Better Rest

7.5

Value for Money

6.5/10

Formula Rating

7.0/10

Risk of Side Effects

9.0/10

Positives

• Very good melatonin dose
• Contains tryptophan

Negatives

• Contains a lot of dead weight
• Tryptophan dose is low
• Theanine dose is low

Better Rest Review Summary

This is yet another stack using pretty much the same formula as every other sleep supplement on Amazon right now. However, to Better Rest’s credit, the doses used here are better than usual. Much better.

We get a very sizable dose of melatonin in each serving of Better Rest, as well as reasonable doses of both theanine and valerian root. We also have a good dose of Tryptophan, which is not present in anywhere near enough sleep aids today. Together, these ingredients will help reduce sleep latency, reduce anxiety, and help you get back on to your normal sleeping cycle. 

However, there’s a lot of dead weight here. GABA supplementation is completely pointless. Hops and passion flower aren’t going to affect your sleep quality or the ease with which you fall asleep at all. We mean AT ALL. That’s some material you’re paying for and consuming each night which does NOTHING for you. A fairly good stack, but the dead weight really weighs it down.

Where To Buy Better Rest

You can buy Better Rest directly from The Calm Company website. We always recommend buying direct when you can.

Detailed Calm Company Better Rest Review

Better Rest is a natural sleeping aid from The Calm Company. This a completely new supplement manufacturer, and Better Rest seems to be its only product. Their website is pretty much a 3 page website with some fluff around the edges. However, they’ve clearly put a lot of effort into it, and it seems likely that they’ll bring out some more supplements in the future.

So what is Better Rest all about?

What is it supposed to do exactly?

If we take a quick look at the official website, we see that Better Rest is supposedly designed to deliver a range of key, core benefits:

• Helps falling asleep
• Supports sleep duration
• Improves quality of sleep
• Helps you wake up on time feeling refreshed

That is a very admirable range of benefits to aim for. In fact, that is pretty much everything we could ask for from a sleep supplement.

Whether it does this by reducing stress and anxiety or fixing your circadian rhythm, any stack that can do these things is a winner in our books.

But plenty of supplements promise to do these things and just a tiny fraction actually deliver.

So where does Better Rest stand?

Does it really work?

What are the side effects risks like?

How does Better Rest compare to the best sleep supplements on the market right now?

In our full review below, we take a closer look at the Better Rest formula to see if this product can back up all its talk with action. We discuss the main side effect risk factors. In the end, we’ll tell you what we think of Better Rest as a whole and how we see it fitting into the market. Please post all questions in the comments section at the end and we’ll try to get back to you within 48 hours.

Better Rest Formula Analysis

Let’s cut to the chase. Here is the Better Rest formula:

This looks very similar to many other natural sleep aids available today.

There is a real taste for formulas like this; tens of sleeping supplements sold right now have more or less this exact same formula – same ingredients, same doses, and so on.

Generally speaking, we’re never overly thrilled with this kind of formula.

But Better Rest differs from many similar stacks in a few key ways.

For one thing, it contains an ingredient not found in your bog-standard sleeping stack: Tryptophan. This stuff is effective and reliable.

It also uses larger doses in key areas that will have a real impact on your sleeping patterns. If you’re going to include ingredients, you need to include enough of them.

Yet we still have far too much dead weight here for our liking. Overall, this is a good product, but you can get better results using other sleep aids.

Main Strengths

• Very good dose of melatonin
• Good dose of Tryptophan
• Addition of magnesium is a bonus

There are some very good things about The Calm Company Better Rest which differentiate it from the bulk of the sleeping supplements sold on Amazon (at least those that use this same kind of formula). 

For one thing, this stack contains a much larger dose of melatonin than you will get from 90% of supplements out there.

Most of you will already be familiar with melatonin and what it does for you.

It is the hormone which governs your sleep/wake cycle. Basically, it is melatonin which controls when you start to feel sleepy, when you actually fall asleep, and when you wake up. it is melatonin (among other things) which governs how long you sleep for and how good or restful your sleep is each night. 

It is a melatonin issue which causes jet lag, and rectifying your melatonin release cycle is one of the things you need to do to cure jet lag.

Better Rest provides 6mg of melatonin per nightly serving. This compares very well to the 2mg you find in the majority of natural sleeping supplements. It is even larger than the 5mg that you will typically get from the best natural sleeping aids available right now. 

We also get a healthy dose of tryptophan from Better Rest.

Most supplements that use Trypotphan, and more should, don’t use anywhere near enough. Some will throw in 50mg or so. 

