Wondering if collagen might help you with your specific health concern?
Find out more about these powerful protein peptides and how they benefit so many ailments, illnesses and injuries in our series of articles featuring real customers who have found answers to how collagen can help them.
Meanwhile, if you suffer from sleeping difficulties that are often linked to work stress, read on…
Imagine being at the supermarket checkout with beer and nappies, and the staff member asks you for ID. You explain your driver’s licence is lost... That old chestnut. You can purchase the nappies, but because you’ve been unable to prove you’re over 18, you’ve had to leave the beer behind.
Now imagine you’re 32 years old.
Sophie doesn’t have to imagine, because it happens to her on a regular enough basis to prove slightly annoying at times. And it means she comes home with nappies, but no beer! However, ultimately it’s a good ‘problem’ to have, and (ironically) it’s partly for this reason that Sophie started taking collagen. You see, once you hit your thirties you know you’re really not bullet-proof and this caper, as amusing as it is, might just have an end date.
However, although Sophie jokes that she started taking collagen to “come out of lockdown looking like a mermaid”, she had no idea this would serve her in other far more valuable ways. But, let’s find out some more about Sophie first...
Vuitton, Madonna, and the invincible twenties
Following a degree in Music Management and Marketing, Sophie carved for herself a successful career in London’s entertainment industry, ultimately working for the likes of Madonna, Louis Vuitton and Alexander Wang.
She began as a gig promoter, before moving on to become a DJ booker. Days were long, commutes were up to three hours for a round-trip, and there wasn’t much time left for healthy living. She put on weight and became familiar with its inherent partners, sluggishness and lethargy.
However, she was in her twenties and therefore bullet proof. Even a fall on her 28th birthday, smashing her knees into the corner of a metal stair that rendered her unable to kneel for months, wasn’t really anything for concern. Nor was the time when she skidded on a kitchen floor, falling heavily onto both knees and flaring up the injury all over again.
As is often the case though, it wasn’t until her thirties that she realised she might have actually seriously injured herself.
A seed change or two
It was the commute that ultimately did it - losing three hours a day commuting from Ipswich to London just wasn’t what life was all about.
Sophie decided to look for work closer to home and make some health changes at the same time. Possibly too healthy, in fact, with Sophie becoming a gym junkie to such a degree that even her personal trainer suggested she dial things down. She forced herself to only go five times a week. Later, she and her partner discovered they were expecting. When her baby girl was nine months old, Sophie decided it was time to work for herself.
She made the leap for a number of reasons. Firstly, if she and her partner were going to put their little one in childcare, then she wanted it to be for a very worthwhile reason - a ‘job’ wasn’t justifiably sufficient. Becoming master of her own day and destiny was also high on the radar. And finally, removing herself from bullying environments and glass ceilings; knowing that she would get out truly what she put in, and not be ambushed along the way.
Besides, she’d grown a baby, given birth to a baby and kept a baby alive; surely everything else in comparison was achievable?
A young family, a young business
Founding her own marketing business, SoRo Studio, was far from easy, but it certainly delivered the rewards for which she’d hoped.
It’s also brought about some unexpected positive benefits along the way. The first year, her approach was softly-softly. She wanted to make any mistakes quietly and not really draw much attention to herself.
Looking back, Sophie thinks she probably needed assurances a lot of the time. She might have known what to do, or what not to do, but she’d feel more confident either way if someone else backed her. Becoming a business owner, however, pours rocket fuel onto self-confidence. It’s not at all an arrogance, but a quiet knowledge that you now have precedents, you’ve learned from them, you’ve proven to yourself you can do something. With all that brings a certain tenacity and poise that perhaps wasn’t on the surface to begin with.
Throwing yourself into uncomfortable situations is also a good way to get there. For Sophie, joining networking groups, for example, required her to step outside her comfort zone and openly sell herself as a business. It pushed her into talking up rather than talking down. When you’ve been bullied throughout much of your career, that’s a sizeable obstacle to overcome.
With freedom comes responsibility
Starting your own business offers plenty of potential perks, for sure, but incredible hard work and stress take up equal parts of territory. Especially with a baby girl on board.
Sure, Sophie can now own her own day, and she loves knowing that her little one is growing up seeing first-hand that Mummy and Daddy work hard. But everything becomes intensified. It can be 5pm before anyone lifts their head from their desk and realises they’ve not been outside all day. Jobs can come in that mean work must start as soon as the little one is put to bed. In theory, that might be straight-forward, but the reality is often very different. Work might not be able to start in earnest until 2am and if that’s the case, that’s the case.
Life before collagen - coffee, stress, late nights, early mornings
As any business owner will tell you, you never stop thinking about your work. You can’t just turn off and on.
Sophie very much lived this reality, and would head to bed around 10.30pm each night only to lie awake stewing over everything. She might start dozing off by midnight before waking again at 2am, 4am and then, finally, 5am with her alarm clock ringing. By late morning, she would already be three coffees into her day.
Her knee injury was persisting, but she kept ignoring it. She didn’t want to go to the doctor in case she was told it really was a problem. She managed and mitigated the pain in ways that made sense to her - reverse lunges instead of forward lunges, for instance.
Life after collagen
Then, as we already know, Sophie started taking collagen.
Lockdown happened soon thereafter and stress levels shot up the Richter scale. Like so many around the world, Sophie and her partner were now worrying about how to care for their daughter’s wellbeing and education at home, whilst also trying to run a business through such testing times. You’d think the sleepless nights would be back-to-back, as would the servings of coffee.
In fact, the opposite happened.
Although she started taking collagen for her complexion, Sophie realised she didn’t need as much coffee. She was waking up energised, and that feeling was lasting well into the day. Despite maintaining a fairly similar physical workout programme, Sophie wasn’t as hungry as often. Remarkably, the knee pain began to subside and she started running with ease.
But the big surprise?
The big surprise was that she slept like a baby. She was hitting the sack at 10.30pm and her brain was logging off immediately. She was falling into a deep sleep that would last right the way through until her alarm woke her up. No wonder she was feeling energised - she’d gone from five hours of interrupted sleep to seven hours of constant, deep shut-eye. And as far as Sophie could tell, the only thing that had changed (apart from lockdown) was the fact she was taking collagen.
Good things happen in threes
Sophie’s now preparing SoRo for its third year in business, and there is a lot on. She knows exactly where she wants to take things. And now that she’s firing on all cylinders thanks to collagen, we’re sure she’s going to get there.
*Please note, this product is only available for purchase in the UK. Take a look at our US collections page or EU collections page for products available here
The information we have provided herewith, and all linked materials, are not intended nor should they be construed as medical advice. Moreover, the information herewith should not be used as a substitute for professional medical expertise or treatment. Please refer to our Terms and Conditions and consult your General Practitioner for advice specific for you.
