whats your sleep schedule like already?
First 3 times I took rapamycin ( 2, 4 and 4mg) I took it in the morning because I had read that rapamycin could cause insomnia but it made me very tired and sleepy for the first half of the day but today I took 6mg and hardly notice anything…
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I’ve read through your post of various supplements for sleep, including the current 3 mg melatonin + 2 mg tryptophan. It’s very interesting. Are you not plagued with BPH symptoms that wake you up to go to the bathroom? Or, is it that you may have had symptoms at one time, but they have gone away?
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I have been taking Flomax for years. About 20 years ago I had laser prostate surgery and have been good ever since. Whatever I have been doing, because I have taken a lot of different supplements over the years, none prostate-specific, has slowed age-related BPH and my flow is near normal.
Before taking rapamycin I was struggling to get a good night’s sleep, but I don’t think it had anything to do with BPH, but with old age.
I have to say it took almost eight months of rapamycin to produce results. Now I sleep 7+ hours without waking to go to the bathroom. I wasn’t taking rapamycin for this, but I am pleasantly surprised by this result.
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Please tell me the brand of tryptophan you use. Thanks.
NOW Supplements, L-Tryptophan 1,000 mg from Amazon.
How are you doing? After about 7 months of relatively high dosing my sleep starting improving rapidly by the end of 8 months I was sleeping like I did in my 20’s. Now I only take 3 mg of melatonin for other reasons than sleep and I am getting a solid 7 -8 hours of good sleep at night. And even better than in my 20’s, I don’t wake up groggy and feel the need to have that first cup of coffee right away. Now if I get even slightly distracted I won’t have that first cup of coffee until two or three hours after I get up. And, I love coffee.
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I just took my first 1 mg dose (in a early morning fasted state with oil in bulletproof coffee) and it definity had a negative effect on sleep, cutting down on total hours as measured by FitBit, as well as “sleep score” and also how I felt.
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Could be just in your mind. 1 mg dose can hardly contribute to that.
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Agreed. Unlikely that 1 dose of 1mg has any discernible effect.
I take 6mg weekly or 2g/wk if I eat a whole grapefruit with the dose. Either way, my sleep is very poor and fragmented for 2-3 days after the rapamune.
Despite the low dose you took, I think it possible the rapamycin impacted your sleep. I had similar sleep quality issues to yours when starting with 3 mg of compounded rapamycin. Given that it was compounded rapamycin, it is possible it was equivalent to 1 mg of the enteric coated tablets.
I personally find sleep disturbance and psychotropic impact to be the main symptoms from taking rapamycin. I find myself at 67 to be in good physical health by most metrics. I would say though my sleep in general has declined more than my general health which has remained stable. I think that could be because of the aging related decline in circadian rhythm. I would also factor seasonal daylight changes for those of us living in the northern hemispheres.
A search in PubMed or PsycInfo or Google Scholar comes up with a number of articles on mtor inhibition and circadian rhythm etc. I suppose whether 1mg is enough to impact mtor inhibition is the crux here. But in my case I think even the low dose of rapa impacted my sleep.
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For people who experience sleep disruption from rapamycin, it would be interesting to all of us if you could post about the experience over time.
- Does it happen at a certain dose level?
- Does it happen even if you take the rapamycin in the morning?
- Does it’s impact change over time - does your body adjust and does it stop interrupting your sleep after a certain amount of time?
- Are your sleep disruptions associated with rapamycin confirmed with data from a sleep monitor, or are you just providing a subjective measure?
I have taken rapamycin the afternoon or evening once or twice and could not sleep at all during the night - just was not tired. When I take it in the morning, I’ve never had any issues (at any dosing level). After one or two experiences of sleeplessness, I’ve stayed on the morning dosing schedule so have not run into it again.
Generally I find now my sleep is much deeper and better since taking rapamycin. At least subjectively. I don’t have a good sleep monitor to validate with data.
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I take 6mg weekly with Metformin in the morning and my sleep is much better than usual. No wake ups and works perfectly when I am traveling overseas too.
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As I have posted before: After several months of taking rapamycin at levels of 5 - 20 mg weekly and bi-weekly, my uninterrupted sleep time greatly improved and I have eliminated most things from my sleep stack. I always take rapamycin before noon and haven’t noticed any effect on my sleep on the days I take rapamycin.
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It very well could be the bag of peanuts conundrum. Have everyone in the world eat a bag of peanuts and you get very different results based on their biology.
For one person, Rapamycin may help sleep and for another, it may disrupt it.
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Could be, Fitbit sleep score went from 83 to 74. Back up to 82 two days later.
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Hey I want to share my experiences here.
