This is nonsense and bro science, TRT improves symptoms of depression and excess estrogen can turn a man into an emotional wreck.
Spend time on these forums and you’ll quickly see this is not true in every case. This statement is very one sided and tells me your doctor is narrow minded, many can attest to symptoms with an estrogen above 35 pg/mL and symptom improvement after getting estrogen under <35.
There are ways to deal with high estrogen that doesn’t include anastrozole. Having excess estrogen can cause fatigue and a host of other symptoms. No one thought to consider free estrogen levels, an SHBG of 24 and an estrogen of 106 would mean free estrogen percentage is damn high.
I don’t mind meditating honestly and ill give it another shot in terms of staying long term instead of on and off.
meditation can help rebalance neurotransmitters and what not. Just in case that’s what i need to do to some degree.
But for the life of me, i couldnt understand why he was dismissing my high estrogen like that!
Granted, it was taken 48hrs post injection, i wish my veins were working on trough day but it is what it is.
I don’t mind the dosage adjustment too, 75mg e4d should be good. Less of a spike and 1 day less to wait should help.
I’m glad SHBG went down some but even at peak, an estrogen level of 106 correlated with test levels just below 1300 just doesn’t add up.
If my test was 2000+ with 100+ estrogen i could understand, but not this.
I’m just going to see how this new protocol makes me feel and take it from there.
I disagree with the statement that most have symptoms with E2 above 35. Most seem to not actually. I’ve had it as high as 72 on trough with zero side effects. I’ve never even had any water retention or bloat.
Stress which comes in many different forms can effect every aspect of your life physically and emotionally and its very hard for a person to acknowledge it because it means there isn’t a quick fix or a pill to take. I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss what he’s saying. Your state of mind leaning towards negative can effect your TRT even if it’s subconsciously questioning whether this will even work. Your mental state of mind plays a large role in everything but especially libido. I would stop worrying about estrogen as it doesn’t matter. Regardless of whether your estrogen is the reason or not its the same outcome. You adjust dosage and/or injection frequency until you get to where you want to be. That coupled with patience and developing a positive outlook is what will finally heal your situation.
I think you probably have a lot of free estrogens floating around. With your test levels being high, you have room to drop and see how you feel. Your SHBG may go up a bit too, which for you would be a good thing.
I had better boners/libido at lower levels. On 50mg E3D I had better days/boners than what I’m on now, which is about 60mg E3D. I have relatively low SHBG. Even PDE5s work better the lower I go. I may try something like 45mg/week E3D and see what happens. I just need to finalize my 6-8 weeks on the 60mg until I do.
My thought is akin to what Systemlord is saying.
I would also ask your DR to prescribe you low dose Buspar. 5mg, which per day. It has helped my libido in the past.
Well i can do is meditate to eliminate the noise and see how i do over time.
It’s hard not to waver in hope. The last time i had high libido was when i first got on test again in April 2018. I was so excited! I thought it was over.
I did a blast of 600mg twice a week in celebration, thought id get some gains and then drop down to my trt dose. 3 weeks in on my Test-HCG-AI cycle it stopped. I didnt crash per say, i still felt decent, but i should’ve felt amazing.
Since then i restart a couple of times, dropped the hcg and ai a few months ago and still feel not optimized. Like WTF! How did it come to this.
How do you hold out hope when its going to be 3 years come January, when you’re a 2 pump chump with your girl whenever you are kinda horny and she looks like you when you PE and says “its okay” shits humiliating.
Guess ill try and find my zen state of mind and hope it comes with results. I can’t completely dismiss it but i cant imagine it being that “simple” either.
Very well said. A lot of people start TRT thinking it is a magical fix for everything. The truth is making sure hormones are optimal is only part of the battle…
The last time I felt good was 125mg twice weekly in September.
I felt better, maybe more assertive. Woke up with a little libido, etc.
Maybe I have some changes in the brain from high dose test that I may have to accept.
