The Supplement That ACTUALLY Helped Me Breathe Again
If we’re going to be friends here, I think we have to start with honesty.
Honesty is always the best policy.
So, for a little reference, let’s start with how I got to the place I started from: the underbelly of rock bottom.
The simplest way to frame this is to say my nervous system is broken. And if we’re being frank, it’s probably been broken for a very long time. I just didn’t understand what a nervous system was or how it shaped the days and weeks that felt like I was being dragged straight through hell.
““I just didn’t understand what a nervous system was or how it shaped the days and weeks that felt like I was being dragged straight through hell.””
I’m sure many of you can imagine it — months, years even, working 80 to 100 hours a week in a physical job. Hot kitchens, snow blowing through the hood, constant deliveries, 50-pound cases, stooping, never sitting except for a quick bathroom break, rarely eating.
Am I superwoman? Are any of us who push that hard? Of course not.
I lived on six shots of espresso at a time, used to swallow my prescription diet pills (yes, plural), and chased it with at least one 5-Hour Energy later. Usually another while I did my makeup in the work bathroom or my car before service — because, obviously, a show pony has to put on her face.
By nine p.m., I was starving to the point of nausea. I didn’t cook for myself; I didn’t even keep food at home. I ate whatever was open, grabbed premade meals from the grocery store, or begged my sous chef to fire something off. Then I’d fall into bed around midnight, only to get up by five, shower, unload deliveries, plan menus, organize events, and prep the whole show again.
I had no idea I could actually break. People had warned me for years, “you can’t work that hard.” I could hear Grandma Ninny’s voice saying I was doing too much, that if I didn’t slow down I’d have a “backset.”
She was right.
Eventually I hit a point where no cold shower, no face in a bowl of ice water, no hands in hot Epsom salt, no diet pills or 5-Hour Energies could revive me. My body gave out.
It took over a year and a half after falling apart to even begin to understand how much work it would take to find my way back to myself.
Finding the Starting Line
Who knew that meals, a few supplements, actual sleep, and a Do-Not-Disturb setting could start to make me feel human again?
Did I start with more than 30 supplements? Pretty much.
Did I gut my pantry and my life all at once? Absolutely.
Do I recommend that? Not even a little.
But I’ve always been all-or-nothing.
Instead of setting up kitchens that made life easier for everyone but me, I started building up the woman I’d let down for so long. Vitamin lists. Timing charts for what to take with or without fat and how long to wait between doses. Nutrition trackers, because eating — shockingly — felt foreign.
People laughed when I said I didn’t eat my own food, but I found joy in other people eating what I made. I never learned to feed myself.
Nutrition has been my biggest struggle. I still fight to eat three meals a day. My brain, a little obsessive at times, gets overwhelmed by all the information and all the contradictory rules. I felt like I was failing every meal I didn’t get “right.”
With PCOS, endometriosis, no gallbladder, and years of extreme cortisol from both my career and personal life, I had to start at the very beginning. So I chose to do a full liver detox.
Some days it felt like nothing was working. I’d quit phentermine. I’d quit smoking after almost twenty years. Desi Lou Arnez — the love of my life — had died. I was drowning.
There were other reckonings, but for now we’ll just say I needed a way out. I didn’t know what my nervous system was, but I knew it was broken.
Learning to Heal
[Magnesium glycinate supplement link here]
[GABA product link here]
When you realize the first part of healing is figuring out what the heck your nervous system even is, you go down every rabbit hole.
That’s where I found GABA and magnesium glycinate. That was the beginning of feeling like the world might not swallow me whole.
I’ve always been tough — called “too sensitive” since childhood, which means you learn to armor up fast. But by this point I didn’t feel tough anymore. I felt empty.
There was one person who believed otherwise, and if he hadn’t been in my corner, this story might never have been written. He said, “Let’s go get some of that GABA you keep reading about.” So off we went, wandering the aisles of supplement stores and natural groceries.
It started with those two things — GABA and magnesium glycinate — and little by little, I could breathe again. And sleep.
Eight hours. At a time.
For a woman who had lived on four or five hours a night for most of a decade, it felt like absolute luxury. And it was.
Once I started breathing and sleeping, mornings were different. I drank hot lemon water when I woke up, learned which supplements needed an empty stomach, started to feel hungry again in the morning — something I hadn’t even thought was possible. I added clean protein wherever I could. My heart stopped racing out of my chest.
I still jump at too many sounds, and everything still feels too loud some days, but I have systems now. Ice packs in my bedroom freezer and the kitchen. A little bottle in the fridge with aloe, trace minerals, and rose water for when my skin flushes for no reason.
Each routine was a quiet way of telling my body it was safe.
What Healing Looks Like
I still catch myself whispering, “You’re safe, Chloe, you’re fine,” like I’m half-annoyed with the younger version of me who couldn’t even keep her phone on ring. But the more I practiced real care — not productivity disguised as care — the safer I actually felt.
I started jotting down how I felt at the end of the day. Not paragraphs, just enough to have evidence that something was shifting.
As I added supplements, changed routines, and edited my food, I had proof that things were working.
I stopped laughing at the wellness people and bone-broth Pinterest boards. I finally understood why they cared about all these things. My gut was a mess, and until I healed that, everything else would stay a mess.
Some days it’s still overwhelming. It’s a lot to learn when no one ever taught you how to take care of yourself. But after 37 years of taking care of everyone and everything else, surely I could do it for me.
And that’s what this is about — learning to take care of ourselves. Because as cliché as it sounds, you cannot pour from an empty, shattered cup.
Why I’m Sharing This
It’s my mission now to make sure others never get as far down as I did. This is how I got there, and this is how I began climbing back.
I had to change my methods. For me. For saving what’s left of the world I love. For holding space for the broken and the desperate who are trying to heal.
So here it is — my love letter to those who feel so lost and so broken they can’t even say it out loud.
I wish it weren’t true that the smallest changes make the biggest difference. But it is. There is always a way.
And for the rest of my life, I’ll keep teaching this to the overachievers, the workaholics, the stay-at-home moms who do it all, the parentified oldest children, and the “I’ll just work harder” crowd.
Because what I’ve learned, more than anything, is that I didn’t need to be tougher.
I just needed a little love.
If you’re new here and want the full backstory, you can start with Why I Started The Rooted Sparrow. Or, if you’d rather see how those nervous-system habits started to spill over into my home life, you can read Learning to Stay Home (and Actually Enjoy It).
