummy I bought had 100mg of ashwagandha. The studies I was reading used six times that. That isn't a low dose, it's a decoration. The form of magnesium decides whether you absorb it, and the cheap bottle was oxide, which mostly passes straight through you. And every product I owned was trying to do the whole job with one pill and fourteen ingredients, none of them at a dose that mattered.
That's when it reframed for me. This was never one problem. It's two.
There's a daytime problem, a stress system that never gets the signal to stand down. And there's a nighttime problem, a body that can't downshift once it finally has permission to. Most of what's on the shelf touches the second half badly and ignores the first half entirely.
So we built the other version. Two ingredients, one for each half of the problem. No proprietary blends. Every active ingredient and its dose is printed on the label.
And we tell you the timeline before you buy instead of after. It took me about three weeks to feel it, and knowing that up front is the difference between finishing and quitting on day nine.
I spent a decade learning how this system works. Then I spent a lot longer failing to fix it in my own body, until I stopped looking for one pill and started treating both halves.
Yosef Valenzuela, Cofounder, Rytma