From 2016 to 2024, I gave everything to Fisker Inc. Co-founding it, serving as CFO and COO, architecting the SPAC IPO, taking the company public on the NYSE — and doing much of it while travelling every other week. Europe was a constant. Investor meetings, board engagements, operational trips across multiple countries — there were stretches where I barely had time to unpack before I was back at the airport, managing a nine-hour time difference that my body never fully adjusted to before the next trip erased whatever progress I'd made.
Like most people who travel at that frequency across that kind of time difference, I had a solution: melatonin. It was on every nightstand, in every carry-on. I took it to fall asleep on planes, to reset on landing, to bridge the nine-hour gap between where my body thought it was and where I needed it to function. It worked, in the narrow sense that it got me across the threshold of sleep when I needed to. But looking back, it was the beginning of a pattern I didn't fully recognise until much later — a progressive reliance on an external hormone to do something my body was gradually losing the ability to do on its own.
The body keeps score quietly, and it is patient. It will let you borrow against your reserves for a very long time before it collects.
After August 2024, the bill came due.
The Burnout That Changed Everything
Burnout doesn't announce itself with a dramatic collapse. For me it arrived in the months following my departure — a slow recognition that I was tired in a way that sleep wasn't fixing, that my mind felt fogged in a way that caffeine couldn't clear, that the clarity and drive I had relied on for eight years felt strangely distant. I had the time, finally, to rest. But rest wasn't happening the way I needed it to.
Part of what I had to untangle was the melatonin dependency I had built up over years of frequent European travel. When you take melatonin as routinely as I had — not occasionally for jet lag, but almost every other week as a mechanism for bridging a nine-hour time difference — you gradually suppress your body's own production. The pineal gland, detecting chronically elevated melatonin, dials back. Over years, you produce less of your own. The supplement that started as a pragmatic travel tool becomes increasingly necessary just to feel like sleep is possible at all.
Years of taking melatonin every two weeks to bridge a nine-hour time difference had quietly suppressed my body's own production. The supplement that started as a travel tool had become a dependency I hadn't seen coming.
This is the cruel paradox of post-high-performance burnout compounded by hormonal dependency: by the time you stop, your nervous system has forgotten how to downshift, and the biological machinery for producing your own sleep hormones has been quietly undermined. The sleep that should be restorative becomes fragmented. You lie awake when you finally have permission to sleep. You wake exhausted from nights that should have restored you.
I started paying attention — not to quarterly figures or capital structures, but to the data of my own biology. What was actually happening physiologically? What was driving the 3am wakefulness, the shallow rest, the morning fog that persisted even after long nights? And what had eight years of bi-weekly transatlantic crossings and routine melatonin use actually cost my body's own chemistry?
What Growing Up in India Had Already Taught Me
Before any of the science, there was something I had carried from childhood without fully understanding it. Growing up in India, the answer to sleeplessness was never a pill. It was a ritual. A particular warm drink, a herb known for its calming properties, a specific sequence of winding down that the body came to recognise as permission to rest. Sleep was treated not as something that happened to you, but as something you prepared for — something you invited.
During the post-Fisker period, I came back to this. I started reading the research behind what those traditional practices had understood intuitively — why certain herbs calm the nervous system, why ritual matters for circadian signalling, why the pharmaceutical shortcut of synthetic melatonin often produces a worse outcome than working with the body's own chemistry. And I realised that modern wellness had largely abandoned this wisdom in favour of convenience, and that the gap between what tradition understood and what most supplements deliver was enormous.
That gap was the seed of Checked Out.
From Recovery to Rebuilding
The months following August 2024 gave me something I hadn't had in eight years: unstructured time. Time to think without urgency, to sleep without an alarm dictating the outcome, to pay attention to what my body was actually telling me rather than overriding it in service of the next deliverable.
And the more I slept — properly, deeply, with intention — the more clearly I could think. The relationship between sleep quality and cognitive clarity isn't subtle once you've experienced the contrast. The version of me operating on restored sleep was measurably more creative, more emotionally regulated, more able to hold complexity without anxiety. It wasn't that I had softened. I had sharpened.
