Sleep deprivation and hormone levels?

General Discussion
#1

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.

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.

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:

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.

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!

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#2

A lot of others have noticed that lack of sleep can increase erections or libido… myself included. It can be a number of things…I remember reading a study about how inflammation drop initially form lack of sleep. But 10s of possible pathways for this including nuerotransmitter changes.

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#3

The body produces t mainly during sleep. So if you dont sleep your t will be way lower next day.

#4

I would love to see evidence for this. Makes one wonder if lowering T through pharmaceutical means could help improve our situation.

#5

Hey Orthogs, nice to see your posts. During the recovery periods you describe, how did your anhedonia feel? Did you have Do you have any physical damage from PFS, or is it mostly functional for you? Furthermore, do you have any memory problems, and if so during these periods did you feel like you had more memories of your life?

I have very severe PFS with lots of cognitive and physical problems set to 11 and unfortunately don’t experience such periods, but I’m optimistic that the problem is variable by extent, site-specificity and affected cell lines between sufferers and is otherwise essentially the same root problem. The anhedonia and pain are really up there in terms of the worst day to day problems for me and I’d be interested to hear more of how this changes for you during these periods. Thx

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#6

Also you may find this interesting:

comments on existing literature:

“More recently it has become clear that the production of testosterone is dependent on sleep generally reaching the peak during the first 3 h of uninterrupted sleep, and at least in young men at about the time of the first REM episode. Total fragmentation of normal sleep architecture throughout the night prevents the increase in testosterone.”

“…it is the first 3–4 h of sleep that are critical to determining the increase in testosterone a recent study has shown that restriction of sleep time to 4.5 h was associated with a lower morning testosterone level when sleep was permitted the first half rather than the second half of the night.12 This is probably not contradictory given that testosterone levels have been shown to decrease with increasing time awake.6 This may also, at least in part explain discrepant data in the literature relating to the effects of experimental sleep restriction in healthy young men. Restriction of sleep for eight nights to 5 h (00:30–05:30 hours) a night decreased testosterone levels by 10%–15%”

…and the study’s own conclusion:

“Testosterone is not subject to circadian variation in the same way that cortisol. There is sleep-dependent increase in testosterone that requires 3 h of SWS or perhaps a bit longer with increasing age. Testosterone remains elevated for the duration of sleep. The subsequent decrease in testosterone depends on the duration of wakefulness; decreasing more with prolonged wakefulness.”

#7

That’s interesting, but isn’t necessarily contradictory.

A sudden testosterone drop may somehow trigger recovery? If one person recovers after disturbed sleep, presumably their testosterone dived due to a reduction in manufacture?

#8

Hi axolotl, thanks. Anhedonia lifts. Libido floods back (and oh how it does). Emotions come back in full force. In terms of physical damage, the only thing is penis kink and girth reduction. These both resolve during these recoveries.

I don’t suffer from any memory problems (to my knowledge) so there is no difference, however during recoveries I find my brain much more aware of what’s going on and thoughts and motivations are much more dynamic than in my usual state.

To me it seems too far fetched to think that the resolution of all my issues are based on a delicate interplay of many mechanisms of action where the perfect balance is needed. A far more likely hypothesis is that there is a single mechanism which, when resolved, brings this about.

An important thing to note is i rarely notice a gradual improvement in symptoms. Rather ALL things resolve in a flash, and dissipate almost as quickly.

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#9

Yes, I expect all the delicate interplay you mention to be downstream of said root. I believe evidence that has come to light recently, and of course the ongoing scientific study, could well go a way to demonstrating why. Thanks for sharing your experience.

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#10

Just want to way in on this.
I had an episode of feeling 100% in summer after staying up all night after a house party with my friends. I’d been drinking a bit that night which usually crashes me, though by this point I had sobered up and made my way home. I was lying in bed about 6-7am feeling completely like my old self again, insatiably horny, no ED, etc. etc.

I put this down to chance till last night where I pulled an all-nighter trying to finish off some uni coursework, I went to bed finally at 6am and was just lying in bed for a few hours feeling exactly like my old self again, strong random erections, insatiable libido etc. you know the drill.

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#11

Just reporting in to say I didn’t sleep last night (due to factors outside of my control) and I had another temporary recovery. This deserves further investigation.

#13

Getting inadequate sleep makes me feel lethargic and irritable. In my condition that means less than 8 to 10 hours and especially less than 4 to 6 hours. But an all nighter will reduce mental sides sometime in the early morning allowing me to momentarily feel more like I did before Pfs before my exhausted body collapses after sunrise. On those mornings I become very tired and angry on the outside but briefly stronger and happier on the inside! I’m thinking it could be the reduction in androgens normally made by the body during sleep early in the morning or it’s the immune system weakening creating a reduction in auto immune. I’d like to hear more reports and theories about this!