Basically, taking rapamycin completely (yes, completely!!) resolved my chronic insomnia.
Some information about me:
Age: 27
Sex: female
East Asian
Height: 165cm
Weight: 49kg
Never smoked/drank
I’m a “generally healthy young adult”.
Rapamycin Dosage:
I’ve been taking rapamycin for 2.5 months. I started from 1mg/week with grape fruit juice (effective dose was 3mg/week) . Now my dosage is 3mg/week (with GFJ; effective dose: 9mg/week). Sometimes I’ll skip a dose if I think I need to activate mTOR. (If I have an infection or I get a canker sore.)
My chronic insomnia before rapamycin:
I started to have problems when I was in high school. During university it got a little bit worse. After I graduated, it became much much worse. (especially after the age of 24)
According to mayo clinic,
Insomnia symptoms may include the following symptoms:
- Difficulty falling asleep at night
- Waking up during the night
- Waking up too early
- Not feeling well-rested after a night’s sleep
- Daytime tiredness or sleepiness
- Irritability, depression or anxiety
- Difficulty paying attention, focusing on tasks or remembering
- Increased errors or accidents
- Ongoing worries about sleep
I had all of them except “Waking up during the night”.
One thing that I had the most trouble with was falling asleep at night. Sometimes I lied on bed for 6 hours since I was unable to fall asleep. (went to bed at 12am, lied on bed for 6h, eventually fell asleep at 6am, slept for 2h, (forced) to wake up at 8am and the following day would be completely wasted because I would be unable to do any work)
Not all my nights were like this but it did happen occasionally.(frequency: around once every 2 months) (BTW it wasn’t because i drank coffee/tea/chocolate before bed.)
I would say that around 30%-40% of my nights, I had some trouble falling asleep, If i had trouble falling asleep, I would need 1 h or more to fall asleep.
There are many factors that can cause this:
Psychological factors: it can be either stress (either long-term or short term) or even if I’m too happy.
Environmental factors: temperature change; blanket change (yes, something as small as this can cause sleeping problems); noise (even a little bit noise can cause tremendous problems for me), light, etc.
Another thing that always comes together was I always felt sleepy during the day. It happened to 90% of my days. almost every day. (It happened at some specific time during the day, like 4:30pm to 5pm)
Before taking rapamycin, I’ve tried many many methods to improve my sleep. (but haven’t tried taking any medications)
Most of the protocols were from Andrew Huberman’s Youtube channel.
- Set alarms for my sleeping time and waking up time. Every day I’ll have a fixed schedule to go to bed and wake up.
- View morning sunlight.
- Use curtains that can block all lights from the windows.
- Avoid viewing bright light at night.
- Use the “night shift” function on my phone at night.
- Use the “non-sleep deep rest” protocol to assist my sleep at night if I had trouble falling asleep.
- I tried taking melatonin for several days and quickly gave up because I found no benefit.
- I completely changed my diet to a Mediterranean one, but it had no effect on my sleeping problems.
I would say that all 6 (except #7 ) worked pretty well for me, especially #6 which could really help me fall asleep at night.
However, I was still extremely sensitive to the environmental and psychological changes. I still needed to be extremely careful. A lot of things can disrupt my sleeping pattern. Also sometimes I still feel sleepy in the day. Sometimes if I had a party with friends and came home too late (passed my usual sleeping time), I had to use the non-sleep deep rest protocol otherwise I would again lie on bed for many hours.
Then I took rapamycin. It was a game changer for me. Now I have no problem falling asleep, Even if I go to bed a little bit early or late. Even if I go to bed 1 hour late I can still fall asleep easily. I don’t need the non-sleep deep rest anymore. Also I feel good in the day. I won’t feel sleepy if I get enough sleep at night.
I mentioned earlier that sometimes I’d skip a dose. I found the effect of rapamycin to be long-lasting. Even if the dose was skipped I still had no sleeping problems.
Also I’m pretty sure it wasn’t due to placebo effects. I never expected rapamycin to solve my sleeping problems because I couldn’t find any articles about it before I decided to take it. (still can’t find any articles now) But it happened.
I decided to take rapamycin mainly because I wanted to avoid getting Alzheimer’s Disease. (because my grandma had AD and I’m super scared. (I don’t know my ApoE gene.) I just want to try and test if rapamycin can improve my cognitive function.)
BTW I also took some other supplement/medication：
- metformin; recently changed to acarbose (frequency: used to be every day, now changed to: only take it with rapamycin)
- vitamin d (every day)
- berberine (occasionally)
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Vitamin D definitely helps for sleep.
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Welcome to the forum, Elea. It’s good to see that Rapamycin is providing you with positive effects! Here’s to your good health!!!
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