I want to establish something before we begin. I am not a wellness person. I have never described my nervous system out loud without irony. I have not done a cold plunge and I do not intend to start.
I am, separately, exhausted. Sleeping badly. Lying awake at one in the morning with the specific tiredness that sits on your chest and hums. I made the mistake of Googling it and found a great deal of content about cortisol — the stress hormone modern life keeps running high, which wrecks your sleep and will not switch off.
There is one object on my bedside table that does something about it. It is small, white, matte, and shaped like a cloud. It does four things — heat, vibration, EMS microcurrent, and suction — in any combination, on demand. The heat reaches body temperature in about fifteen seconds. The rest I'll describe properly below, on the basis that this is a review and not a diary entry.
What I will say is this: it did the thing. On a Tuesday. In forty minutes. I fell asleep within twenty minutes and slept for seven and a half hours — which I had started to assume was simply no longer available to me on a weeknight.
I had been treating it as a luxury for when I had the time and the energy. That, it turns out, is backwards. It is a tool for the nights you have neither.
Verdict. Thunder & Lightning is £144.44. It does four things at once, which is three more than my brain can manage at one in the morning. The guarantee is real — sixty days, in writing, cash back. On the present evidence, it is the most useful object I own.
Gerald next door swears by chamomile tea. Gerald is also awake at two every morning, vigilant against nothing.
— Charlie
