“I Am 72 And I Had Not Slept A Full Night In Four Years. It Was My Feet, And Nobody Ever Told Me Why.”

By Beryl Hargreaves

September 18, 2026

It was twenty to three in the morning and I was standing on the kitchen lino in the dark, again, because the tiles are the coldest floor in the house.

If you have this, you already know what I am describing. You do not need me to find a clever word for it. Burning, or pins and needles, or that feeling like there is wire under the skin — and it only properly starts once you lie down, which is the cruellest part of the whole arrangement.

I am 72. I worked in a school office in Toowoomba for twenty-six years and I have six grandchildren. I am not the sort of person who writes things like this.

What made me write it was my granddaughter Ruby, who is nine, at her cousin's birthday in March. There was music on and she took my hand to pull me up, and then she looked at my face and let go and said, it is alright Nan, I forgot.

Nine years old, and she had already learned to stop asking.

I want to be straight with you before I go on, because there is a version of this article that is rubbish and I am not writing it.

I am not a nurse and I am not going to tell you what is wrong with your feet. I do not know. What I can tell you is exactly what I tried over four years, because I suspect your cupboard looks a lot like mine did:

The Lyrica is the one people ask about, so I will deal with it.

It did take the edge off. It also made me feel like I was watching my own life through a flyscreen. I would lose the end of a sentence at the bowls club. My ankles swelled. I put on six kilos in a year and I was not eating any differently.

My GP was not being lazy — she was working with what she had, and for plenty of people it is the right answer. Nothing here is a reason to change or stop anything your GP has put you on. A cream you rub into your feet is not an alternative to a script, and that conversation is one to have with the person who wrote it.

But I remember sitting in the car in the surgery car park thinking: nobody has actually told me what is wrong. They have told me what to take for it.

Let Me Guess What Your Feet Do At Night

You are fine all day. That is the bit that makes you feel like a fraud.

You get through the shopping and the garden and whoever is visiting, and nobody looking at you would know. Then you lie down, and about twenty minutes later it starts.

You move your feet to the cool part of the sheet. That works for a minute. You put them out the side of the bed. You give up and get up, and you stand somewhere cold, and you put the jug on so you have a reason to be standing there.

And at some point you started going to bed later on purpose, because there is no sense lying in the dark waiting for it.

Here is the part I did not understand for four years, and it is not complicated.

Everything I had bought was aimed at how much it hurt. Not one thing was aimed at why it was hurting. The salts, the socks, the blue tub, even the tablets — all of them work on the noise. None of them go anywhere near where the noise is being made.

It Is Not Your Circulation. It Is A Gate On The Nerve That Will Not Shut.

Magnesium is what holds a nerve ending quiet. It sits in the gate on the surface of the nerve — the receptor that decides whether a pain signal gets sent — and it plugs that gate shut. When magnesium runs short, the gate stops closing properly. The nerve fires. And then it keeps firing. That is the burning. What you are feeling at two in the morning is not damage yet. It is a nerve ending stuck in the on position, running all night because there is nothing left to switch it off. Then the second stage, and this is the one nobody explains. A nerve ending that fires continuously inflames. Inflamed tissue in the worst-supplied part of your body starves of blood, and a small nerve fibre starved of blood dies back — patchily at first, then for good. The burning fades. What replaces it is numbness. Numbness is not the problem easing. It is the nerve going dark.

They call it nerve char. Two stages: the years of burning, and then the going dark. And when somebody finally explained that to me I understood my own feet for the first time since 2022.

A magnesium tablet — spent all over your body before it gets to your feet

Rubbed into the foot — it arrives where the gate is

This is the part that still irritates me, because I had been most of the way there on my own.

Somebody in a Facebook group had said magnesium, about two years earlier. So I had bought magnesium — the tablets, from the chemist, like anyone would — and taken them for about six weeks and given up, because nothing happened.

I had the right mineral and the wrong route, and I had written the whole idea off because of it.

