hey man, i don’t usually post here, but i saw your thread in an email notification and felt your pain my dude. i remember at one point after i took an overnight flight, i came back and was stuck in a loop of being unable to sleep. literally went 3 days with Z E R O sleep. shit was the worst experience of my life. i felt so fucked up and everytime i laid down my brain was wired.
i think what happens is that when you don’t sleep at all, you become way more insulin sensitive, you can search online about how lack of sleep messes with your stress response, but everytime you don’t sleep well, and then you eat sugar, your body doesn’t process the sugar right and then gives you stress. so the cycle is you don’t sleep, then the next day you have something that spikes your blood sugar, then you just feel mega stressed the entire day and that follows you to bed and you can’t sleep.
so there are a few ways to attack this. first, do yourself a favor and go buy gelatin over at amazon. great lakes is a popular brand, in the orange bottle. gelatin is really high in glycine which gives a calming response and is a very potent sleep aid since glycine isn’t an amino acid that is very high in other proteins. second, if you can’t sleep at all, go zero sugar for the day (no carbs, no juice, etc) and then have a few servings of the gelatin and then go buy sleepytime tea. the best thing to do is if you boil kale in a glass pot with clean water (Bottled water), boil the veggies in it, then use the liquid of the kale and add the gelatin to it along with sleepy time tea, and don’t sugar for the day, you will ZZZ off. this is how i managed to finally break the 3 day hell cycle.
no sugar over a long period is not good though, you need sugar for normal thyroid and metabolism function, just an FYI, but this is a good emergency thing to do if you have to and you are not sleeping at all.
after you get over that, you’re going to want to make sure you are hitting enough zinc everyday in your diet along with magnesium (use epsom salt soak for magnesium). zinc and magnesium are both depleted from high progesterone (propecia = very chemically similar to progesterone) and zinc is CRUCIAL for digestive function, like your pancreas literally needs it to make digestive enzymes, so you need to make sure you hit the daily requirement (do NOT go mega dosing or taking too much zinc, it will deplete copper if you take too much, just see what the amount is you need eveyrday via cronometer and then eat the food that has it inside of it). you can use oysters (like 2x a week, over that can be too much), beef is a good one. would stay away from supplements though, many are laced with other crap since it isn’t regulated by FDA, food is the best bet. zinc also has no storage place in your body, your body doesn’t retain it, so you need it everyday. e v e r y d a y, look it up on cronometer, you might be low. you want to make sure you are getting enough potassium everyday too, if you are low on potassium, it can spike your progesterone more, so use cronometer for that as well. calcium is also important to get, parmesan reggiano is the best cheese with no additives in it, but you’ll get constipated if you don’t get enough zinc or magnesium in your diet per the above recommendations.
check out raypeat for other diet related info on how stuff works and connects with each other.
good luck brother, peace.
wanted to add 1 more thing, if you are in bad enough state where you can’t sleep, nofap/noporn is a given, your body cant handle it, avoid it at all costs until you feel better.