Some stacks, such as Performance Lab Sleep, will go in hard and use a massive 250mg of Tryptophan per serving. 

While you don’t get anywhere near that much from Better Rest, you do get a fairly healthy 100mg of Tryptophan per serving. 

Finally we come to the magnesium. As we said above, Calm Company actually updated their formula a few months after the initial launch of this product.

The only thing they changed was to introduce some magnesium.

This is definitely an improvement. Magnesium supplementation has been shown to help improve sleeping habits in the elderly. Even small amounts of magnesium before bed time tend to help hasten sleep, and the cited study notes that it tends to reduce anxiety and elevate mood.

Magnesium deficiencies are related to a number of negative health outcomes, so supplementing with a little extra magnesium certainly can’t hurt!

Now, we would prefer to see a lot more magnesium than this in a premium sleep stack. We think 100mg is a good starting point (assuming your diet contains plenty already).

However, it is great to see that Calm Company have opted for magnesium bisglycinate; a highly bioavailable form of magnesium. 30mg is less than expected, but it’s enough to produce benefits. 

-Why You Should Get Up At 5am-

Main Weaknesses

• Too much dead weight
• Theanine dose is low
• Tryptophan dose could be higher

Despite the substantial good points laid out above, we aren’t going to be recommending this stack to our readers as the best value or most potent sleep supplement on the market today.

That’s because there is quite simply too much dead weight in this stack for us to really get excited about it as a whole.

We hate paying good money for ingredients that don’t do anything to help us achieve the stated aims of the product. 

More ingredients does not equal a better product. Quite the opposite. 

We would rather pay good money for high doses of fewer ingredients that are of the highest quality than more, but lower quality ingredients that are also dosed lower on average.

We look for punch and value, not variety and exotic sounding ingredients.

We also want to minimize how much actual material we’re consuming every day through supplements. Many of our review team take 2-4 different supplements each day, varying with their needs and interests. 

We want to minimize the risk that comes with consuming dozens and dozens of herbal extracts every day. While individually safe, we don’t want to risk experiencing side effects from combining so many different ingredients from different stacks. 

So the fact that Better Rest contains so many useless ingredients is a real problem for us.

For example, we know that supplementing with GABA is completely pointless. 

Orally consuming GABA does not reliably translate to higher GABA levels in the brain. This means that you aren’t going to get the benefits associated with increased GABA just because you have been taking it as a supplement. 

Increasing GABA excitability can indeed help you feel more relaxed and ready for sleep. But there are more efficient ways to reduce sleep latency and increase sleep quality.

It is easy to sell GABA on paper, which is why it is in so many sleep supplements. But in reality, it does very little.

This is just one example of an ingredient in Better Rest that does nothing for your sleep quality, latency, duration, or anything at all for that matter.

We could talk about hops, passionflower extract, or the efficacy of using lemon balm in this manner. But we don’t have the space right now. In each case though, we think the formula would be a lot better if said ingredient wasn’t there. They offer nothing, and take up valuable formula space.

More tryptophan and theanine would do a lot more for us than passionflower extract.

-Best Natural Anxiety Remedies-

Better Rest Side Effects – Is It Safe?

Very few users are going to experience any side effects whatsoever from this stack.

The ingredients in The Calm Company Better Rest have all been extensively studied in clinical trials. While we have questions about their efficacy as sleep aids (in some cases), we have never found reason to believe that they pose a significant risk to health. 

These ingredients are all widely used today. Thousands of people use them in an attempt to improve their sleeping patterns, and side effects seem to be very rare – based on user feedback and product popularity at least. 

Do not try to treat a serious case of insomnia with natural sleep aids. If you are seriously sleep deprived, you need to talk to a doctor SOON! Going without sufficient sleep for a prolonged period can be seriously damaging to your health. 

Do your own research and be careful!

Final Verdict – The Calm Company Better Rest – Should You Buy It?

This stack contains some absolutely excellent natural sleep aids.

The problem is that it also contains several ingredients that don’t bring you any benefit whatsoever.

The doses could also be much better in places. One of the best ingredients in here is Tryptophan. But as one of the only reliable ingredients, it could be dosed a lot higher for our liking.

We could also happily see about twice this much theanine, and twice as much magnesium. But Calm Company have included these ingredients, and they will still have an impact on your sleeping patterns.

The value for money is what really lets this stack down. The only good ingredient dosed right is the melatonin, and melatonin supplements can be purchased for very little money these days. Just buy own-brand from your local supplement store.