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The Audiobook Test: Six Months With the Hypnozan 8H Program

Struggling to fall asleep at the end of the day? Sophie Bennett may have found a solution…

For about two years I could have told you exactly how long it took me to fall asleep, because I could also have told you the plot. Two chapters a night, minimum. Three if it had been a proper day. All heard, all followed, all while lying in the dark waiting to get on with it. It was never a dramatic problem. Nobody commissions a feature about being mildly rubbish at falling asleep. It was just a long, dull gap every night between deciding to sleep and getting round to it.

How much of the book I heard was the whole measure

That turned out to be handy. I am not a sleep-tracker sort of woman, and I distrust any device that grades my night out of a hundred before I have had coffee. But how much of a story you can still recount over breakfast is hard to argue with. It is not a feeling. It is a chapter count I did not choose and could not flatter.

Why I stopped waiting for a before-and-after

When I started on Hypnozan 8H I was braced for the usual wellness arc: nothing happens, you decide you imagined it, the bottle quietly relocates to the back of a cupboard behind a jar of something fermented.

It comes as two parts. A botanical formula with valerian root, lemon balm, motherwort and hops, plus vitamins B6 and B12, and magnesium bisglycinate with vitamin B6. Both capsules are vegan. You are meant to judge it as one thing rather than auditing the halves separately, which suited me, since I was already auditing chapters.

Magnesium and vitamins B6 and B12 contribute to the normal functioning of the nervous system, to normal psychological function, and to the reduction of tiredness and fatigue. It is a food supplement, not a treatment for anything, and I set my expectations accordingly.

Measured in chapters

The early weeks were unremarkable enough that I nearly wrote the whole thing off.

Then, somewhere across the second and third month, the amount I could remember started shrinking. Two chapters became one. One became a few pages. That was the clearest stretch for me, and the gap between putting the book on and losing the thread stopped being the long part of my evening.

I want to be careful here. That is my experience of my own nights across my own six months. Someone else’s chapter count is entirely their own business.

The unglamorous reason I finished the course

I carried on to six months for a fairly boring motive. I wanted to know whether it would hold once life stopped cooperating: a difficult week, a weekend that ran late, the usual.

A month can flatter almost anything. Six gave me a fairer view. It is sold as a course rather than something you take indefinitely, so finishing it felt like the honest way to answer my own question.

If a friend asked

I would say try it if your evenings have that same slow gap, and give it considerably longer than you want to. I would not promise a timeline. Mine took months, and it might not be yours.

Check first if you are pregnant or breastfeeding. It should not be taken alongside alcohol or other sedatives, and anyone on regular medication, particularly for blood pressure, blood thinning or heart rhythm, should ask a healthcare professional rather than a comments section.

These days I rarely make it past the opening pages before falling asleep. After years of getting through chapter after chapter, that feels like progress enough.