I have always been a bad sleeper but trt has just magnified it. I can’t stay asleep no matter what i try. I’m on my current protocol about 2 months, I can fall asleep easily, sometimes I may use .25 mg melatonin but typically I just doze off without anything.
Here are my labs on
40 mg test 2x a week
360 iu hcg 3x a week
I take 30 mg zinc, 5000 iu vit D, fish oil, 6 mg boron
At night: 400 mg magnesium and Zyrtec for allergies
I recently started 30 mg pregnenolone as well at night per defys order to try and help with sleep.
Pregnenolone helped slightly but still, I’m waking up in that 2 or 3 am hour and just tossing and turning the rest of the night with a little sleep here and there.
Then I just wake up tired… I’ve tried small doses of melatonin in the middle of the night but it’s not as effective still and I just wake up groggy
Anyone been able to overcome this?
I inject test tues night and sat morning and hcg tues/Thurs/sat morning
I think with some people higher testosterone may be associated with higher adrenaline. This is what happened to me the first time I managed to increase my test naturally. I had a condition on the nervous system that was caused by years without any sport and as soon as I started working out this somehow raised my adrenaline and my testosterone. Then at some point both of them dropped. Of course this is a crazy theory that can be completely out of whack.
As a bad sleeper what I can suggest to you. First why do you take the test at night? I think even the long acting ester may make you a bit aroused. Second of all I would suggest taking vitamin d at once for the whole week. Its perfectly safe. If I take it daily also causes me sleep issues.
The issue with sleep is a lot psychological not only physical. You need to remove all pressure from yourself that “you need to sleep”. The more you try, the more you will fail. Accept as a first step that is ok if you do not sleep well. I’ve gone 5 days with 1-2 hours sleep per day and I did not die.
Second of all try to improve your bedroom as much as possible to be sleep friendly. Put blackout curtains for complete darkness, make sure to have comfortable bed and not to be too hot. Also try not to watch any screens 1-2 hours before bed and to not have wifi ruter turned on in your bedroom. I know these may not sound very game-changing but can still make a difference.
Beside all this something that made magically improvement in my sleep - pearl powder. Try to find some quality source for this. Also I would not touch the melatonin. There are some studies pointing out it may disrupt own production.
I went through something similar and am just now coming out of it. For my first month of T (on cream), I had no issues sleeping. For my first 2 months on injections, however, I would repeatedly wake up in the middle of the night (2-3 a.m.), unable to fall back asleep. I would just start my day. Not ideal.
My T numbers are much higher than yours, and I was always a great sleeper before TRT, so our situations are different. But here are a few thoughts that I hope help:
hCG injection timing should not matter – don’t worry about this
Your T injection timing does matter – don’t inject at night. I always inject before noon.
Do you exercise? If so, do it earlier in the day. The adrenaline from exercise later in the day can combine with the T to play a role in keeping you up
Do you eat before bed? If so, keep the meal relatively small (~200-300 calories), and moderate in each macronutrient. Also, don’t eat right before bed – give yourself at least 1-1.5 hours to digest.
What is your caffeine intake? Try decreasing it slightly (I know this is hard; for me, I just switched from 2-3 cups of coffee in the afternoon to one light Monster, which is about 1/2 the caffeine), and also be sure to cut off caffeine consumption by 3 p.m.
I take 6 mg melatonin on non-injection nights and 10 mg on injection nights, popping the pills 1-1.5 hours before bed. This has been working very well for me.
I’ve struggled with insomnia for years and after so many years of dealing with it, I finally went to the doctor and got help for sleep. It’s not ideal and definitely a last resort, but without sleep, my whole life suffers. The hardest part is me not being able to function at work when my sleep is interrupted. I ended up on Lunesta and I take pure CBD. CBD works wonders for sleep! I don’t like having to take something, but it became necessary for me.
3 AM is the witching hour. It’s a Circadian rhythm thing. 3 AM and 3 PM. I worked nights for a few years. The new guys were always face-down on the desk at 3. You have any apnea? Sensitivities to caffeine? Maybe you andrenaline is up because you actually have some test in your system.
Thyroid function is good, had a full thyroid panel done and Dr. Saya said it was all good.
I’m ok with my free T where it is as I have no low T symptoms at the moment. The only symptom I can really identify is decreased sleep from this weird 3 am waking up crap. I am trying to nail that down before I make any changes to my Testosterone dosage.
I inject at night on Tuesday’s and morning on Saturday. This is to keep the 3.5 day schedule. I’ve never noticed any difference in my sleep based on injection timing. I still wake up around 2-3 am.
I drink about 2 maybe 3 cups of coffee every am, before 10 am.
I do eat before bed, every night. Otherwise I wake up very hungry at night.
I work hospital hours so I’m at work before 7 am. I would consider working out early but only if I’m able to sleep until 5 am that day which is rare. So I typically have to work out in the afternoon.
This isn’t something that’s new with trt, but it is still worse with trt.
How do I know if I have sleep apnea? I don’t snore much is all I know
You can try a sleep study doc. I did a take home test which proved what I already knew, that I was stopping breathing every 2 minutes or so. I got sinus surgery. Others get the CPAP machine
I had balloon sinuplasty and uvulaplasty and repair of my septum. My doc is pretty cutting edge and the surgery was pretty painless. No packing. The worst part was the shots to stiffen my soft pallet. That hurt for about 2 weeks
When I had low testosterone I slept poorly, this was the point I was trying to make, more testosterone always made me more sleepy even when too high and less sleepy when low.
I had poor sleep at around 400 and great sleep at 500, but when pushed into the 800 ranges turned into sleeping beauty. Free T was right at the top of the ranges when Total T was 500, I see your Free T suboptimal and connect this to poor sleep.
Optimal testosterone should make a man calm, this is where good sleep comes into play. When I hear men say they wake up at 3-4 am, this is a common complaint of low T suffers.
It was Dr. Abraham Morgentaler an expert in the field of TRT that stated men with Free T at or below 15 pg/mL would likely benefit from TRT. You’ll need >900 to get Free T to the optimal ranges which is 20-26 pg/mL.
I’ve also read a study, you could probably google it, where higher vitamin D doses, actually lowered melatonin production. I guess it has to do with the vitamin D and the sun signal’s regulation of the circadian rhythm.
Personally, I test mine, and keep it around 40 ng/ml. I also get vitamin a and k2 with it too. I had a buddy banging 10k iu of D/day and it crashed his serum retinal. Testosterone came down to 250. We didn’t know what caused it but he backed off the D and two months later T was back at 600. Not 100% sure that was the cause but an interesting anecdote.
Magnesium glycinate is good for sleep, 400 mg - 600 mg. Glycinate, not the other types. Copper and zinc are not likely to affect your sleep, maybe your E2.