If that’s the case it sucks because there are people who abuse test for a minute but still are fine. Maybe I’m unlucky like that. But I just gotta do what I can and stay hopeful.
May I’ll do some searches into repairing the brain or things of that nature and see what I can do.
Was this 125mg total for the week I’m assuming? If so, drop down to like 48mg twice a week. Try that for a bit and see what changes you have. That’ll drop your E2 a bit too. You may just feel better with less.
I’m gonna take a page out of @roscoe88 book and lower the dose: going to reduce dose from 150mg to 125mg weekly. I’m coming back full circle to when i restarted trt for the final time in May.
I was 125mg test e3.5d with 750iu hcg and 25mg aromasin weekly. My test levels at a 2 day trough from Mon to Thurs was 1387.
Without hcg i would assume my peak has to be around 1200. Lets see if this estrogen can get checked down.
I loathe the idea of daily injections but I’m willing to try come time.
If 62.5mg does work, I may do 50mg e3d and should that fail i’ll do 20-25mg daily.
I still can’t believe I ended up in this situation. The worst that was supposed to happen was trt, take test and live on gracefully. This is mentally exhausting with no guarantee i get back. But lets hope this struggle has a happy ending.
I’ll be meditating indefinitely just in case its mental. I don’t think I’ll go to a psychiatrist because i can’t say i have that kind of money to spare. Plus ill probably be put on some meds anyway.
Lets hope this brings some positive results in the coming weeks
My thoughts, after years in trt and different protocols is this: when I go lower in dose, I get better erections and mental clarity, but libido tanks. When I go higher, I can sometimes feel libido, but my erections and clarity tank.
I think I need a higher test level to get libido, mixed with a lower e2 level to keep erections and mental clarity. My body doesn’t seem to get the ratios correct with exogenous test, and I may need to start experimenting with arimidex
You need a higher t level WITH a higher e2 level but that e2 level needs to be at the right ratio. Our bodies definately struggle to get this ratio perfect, although it does pretty well considering how injections flood the system. I think it just needs a tiny tiny bit of help from an ai and im not talking typical doses recycled around forums. You definately dont want to keep e2 low and t high you will feel like a zombie if you do that.
I’m on week 2, day 15, shot 5. Of course nothing yet, just chilling.
Going to give this 12 weeks.
I kinda feel like I’m in a cross roads.
I’ve always known mental ED to be characterized by being capable of morning wood and having a functional penis, but unable to use it when its time to perform and not feeling horny, etc.
Idk maybe, maybe not. Could that really be the case? If so, how does one go about curing it? I don’t feel depressed, is there some sort of mental blockage?
I search the forums on not just T-Nation, but the subreddits too. I read stories and other anecdotal experiences. I wonder if i can find something, a routine that somebody did to help themselves. I’ve talked to some and its amazing how simple some solutions were. I pray mine is equally simple in terms of waiting.
I would be ELATED if it just took 8-12 weeks for things to work.
It really does seem like my only real hope is that 8-12 weeks, my body finally dials in and i can leave this behind.
Mental ED could be the fact that the anticipation of sex and the expectations of having to perform causes anxiety and your brain shuts off as some sort of coping mechanism. If you have a steady girl you should talk to her beforehand and set up times that you are going to fool around but it’s agreed upon that you will not have sex and she will not touch your penis. Eliminate the expectations and just focus on pleasing her and touching each other’s body but she isn’t to touch your junk. The first time will feel a little awkward and but as time goes on you’ll get more comfortable and your brain will learn the anticipation does not equal sex and hopefully over time you’ll have reprogrammed those circuits to where one day things just start working. You’d basically be reinstalling Windows to its default settings.
I didn’t make this up. I have a friend who developed ED and got on TRT for that reason but it didn’t fix his issues. He tried all kinds of shit before giving into the mental aspect. He went to a renowned psychologist that specializes in sex issues in NYC. I won’t tell you how long it took to work because that could feed into your anticipation/expectation issues but he’s back to having sex on command. He went three years before he would even consider his issues were mental and not physical.