Has anyone tried Reishi mushroom for sleep? My 3-month experience

I've been dealing with sleep maintenance insomnia for about 2 years — the kind where I fall asleep fine but wake at 2 or 3 AM and can't get back down. Tried melatonin, magnesium glycinate, L-theanine with mixed results.

About 3 months ago I started adding a broken-cell-wall Reishi spore capsule to my evening routine, mostly out of curiosity after reading about the gut-serotonin pathway research in a 2021 Nature Scientific Reports paper.

The short version: I noticed a meaningful difference around week 3. Not sedation — more like the anxious "racing thoughts" that usually kept me awake after 3 AM were noticeably quieter. Sleep tracker showed longer deep sleep phases, though I know that's not clinical data.

I've since learned the mechanism is thought to involve Ganoderma's effect on gut microbiota → serotonin signaling → sleep regulation, which is different from how melatonin or sedatives work. There's also some research linking its triterpenoids to reduced cortisol reactivity, which makes sense for the 3 AM cortisol spike that's common with maintenance insomnia.

Curious if anyone else has experimented with it. I'm particularly interested in whether people saw differences between hot-water extracts vs. spore-based products — the active compound profiles are quite different.