Rapamycin and sleep

It might be. But in my case it’s completely unrelated. I started to take vitamin D many years ago and saw no improvement on sleep.

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Melatonin and Glycine 1 h before bed helps me much. I fall asleep almost immediately. If I wake up at night, I take another Glycine and fall back to sleep. Also sauna is worth trying.

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Haven’t tried glycine yet.
I’ve tried Melatonin, doesn’t work at all for me. All I saw were side effects - The next day I’ll feel extremely tired.

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Glycine is an amino acid that helps with sleep. It also clears methionine from your system and improves longevity. Just not as much as Rapamycin. However, it has no major side-effects other than helping you sleep (which is a good thing).

It’s a main component of both collagen and creatine.

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Elea - "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. "

It is purely speculative on my part, but I see evidence in the literature on rapamycin’s impact on sleep. Rapamycin affects the circadian pathways through inhibition of mTOR. A search in the PubMed database rapamycin circadian sleep - Search Results - PubMed gives a number of articles. You might be interested in particular on result #4. (Maiese K. Cognitive Impairment and Dementia: Gaining Insight through Circadian Clock Gene Pathways. Biomolecules. 2021)

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Rapamycin caused me sleep problems when I took it. Topically it made no difference to sleep. I looked this up and I think it is autophagy that impacts on circadian proteins.

The conditions are coming together for me to take rapamycin again, but I want to time it around a testing cycle and next week I have agreed to participate in a separate testing routine so I may not take Rapa again until mid December. I have not yet decided on the frequency that it would be good to take Rapamcyin at, but I am thinking of every 2-3 months. I may, however, increase the dose from 2mg possibly take grapefruit juice and have more of a medium term fast when I take it. (which will also cause sleep problems).

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I have a limited scientific understanding of autophagy, but I think you are correct about how rapamycin impacts circadian proteins (through autophagy) and perhaps other mechanisms). I have had similar sleep disturbance when intermittent fasting and also in a 5 day fast. My conjecture is that both rapamycin and fasting impacts autophagy, and for me sleep.

I started off with 3mg rapamycin in powder form about a year ago and found the sleep disturbance impact alarming enough to only use rapamycin very infrequently - every 5 or 6 weeks. In my case, I think age (67), and being in a northern clime (only 8 hours of winter daylight) may have impacted my circadian sleep pattern more than other folks on this forum who have not reported the same sleep disturbance.

I can now report that, through trial and error, I am now up to 7mg rapamycin dosage weekly and my sleep is not impacted when I take my dose in the morning. I am hopeful my overall sleep quality will improve in time as reported by others here.

Good luck.

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I’m a newbie. Just this week I took my first dose, 1mg in the morning with a high fat high protein meal.

I felt great that day and slept unusually hard that night. In fact I was unusually exhausted by 930, when I usually fall asleep between 1030 and 11.

Weirdly enough, on day two I could not fall asleep, which is also unusual for me. At 1130om I was still wired, almost as though I’d had afternoon caffeine although I had not. I finally lay down to sleep at 1145 and tossed and turned all night.

So two strange nights of sleep. Might be unrelated. We’ll see as the weeks go on and my dose increases, probably to 6mg.

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Hey just wanted to post since I haven’t in awhile.
I found everyone’s anecdotal evidence to be very fascinating and will be interested to see where it goes in the future!
I am beginning to wonder if part of the reason we see fluctuations in sleep response with individuals who take rapamycin is just the body adjusting to a change in circadian rhythm. SO some may experience awakening when taking rapamycin, but after awhile get better sleep and that might be due to the body readjusting its circadian rhythm over time and the benefits one gets with sleep down the line might be A) the body reaches a homeostasis and adapts its circadian rhythm in order for the individual to get sleep/ maybe even catch up on sleep “Debt” that accumulated from the nights that rapamycin did impact sleep or B) because rapamycin is impacting other biomarkers and allowing individuals to feel/be healthier, then we see a health bias better either with 1) people being more aware of sleep habits and improving them or 2) the individual actually is becoming healthier, more active, expending more energy and able to sleep better because of these influences.
I am not ruling anything out!

Anyways: I wanted to share this paper I came across not too long ago, its definitely food for thought in MTOR’s role in circadian rhythm and it may explain why inhibition with rapamycin causes individuals to have disrupted sleep

mTOR signaling regulates central and peripheral circadian clock function

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5965903/

main take away: Second, owing to its regulation by the clock, mTOR serves to provide rhythmic outputs from the clock to regulate circadian physiological and biochemical processes such as ribosomal biogenesis. Further, mTOR also acts as a modifier to regulate the clock function. In peripheral tissue, especially the metabolically active liver, mTOR acts to modify the local clock in response to metabolic and physiological inputs. Intriguingly, as a nutrient/energy sensor, mTOR senses cellular nutrient and energy levels and integrates the inputs to the cells from upstream pathways mediated by insulin and growth factor receptor signaling. As such, the mTOR activity is regulated not only by the endogenous, anticipatory circadian mechanism, but also by extracellular signals (e.g. the light/dark cycles and nutrient availability). Thus, the mTOR pathway interacts with the circadian system in multiple tissues, and the interplay plays a key regulatory role in mammalian metabolism and physiology. Dysregulation of mTOR under pathological and diseases states such as obesity, diabetes and cancer, could have adverse effects on the circadian clock and circadian behavioral and physiological processes. As circadian clock dysfunctions are often identified in patients with metabolic syndromes, a better understanding of how metabolic signals are transduced to control cellular clock function will provide insights into pathogenesis of these diseases.

