I tried dissolvable cherry-flavoured strips designed to send me to sleep — they’re just 63p each

I’VE ALWAYS found a good night’s sleep elusive.

Despite a high-tech setup — featuring a fancy iGel mattress, a dehumidifier, Loop Earplugs and an Oura Ring — my slumbers are short and often restless.

Sleep Bundle, £35.99 from Diso

Part of the issue is that I’ve never found a great sleep supplement — they’re either so weak that they’re unnoticeable or so strong that I’m left with an odd, groggy hangover feeling the next day.

However, I was offered the chance to try My Diso’s Sleep Bundle, which contains the brand’s 63p-per night strips, designed to dissolve on your tongue and send you into a deep, cherry-scented sleep.

It seemed like a low-risk, high-reward opportunity, so I gave them a go.

First impressions

Snooze Supplement, £18.99 from Diso

The instructions for using the MyDiso Snooze Supplement are simple and undaunting; simply put a cherry-flavoured strip on your tongue around half an hour before you go to bed and allow it to dissolve.

There’s no water required, which is handy if you’re already in bed and can’t be bothered to get up, and they come in a nifty tin, too, which is great for travelling — when sleep issues usually affect me most.

Taste-wise — I won’t lie, it ain’t great. There’s a fairly pleasant cherry flavour, followed immediately by a very medicinal taste. It’s not too far off the experience of eating a cough sweet, but a bit more intense.

Do they deliver?

Snooze Supplement, £18.99 from Diso

As is often the case with products like this, it’s hard to pinpoint how much of any effect is down to the MyDiso strips themselves, and how much is to do with either the ritual of using them or the placebo effect.

Either way, I do think I felt drowsier as a result of taking the strips; as promised, after half an hour, I felt ready to turn in.

Because of the strips’ quick absorption — which I’ve dived into further below — it was a short, strong feeling of tiredness, which is perfect if, like me, you often endlessly scroll because you don’t feel “ready to sleep”.

I tend to avoid heavy sleeping tablets because they give me a terrible grogginess the following morning — thankfully, there was none of that from these.

Does the science check out?

There’s understandably quite a lot of scepticism around products like this — they often sound a bit too good to be true.

I won’t go into too much depth about the science behind the ingredients (we’ll leave that to the medical journals), but there’s actually some impressive evidence backing these strips.

Their main USP — and the USP of MyDiso as a brand — is that, by dissolving your tongue, their ingredients are absorbed into the “oral mucosa” (which, despite sounding like a particularly gross spell from Harry Potter, is simply the lining of your mouth).

That means that the strip’s goodies — Montmorency Cherry, L-Theanine, Valerian, Chamomile, GABA, and Vitamin B6 — absorb into your bloodstream quickly — perfect if you’re trying to achieve almost immediate drowsiness.

The other advantage is that, unlike when you take an oral tablet, half of the ingredients aren’t immediately destroyed by your liver and stomach acid, meaning that MyDiso can get away with using extremely low quantities of some ingredients (although the jury is still out on whether the levels of some, like GABA, are high enough to be effective).