This is something profoundly revealing about a society in which aligning with your own biology requires permission. In the UK, melatonin - the hormone your brain naturally produces in response to darkness - is only available by prescription, despite this being one of the most sun-deprived countries in Europe. Long winters, short days, persistent grey skies, and a population increasingly disconnected from natural light and circadian rhythm form the backdrop of modern British life. Melatonin is not foreign to the body, not synthetic, not novel. It is ancient - older than medicine, older than institutions, older than government itself. It governs sleep, repair, immunity, and seasonal rhythm in humans and animals alike. Yet in a culture saturated with artificial light, chronic stress, and overstimulation, restoring this basic biological signal is treated as a medical privilege rather than a foundational human need. At the same time, substances that actively disrupt sleep and long-term health - alcohol, caffeine, ultra-processed food, constant digital stimulation - remain freely available, socially encouraged, and aggressively marketed. That contradiction is not incidental; it is structural.
Once you notice it, the same logic extends far beyond melatonin. Natural health products - adaptogens, medicinal mushrooms such as turkey tail, traditional herbs used for centuries to support immunity, stress resilience, and nervous system balance - are increasingly restricted, reclassified, or regulated into obscurity. Rarely through dramatic bans, which would attract too much attention, but through quiet mechanisms: legal grey zones, redefinitions as “novel foods,” capped dosages, limited availability, and the familiar refrain of “insufficient evidence.” Yet “insufficient evidence” often translates not to ineffectiveness, but to a lack of financial incentive to fund research into substances that cannot be patented, owned, or monopolised. Many modern pharmaceuticals are derived from these same plants and fungi, yet once isolated, synthesised, and commercialised, they suddenly become legitimate. What is discouraged is not the outcome - but the autonomy.
These natural substances share something in common that makes them uncomfortable within a profit-driven health model: they do not override the body; they support it. They help regulate rather than suppress, adapt rather than dominate. They reduce dependency by strengthening the body’s own capacity to respond to stress, darkness, scarcity, and imbalance. Humans evolved through adaptation - through long periods of cold, famine, migration, and low light - using plants, fungi, rhythm, movement, and environmental awareness to survive. Our biology expects these inputs. Remove them, and dysfunction follows. Modern life has systematically removed nearly all of them. Artificial light replaces the sun, screens replace stillness, sedentary routines replace movement, processed food replaces nourishment, and constant stimulation replaces rest. The resulting collapse in sleep quality, immune resilience, and nervous system regulation is not a mystery - it is a predictable outcome.
Rather than redesigning life around human limits, society manages the consequences. Exhaustion is medicalised, insomnia is pathologised, stress is individualised, and imbalance is treated as a personal failure rather than an environmental one. People are encouraged to cope indefinitely rather than restore balance. And when individuals reach for natural tools to help their bodies recalibrate - to sleep, to adapt, to recover - those tools increasingly sit behind regulatory barriers. Not because they are dangerous, but because they work quietly, preventatively, and without locking people into lifelong dependency. A resilient population is difficult to manage. A population that understands its own biology is harder still.
At its core, this is not really a story about supplements or herbs; it is about monetisation. Natural living - sleep, light, food, movement, rest, resilience - has been engineered out of everyday life and then sold back in fragments. What once came freely through alignment with nature is now accessed through products, services, subscriptions, consultations, and permissions. Sleep is no longer a rhythm; it is a market. Movement is no longer embedded in survival; it is a membership. Health is no longer cultivated daily; it is administered. Even “wellness” itself has been absorbed, aestheticised, and repackaged - stripped of its original power, which was independence from fragile systems.
Freedom, in this context, has not been taken away outright. It has been priced, regulated, and rationed. You are free to consume, free to numb, free to distract, free to manage symptoms indefinitely. But aligning with light, rhythm, rest, and adaptation increasingly requires approval. From a Green Blueprint perspective, this is the great inversion: humans once lived in relationship with nature, and that relationship made them resilient, adaptable, and difficult to control. Now, nature itself is filtered through policy, and biology is treated as a liability unless supervised. When aligning with your own design requires permission, the issue is no longer health - it is control.