I also began to identify the specific things that were disrupting my sleep at a physiological level. The cortisol dysregulation that years of sustained high pressure had left behind. The mouth breathing I hadn't known I was doing. The gap between lying down and actually entering restorative deep sleep. Each had a specific biological mechanism — and each had a solution that didn't require pharmaceutical intervention.
This is where the product thinking for Checked Out began. Not as a business exercise, but as a personal one. I was building a sleep system for myself, rooted in the science I understood as a biotechnologist and informed by what I had remembered from growing up in India — where sleep was never something you medicated, but something you prepared for.
Building a System, Not a Sleep Aid
When I eventually started working on Checked Out Inc. formally, I was thinking about a specific person — and that person was largely me, a year earlier. The high-performer whose nervous system has been running in overdrive. Who has tried melatonin, CBD, magnesium capsules, and ambient noise machines, all with inconsistent results. Who falls asleep but doesn't feel restored. Who has forgotten, or never learned, what it feels like to wake up genuinely ready.
What that person needs isn't another thing to take. They need a system. A set of inputs that works with the body's existing chemistry rather than overriding it, that requires minimal effort to sustain, and that compounds over time rather than building dependency.
The Sleep Patch delivers the cofactors the body needs to produce its own melatonin:
- MgMagnesium Chloride — to activate the synthesis enzymes and regulate cortisol
- B6Vitamins B6 and B12 — to drive the tryptophan-to-serotonin-to-melatonin conversion pathway
- L-TL-Theanine — to quiet the neurological hyperactivity that keeps post-burnout nervous systems alert long after bedtime
- GAGABA — to engage the brain's own inhibitory systems
- ECEcklonia Cava — to deepen the slow-wave stages where physical and cognitive recovery actually occur
Transdermal delivery over eight hours means no spike, no trough, no grogginess. Just steady, sustained support that runs quietly while you sleep.
The Mouth Tape Insight
The Mouth Tape came from a different realisation — one I made during the period of paying close attention to my own sleep. I was mouth breathing at night without knowing it. The signs, once I knew what to look for, were obvious: morning dry mouth, a persistent sense of having slept without having rested, mild headache on waking. Nasal breathing produces nitric oxide, humidifies and filters air, and maintains lower airway resistance — all of which support deeper sleep stages. Mouth breathing bypasses all of this.
But when I looked at the mouth tape market, every product was purely functional — adhesive tape that keeps your mouth closed and nothing more. That felt like a missed opportunity. If something is on your face for eight hours during the peak cellular repair window, why shouldn't it be actively doing something for your skin? We built a mouth tape using medical-grade hydrocolloid infused with a peptide complex and hyaluronic acid. It supports nasal breathing and repairs your lips overnight. Two jobs. One product. Zero extra steps.
Every hour of sleep is an hour your body is working. The question is whether you've given it the right conditions — and the right tools.
Recovery Is Not the Opposite of Ambition
The thing I most want people to take from my experience — and from Checked Out — is this: prioritising recovery is not a retreat from ambition. It is what makes sustained ambition possible.
The version of me that emerged from that post-Fisker recovery period was not less driven. She was more effective. Clearer. More creative. Better able to hold complexity, manage relationships, and make decisions that I'm proud of in retrospect. The sleep hadn't softened the edge. It had sharpened it.
I am building Checked Out with that understanding at its centre. Not as a wellness brand in the passive, decorative sense. As a performance tool. As a recovery system for people who take their output seriously enough to also take their input seriously.
Why This Matters Now
We are living in a moment of extraordinary complexity. The pace of change, the compression of decision cycles, the always-on nature of modern professional life — all of it places unprecedented demands on the human nervous system. The people navigating this most successfully will not be the ones who sleep the least. They will be the ones who have learned to recover most effectively.
I learned that lesson the hard way — through exhaustion, burnout, and the long, quiet work of rebuilding. I am grateful for it. And I built Checked Out so that others might learn it a different way: not through depletion, but by design.
