I did what most of us do. I tried the obvious things. Better diet. Multivitamins. I started working out again — I've played sport my whole life, basketball, football, ice hockey — so the gym felt like familiar ground.
The workout and the diet helped. But something was still missing. Like a battery that can only charge to 70%, no matter how long you leave it on. A 20-minute dumbbell session that would have been nothing five years ago was now knocking me sideways for the rest of the day.
My stomach churned with a feeling I couldn't shake: I'm 40. That's halftime. I've got at least 40 more years of this game to play. And right now, I'm not even fielding a full team.
I'm not a doctor. I'm not a biochemist or a dietitian. By trade, I'm a web designer and an e-commerce builder. But there's something in my personality — call it the researcher, the stubborn journalist — that can't rest until it finds the truth of a thing.
So I dug. Deep. Every blog, every study, every health influencer, every YouTube channel on men's health, hormonal shifts, NAD+, cortisol, sleep architecture. Hundreds of hours. And somewhere in that research, something clicked.