What actually worked
Magnesium at night. The only supplement where stopping for two weeks made an obvious difference. About forty dollars a month and the single best thing on this list.
Assisted stretching. An hour of someone moving your legs through ranges you cannot reach alone. The effect lasted a week, which nothing else here can claim.
A consistent sleep time. Free, deeply boring, and it does more than everything below it combined. Worth saying because every list like this skips it.
Pleasant, and I cannot prove anything
Cold plunge. Feels extraordinary for about three hours. I have never been able to identify a lasting effect, and I still do it, which tells you something about why people do it.
Infrared sauna. Genuinely relaxing, and the argument for buying one rather than paying per session is purely financial — it pays for itself in about four months if you would otherwise book regularly.
Red light. I sat in the room. I enjoyed the room. I cannot tell you it did anything, and I am suspicious of anyone who says otherwise with confidence.
What I would not buy again
Any single device over a few hundred dollars that does one thing. The expensive panels, the specialist gadgets — I used each one enthusiastically for about three weeks.
A stack of nine supplements. I went into this year taking nine things and came out taking three, and I feel no different except financially. The test that sorted them: stop for two weeks and see whether you notice.
The honest bit
A lot of this is structure rather than biology. Booking a sauna at seven means not doing something else at seven, and in the first year that mattered more than any measurable effect.
I would not pretend the red light did anything. I would absolutely say the habit of going somewhere and sitting still did.
