A letter from the founder
A mother, a kitchen, two sons.
I'm Maggie Reeve. I built Repose at my kitchen table in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, after the supplement aisle failed both of my children. This is the long version of how that happened.
The first call
Wilder was twenty-two.
The phone rang at 4:11 in the morning. He was at an emergency room in Pittsburgh, two hundred miles from home, and they were telling him for the third time that month that his heart was fine. That what he was having was a panic attack.
He didn't believe them. I'm not sure I did either, the first time. The second ER visit my husband drove him. The third one, Wilder drove himself, and then he stopped leaving the apartment for six weeks.
I went to Pittsburgh. I sat on his couch. I went to the pharmacy with him. The shelves had thirty different supplements that all said the same vague things. We tried four. Nothing.
A turning point
So I started reading. Not vaguely. The studies. The doses. The years. I bought a binder. I wrote things down. I called clinicians and asked for the citations they used. I made a spreadsheet with one tab per ingredient.— Maggie
What the research actually said
The shelf was using one-tenth of the doses the trials used.
This is what nobody tells you about the supplement aisle: most products contain an honest-sounding amount of an ingredient that was studied at a much larger amount. Half a gram of inositol on the label, twelve grams in the trial. Three hundred milligrams of ashwagandha, six hundred in the Chandrasekhar paper.
Once you see it, you cannot un-see it. Here are three of the studies I returned to most often.
Inositol for panic
Double-blind crossover. Inositol at 12g daily reduced panic frequency and severity. The shelf typically dosed at 500–1,000mg.
KSM-66 ashwagandha for cortisol
Randomised, placebo-controlled. 600mg/day reduced serum cortisol and PSS scores. Most supplements: 300mg or less.
Inositol for OCD
The foundational OCD trial. Inositol at 18g daily improved Y-BOCS scores. Most "OCD support" formulas: 1–2g.
The second call
Sam said it out loud.
By the time Wilder was holding steady, my younger son was twenty-four and had been quietly losing time to intrusive thoughts since he was fifteen. He wouldn't call them that. Nobody had given him the word.
The day he finally said “intrusive thoughts” out loud, we were on the porch in Doylestown. He told me what the thoughts were. They were the kind no one tells their mother. I made tea. I told him I'd heard worse from people I love. I told him he wasn't broken.
Then I started reading again. The Fux paper. The NAC trials. The cortico-striatal loop. The 1996 inositol number, eighteen grams, that nobody in the supplement aisle had ever tried to actually meet. I wrote up the second formula on the same kitchen table. I called it Still.
Reviewed before we shipped a single sachet
Then I asked the people who would know.
I didn't want to build something I believed in and ship it on faith. So I hired four clinicians who specialise in anxiety and OCD, and I asked each of them, separately, to tear my doses apart.
They argued with me. They told me to drop two ingredients I loved. They told me to double an inositol I'd planned to shave. They told me to label the SSRI interaction loudly. We paid them for their time, and never for their opinions. That part is in writing.
Why we ship it
Because the shelf failed two children I love.
I built Ease for Wilder and Still for Sam. I built them with the doses the research actually used, not the doses the supplement industry has trained itself to use. And after we ran them for ten months between the four of us — me, my husband, my boys — I made a decision that this was the kind of thing you don't keep in the family.
If you're reading this, it's because you or someone you love is in a hard chapter. I won't promise you a fix. Nothing fixes anxiety or OCD by itself. Therapy works. Medication works for many. Repose is the third leg of the stool, the dose precision the shelf forgot, dropped into a sachet you can mix into water at your kitchen table.
If it doesn't help, you take it back. If it does, please tell us. We answer every email.
— Maggie Reeve
Founder of Repose · Doylestown, Pennsylvania · since 2022
Built by a mother. For her two sons. For yours.
Two formulas. Two specific neurological problems. Dosed at the amounts the trials actually used.
Plant-based nutrition to help the planet thrive
Repose products are 100% vegan, designed for low-carbon eating.