This might give an explanation as why we see a variety of responses to MTOR inhibition, maybe individuals have better metabolism and improve circadian function with inhibition, or individuals have circadian rhythm disrupted to due to changes in metabolism /cell circadian rhythm.

@RapAdmin I would be interested in your take on the paper since you have a pretty good background on the other MTOR research that has been done.

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This is a noticeable effect for me as well…I’m about 6 months into my 6mg + GFJ once a week, and for the past few weeks I’ve needed NOTHING to get to sleep or stay asleep. And magically, I can fall BACK asleep if I pop awake in the middle of the night. Can’t say for sure that it’s the rapa, but it sure feels great.

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My data looks good also:

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Side effects of trazodone: “Common side-effects include dry mouth, feeling faint, vomiting, and headache. More serious side effects may include suicide, mania, irregular heart rate, and pathologically prolonged erections.” Yeah, I’m going to pass on that, if the benefit is only “slightly improved sleep quality”.

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You failed to note the date of the post. Look at the July 16th post.
I am not currently on any “sleep stack” other than melatonin. Rapamycin greatly improved my sleep duration and quality after a few months of use.
The items in my old sleep stack were part of an evolving sleep stack.
Every item in the stack was used by me and at least subjectively was effective.
“Common side-effects” does not mean the same as “side effects are common”
Trazadone has a very good safety record and has been used for decades. I am not suggesting that anyone use it. It was only mentioned as part of my sleep stack that was always evolving.
I have been on rapamycin for over a year and my sleep stack has devolved to melatonin only and I take it for reasons in addition to sleep

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For me, melatonin only works if I don’t take it consecutive days. What dose of glycine do you take, please? Thank you!

I take 3 mg of melatonin and 1 g of Thorne Glycine some 40 min before going to bed. I usually fall asleep almost immediately. My deep sleep stage also increased much (from 6 min to 34 min). I sleep approx 8 hours per night and wake up refreshed.

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2023/1/15 Here’s an Update to the Original Post!

Starting from December 2022, I stopped taking rapamycin because I live in China and the policy towards COVID-19 has changed since then. I was expected to get a COVID-19 infection very soon. I’m unsure about rapamycin’s effects on COVID so I stopped taking it.
On 20/12/2022 I started to show COVID symptoms - a fever with a mild to moderate headache. On the next day, my acute symptoms were all gone. Then I started to have “chronic” symptoms" - runny nose, coughing up phlegm, angular cheilitis; and my seborrheic dermatitis worsened a lot.
After around a bit more than a week, I tested negative for the antigen test.
However, my symptoms remained until today:
A few days later I basically recovered from the first 2 symptoms (runny nose, coughing up phlegm) but I then immediately had something new - red and pain in my eyes, brain fog; A few days later my eyes would recover and I would have something else - diarrhea;
I would continue to recover and develop something new… My other symptoms include heel pain, temporomandibular joint pain, dry and itchy throat, insulin resistance (I guess it’s insulin resistance because I would feel very hungry at night before I fall asleep which before the COVID infection I didn’t).

Finally on 11/1/2023, after I basically recovered from all the above symptoms, plus undergoing a somewhat stressful (and exciting) event, my insomnia problem came back.
I would like to do a self-experiment so I didn’t use NSDR. It took me about 2 hours to fall asleep - during that 2 hours, I felt extremely tired and was yawning on my bed, while still unable to fall asleep. This was the exact kind of feeling before I solve my insomnia problem last year by a series of behavioural protocols and later (probably) by rapamycin.
(On the second day I still had trouble falling asleep but I used NSDR to solve it.)

I feel like this is an exciting moment for me because I can retest the effect of rapamycin on me - now I’ve induced my insomnia again.


a side note - my medication for COVID: I took nothing (prescription or OTC) in the beginning,
when I got diarrhea, I took berberine 0.3g/d, along with 1L yogurt per day that I made by myself. (very effective)
Additional Supplement: melatonin; 10mg/d, gradually reduced to 3mg/d, then to 0mg/d. CoQ10 200mg/d.


Another thing I discovered: my fitness tracker is extremely accurate at “predicting” whether I will get symptoms during the day: every day when I wake up I would look at my HRV/stress data during sleep (last night) and if it’s not normal, I know I will get some symptoms during the days. (but of course, I don’t know what the symptoms will be.)

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During immediate post-Covid period my sleep also changed: less deep sleep, wake up in the middle of night, etc., but now (3 weeks post Covid) it returned back to normal. I continue with 3 mg melatonin and 1000mg glycine 1 h before going to bed. I also started taking Valeriane and L-Theanine. Sauna later at night, around 8 pm, also helps to relax. NAC helps with head congestion. Continue exercising every day (walking, swimming, stretching, vibration platform for better circulation). It’s a real work to come back to normal!

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I find the larger the dose of Rapamycin I take, the more trouble I have sleeping. The issue I’m having is waking up in the middle of the night and being unable to fall back asleep. I never used to have this issue. :frowning:

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Same for me. Glad for those it knocks out. Me the opposite… a restless night.

It knocks me out during the day and I feel fatigued up until it’s time for bed and then I can sleep. But then 1:30 am I wake up. Going back to sleep is then tough. Doesn’t happen all the time, but it’s happening more at my current dose.

It could also be those damn cheeseburgers. :wink:

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