Carlos’s Story: A Lifelong Insomniac Finally Reclaims his Sleep and Energy

Carlos is a numbers-driven person.

He studies the science, tracks data, and questions mechanisms. “Getting to sleep, staying asleep, getting back to sleep have always been problems,” he says. His body seemed to want a 30-hour day, and sleep felt random. Some nights he woke around 3:45am, unable to fall back to sleep. Other nights were fragmented or even completely sleepless. He tried everything: prescription sleep medications, melatonin, EEG-based products, red light, no light, sleep hygiene practices and tracked everything. Nothing produced consistent, measurable results.

“When I felt tired or awake, was random. There was no pattern I could trust.”

By the time he joined Lume, he was understandably skeptical. “I went in 50–50 on whether the numbers would actually get worse,” he says. He had seen too many companies make confident claims without showing their work. “I don’t like it when people don’t tell you how,” he says. “I want to understand the details.”

With Lume, instead of the impossible task of forcing sleep, Carlos aligned his behavior with his circadian biology by modifying timing of various habits and making conscious decisions about light exposure.

The change showed up first in his mornings. “I am no longer dragging @ss at 9am,” Carlos said. His caffeine intake reduced significantly. The jitters disappeared. His energy stabilized. Sleep was not perfect, but it became reliable. Even his metabolic health improved. His HbA1c dropped from 5.2 to 4.7 unexpectedly, with no other reasonable explanation.

At the conclusion of his two-week program with Lume, the final results came back. His hormone levels exceeded the assay’s detection limit.

“You literally broke our test”

From late evening onward, his levels were higher than expected for his age, closer to what is seen in much younger individuals. “I didn’t really expect this to happen,” Carlos says. “It’s kind of crazy.”

What mattered most was the validation. “It puts an objective number behind the subjective feeling,” he says. “Seeing the numbers correlate with what I feel. Now I know the whole thing is real.” For years, he carried a PTSD-like fear around sleep, believing that if he woke up he would never get back to sleep. “I used to go to bed with medication” he says. “Now I go to bed with nothing. I fear I won’t sleep, and then I’m asleep. It’s just never happened before.”

Looking back, Carlos believes the difference was missing information. “People say ‘cut blue light,’” he says, “but nobody ever said, go get really bright light for an hour in the morning.” The details mattered, including brightness, wavelength, timing, and environment. He says,

“You gave me the rest of the missing knowledge and measured the results”

Today, Carlos still has occasional nighttime awakenings, but fewer and less disruptive. He falls asleep reliably without sleep aids and wakes with energy he had not felt in years. “It works,” he says. Coming from someone like Carlos who had exhausted every option, that says a lot.