A tablet goes into your stomach, into your blood, and gets shared out across your heart and your muscles and every nerve in your body. Your feet are the very end of the line — the furthest point from your heart, on the thinnest little vessels you have. A tablet was never going to turn up at my toes in any quantity worth having.

Put it on the foot and it does not have to make that journey at all. A 2017 pilot study published in PLOS ONE had participants apply a magnesium cream to the skin daily for two weeks and measured a rise in their magnesium levels — which is the question everybody asks first: does it actually go in.

“Nearly everyone who comes in has a tub of magnesium in the cupboard and a cooling rub beside the bed. They got to the right mineral by themselves. Nobody told them it had to go on the foot.”

Gavin Rourke, Podiatrist, 22 years — diabetic foot and small-fibre neuropathy

Go And Stand On Your Bathroom Tiles Tonight, In Bare Feet

Not now — tonight, when you get up, because you will. Stand on the bathroom tiles in bare feet, both feet flat, and do not do anything else for about ten seconds.

Then ask yourself one question: do both feet feel equally cold?

Not whether they hurt. Whether the cold arrives the same on both, and the same across the whole of each one — heel, arch, ball, and every toe.

When I did it, my right foot was cold and my left was cold everywhere except the two smallest toes and a patch under the ball of the foot, where it was nothing at all. Not painful. Not cold. Just nothing, as though I was standing on it through a thick sock.

I had been quietly pleased about that patch for months, because it was the one bit of my foot that had stopped burning.

It had not stopped burning. It had stopped reporting.

That is the stage after the burning, and it is the reason I stopped treating this as something to put up with until it settles down. It does not settle down. It goes quiet, which is a different thing entirely — and a foot that cannot feel cold tiles also cannot feel a stone in your shoe.

Nobody Stops Going Out All At Once

This is what I would most like the people reading this to hear, because it is the part I did not notice happening.

You do not decide to stop doing things. It happens in a series of small sensible adjustments, and every single one of them has a perfectly good reason at the time:

• Driving to the shops instead of walking down, because of the walk back
• Sitting down at the barbecue rather than standing about, and arriving early so you get the chair
• Ladies' bowls on a Tuesday, dropped for a season, then not picked back up
• Saying no to the second night when the grandkids stay, because you know what you will be like
• Going to bed at midnight because there is no point going at ten

Not one of those is worth ringing a doctor about. Which is exactly why it goes on for four years.

And then one day a nine-year-old lets go of your hand at a birthday party and says it is alright Nan, I forgot, and you realise that the adjustments added up to a smaller life while you were busy being sensible about each one.

What I Actually Put On My Feet Now

It is a cream you rub into your feet, and I use it twice a day — once after my shower and once sitting on the edge of the bed before I get in.

The one I ended up with is an Australian one called Mantle Nerve Relief Cream. What mattered to me is what is in it besides the cool bit, because I had already bought enough tubs that were only the cool bit:

It does go cold when you put it on, and I want to be honest about that, because the cold is the first thing you will notice and it is not the clever part. That is the menthol, and it is comfort while you are getting off to sleep. The magnesium chloride underneath it is the part doing something at the nerve ending.

I will not tell you it worked the first night, because it did not. The first night was the cold feeling and a solid four hours, which was more than I had been getting.

It was somewhere in the second week that I noticed I had not got up. Not that I had slept well — that I had not been standing on the kitchen lino at all, and had not for a few nights, and had not noticed.

By about six weeks the patch under the ball of my left foot could feel the cold tiles again. I am not going to make a grand claim about that. I am telling you because I check it, every so often, standing in the bathroom like an idiot, and it is better than it was.

I bought three jars in the end. One lives on the bedside table, one is in my handbag for when we go away, and one is in the bathroom cupboard, because the whole thing only works if you are not hunting for it at two in the morning.

I am not going to tell you this will work for you. I do not know what is wrong with your feet and neither does anybody who writes one of these.

What I will say is that I spent four years buying things aimed at how much it hurt, and rather less than that on the one thing aimed at why, and I would like those four years back.

Go and stand on the tiles tonight. Then decide.