PFS started for me in January of 2017. I’ve had a few temporary recoveries which lasted anywhere from a single day (or a fraction of a day) to a little under a week. There are a few common attributes I’ve noticed in at least a few of my temporary recoveries.
My experience of PFS involves emotional anhedonia where things aren’t pleasurable and I’m not compelled to do anything exciting because that feeling is largely absent. Extremely low libido and penile sensitivity also feature. I also experience small degrees of pain, almost like muscular pains in my penis and prostate region. They don’t happen everyday but on most days. Erections are ok in a sense, but they are not full, where it appears the inner part of the penis fills up whilst the outer part doesn’t. The head of the penis, the glans, also remains rather unfilled and the penis kinks upwards from the base.
During recoveries the functionality of the penis is entirely different, where erections are more ‘horizontal’, the penis fills up completely (not just the inner part), and the glans fills up with a great deal of sensitivity.
Furthermore, libido comes back full-force, as in even before PFS, the libido is substantially higher than an ordinary day. It’s interesting to note that it reverts from extremely low to being extraordinarily high before again decaying to nothing. Emotions come back, as does motivation. Essentially, I return to normal for those brief periods.
The last recovery happened around 6 days ago on Monday. A few features to note specific to this recovery, but upon thought, they may be common to the other ones too.
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Sleep the night prior was disturbed. Recovery occurred on Monday, but on Sunday night i distinctly recall waking up at some unusual time (3am or thereabouts) and not being able to return to sleep for about an hour. When I awoke at 6:30am due to my alarm, I felt quite good, but the real feelings of recovery happened a little later in the morning.
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I masturbated that evening (which was quite an experience), and felt quite good even the next day. Things started going downhill at around 3pm the following day, where I started feeling unusually tired, yawning uncontrollably (this also happened when relapsing after my other recoveries). Then the pains started again in the genital region. Stabbing pains. The next day I was essentially back to square one.
Note that the commonality in terms of feelings of tiredness and sleep.
I wish I had a background in biology, but regrettably my background is in the ‘‘Hard Sciences’’. I had given this a few thoughts and had some overall points I’d like to raise:
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Could the disturbance of sleep prior to these aforementioned recoveries be the cause of the temporary recoveries? Psychiatrists have, for the past two decades been using sleep deprivation therapy to treat depression which is resistant to pharmaceutical treatment. Why it helps remains a mystery, but it’s theorised that it may be due altered levels of hormones and neurotransmitters in the body.
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Could it be that sleep disturbances cause hormones to shift favourably? There is a theory that due to androgen receptor (AR) overexpression (evidence of this in penile tissue has been demonstrated in PFS sufferers), the organs which rely on AR signalling get oversaturated with androgens, thus causing the organ to stop responding properly to the androgens.
Perhaps sleep disturbances causes a marked reduction in androgens which allow the receptors to drop below that threshold where they are oversaturated, and functionality restores to that where they are responding (still on the brink of oversaturation but just a little below). This theory is supported by PFS sufferers who report improvements after taking supplements and foods which are reputed to reduce levels of Testosterone in the body.
Why why why in these recoveries does libido go from nil to very high almost instantly? This supports the above hypothesis.
Food for thought!
