Her restless legs finally relaxed. His neuropathy is almost gone.

My legs have been my own private nightmare since I was 46. I am 58 now. That is twelve years of lying in the dark trying not to move, knowing I was about to lose the fight, knowing I was about to swing my legs out of bed and pace the kitchen for forty minutes until they stopped buzzing.

If you have restless legs you already know what I mean. If you do not, the best description I have ever heard came from a neurologist in a podcast: "It is like someone has put a low-current battery inside the muscle, and the only way to discharge it is to move." That is exactly right.

What I had tried.

Magnesium. Iron. Quinine water. Compression socks. Cold showers before bed. Hot showers before bed. A weighted blanket that pinned my legs so hard I felt like I was being held down by a friendly anvil. A prescription that made me drowsy for the first hour and then woke me up at 2am with my legs going harder than before. Two specialists. One sleep clinic. A neurologist who said, kindly, "There is not a lot we can do about this beyond medication, and the medication will eventually fail."

That sentence, by the way, is what I remember most. The medication will eventually fail. She did not say it as a threat. She said it the way you say "the kettle will eventually need replacing." It was just a fact.

What my husband had.

My husband Frank, who is 61, has had peripheral neuropathy in both legs and feet for the last six years. His was post-chemo. The pins-and-needles never quite went away after his treatment ended. He described it as "a thousand small alarms going off in my socks all night." Two of us, in the same bed, with two completely different complaints, both of which made sleep a slow, defeated affair.

We had reached the stage where neither of us slept properly and neither of us complained about it. You start to think of it as your life.

The thing my niece mentioned.

My niece — 32, lives in Brisbane, has the kind of energy that makes me tired just on the phone — mentioned the grounding sheet to me at a family lunch. She had used one for postpartum sleep after her second baby. She did not pitch it. She said, in passing, "Aunt Sarah, given the legs thing, you should try one of those grounding sheets. It is the only thing that worked on my nervous system."

I nodded the way you nod when you have heard a thousand things and you are not going to try a thousand-and-first. I went home. I forgot about it. Two months later, on a particularly bad night where I was pacing the kitchen at 3:40am and Frank was sitting on the edge of the bed shaking his feet, I went and looked it up.

What I actually bought.

It is a stainless-steel grounding sheet. It is a king-size sheet woven with surgical stainless-steel thread that you put under your fitted sheet. A cord runs from the sheet to the third pin of any wall socket — the earth pin — the one connected to a copper rod buried in the ground beneath the house. No electricity flows through the cord. It is the same connection your body would make if you walked barefoot on grass — your body discharges the static charge it has built up during the day into the actual Earth.

I ordered the Premium Grounding sheet on a Tuesday night. It arrived on the Friday. I put it on under our fitted sheet, plugged the cord into the wall socket on Frank's side of the bed, and did not say anything to him about it because I did not want to manage his disappointment when nothing happened.

The first three nights.

The first night, my legs were quiet by 11:45pm. I noticed. I did not write it down because I did not want to jinx it.

The second night, I slept through to 5:10am. I have not slept past 4am in years. I lay there until 6, awake but calm, with my legs flat against the sheet and no buzzing.

The third night, Frank — who has not commented on anything I have bought in years — said: "My feet are quiet."

That is the exact phrase. My feet are quiet.

Eleven weeks in.

I am not going to tell you that my restless legs are gone, because they are not. I had two rough nights in the eleven weeks since we plugged the sheet in. Both were after I had drunk red wine at a wedding. Cause and effect, I suspect.

What I will tell you is that I now sleep, on average, six and a half hours straight. I get out of bed in the morning without the pre-emptive stretch I used to need to convince my calves they could carry me to the kitchen. The medication my neurologist warned was going to fail eventually has not failed yet, but I have not needed to take it for four weeks.

Frank's neuropathy — the thousand alarms — is harder to quantify because we cannot see it. But here is what is true: he sleeps for six hours straight now. He did not for the previous six years. He gets out of bed and walks to the kitchen normally. He did not for the previous six years. He has not mentioned the alarms once in the last six weeks. He is the kind of man who would mention the alarms if they were still going.

What I would tell anyone with restless legs.

It is the cheapest experiment you can run. The sheet costs less than two months of the supplements I used to buy. It comes with a 90-night money-back trial — which is, as I keep telling my sister-in-law, longer than most specialist treatment plans before someone tells you it is not working.

The thing I wish someone had said to me twelve years ago is that not every problem in the leg starts in the leg. Restless legs and peripheral neuropathy are, in the end, nervous-system problems. The grounding sheet works at the nervous-system level, which is why it works on both at once. You do not need to understand the chemistry to feel the difference.

You need ninety nights and an earth pin in your wall.

"My niece said it was the only thing that worked on her nervous system. She was right. I owe her ninety dollars on the wedding gift I never paid for."