PIED? or Low T

During the height of my addiction. When I was dealing with severe PIED and severe withdrawal every hormonal level was excellent. Before the test I had multiple orgams to see if there would be a higher level of prolactin, but there was nothing out of the ordinary with my prolactin levels. From the range of 4.1 μg to 15.2 μg, my prolactin was 12,9 μg. Not really the lowest, but still perfectly in range.

All other hormones were perfectly in range too. But I was feeling like shit anyway and the main culprit was just the porn edge binge sessions with multiple orgasms. I felt beta as fuck even when my testosteron was on the high-end, estradiol in middle-end, albumin, DHT, SHBG and DHEA-S were all perfectly in range.

It's definitely a dopamine issue and all the other interconnected neurotransmitter systems involved with dopamine dysfunction (like endorphin resistance and increased dynorphin tone) that cause these other neurologicial and sexual dysfunctions.

 

HCG is only necessary during TRT or during high dose steroid cycles to keep your balls still producing some endogenous test. So you don't shut down your HPTA completely. HCG is an LH analogue and if you're not juicing with strong compounds or using TRT, I would never use it. It will actually shut down LH production in the pituitary, because your body thinks it's getting enough already. You can also suppress or with high doses of HCG shut down your testes. Causing HPTA dysfunction.

 

Yeap, we're in similar boat and age range! Before NoFap I thought I had low T...Doctor told me I was 'working like clockwork, it's all in your head'.

You're definitely going through flatline like me atm, Day 34 of this streak (my longest was 74 days, soft mode reboot!)

Just got to sit it out...wait for the dopamine/reward system to heal.

 

Mind telling me your protocall? MG per week, and how frequent the injections are? Do you take an aromatase inhibitor? And do you take HCG with your TRT?

What is the frequency of your dosing? Levels are more stable the more frequent the injections with the dosing split between them. At the clinic I work at the MDs, and NPs prescribe at a minimum of every 4 days, we even have some patients every day. The reason they do this is because it's closer to natural testosterone production that makes only a few mg a day while we sleep. When you inject 100mg-200mg once a week, to every 2 weeks you're getting a huge spike in the amount of T that's in your body. This infrequent injection often leads to higher estrogen production, which when outside of normal range, whether higher, or lower, can have a lot of symptoms of low T even though your T level might be really high the day after injection.

Lower doss more frequent injections are important for not just controlling estrogen, but also the medicine itself simply doesn't last that long inside the body. Testosterone Cypionate has a half life of 8 days, so if you're injecting infrequently your levels are not stable, and that can cause libido issues as well.

 

Thats a 50% fluctuation between peak, and low. Once a week is a huge improvement over the old school every 14 days thing of course. However, we almost always take guys who transfer in from other clinics and put them on more frequent injections to maintain stable levels. Maybe talk to him about doing it every 4 days, splitting your dose, really can't hurt, see what he thinks. Overall, just glad you have a competent doctor.

 

Again, I agree with everything you say. It’s definitely a dopamine thing and not horomones. I’m 42 days into my streak and don’t plan to stop only with a female. I don’t really have urges either.

 

Excellent feedback! Well done!

 

When you tested at 400 you probably could have raised it through lifestyle factors and avoided trt. Too late now though to come off and recover probably.

I was offered trt when I tested at 420. My libido was shit at the time. I decided against it as I didn't want to mess with my fertility (yes yes HCG I know) Incase I want to start a family some day.

Anyway I've been off porn for near 5 months now and my libido is really gaining momentum again. So I'm either still around 420 t level and that's enough confirming your hypothesis that it's dopamine related. Or it's (TT )raised overtime causing increased libido.

Likely a combo of removing porn and improving lifestyle factors like snoring via CPAP.

Stay off porn it's so worth it. Trt or not.

 

I've seen a few guys come off at the clinic I work at, not a single one of them didn't go back to near their baseline T levels before they went on TRT. It just takes time, a cycle HCG would make it jump start faster, similar to a pct for guys coming off steroids.

Some guys still have a libido in the lower ranges, some guys don't, it varies. There are other health reasons than libido, and sexual function to get on TRT if you dip too low.

 

Biomedical masters studies here. Pied is not related to testosterone at all, your testosterone levels are stable until you age 35 to 40 y, at which moment they will decay with time, but it does not create erectile dysfunction, as many people here were conceived by their fathers beyond 35 y. Low libido it is a sign of low T, but again you have to be old. Of course there will be counterexamples, but I am describing what is the regular male biology. The basis of Pied has to do with sexual conditioning of your erectile response to screen format in detriment of real format, so to speak. It is similar to the salivatory response of Pavlovs dog, but in our case it is erectile blood flow instead of salivation. Our bell is porn, to the point we only respond to the conditioned stimulus (porn) instead of the unconditioned stimulus (real partners), because we LEARNED it, albeit unconsciously. It is called implicit learning or procedural memory association. We trained or taught ourselves for that, the fact we did not know it is irrelevant to our basal ganglia, which made this pavlovian learning possible.
That said, another factor that plays a major role, it is we desensitized our dopamine receptors to the point of losing gray matter in the erectile centers of the brain, which are the hypothalamus and head of the basal ganglia. This is not hypothesis, it was proved by the Max Planck insitute and Simon Kuhn back in 2014. That is what you may interpret as low T, but it is not, it is actually low DA (dopamine signaling), albeit other neurotransmitters will surely also be downregulated, precisely the ones we released by compulsively pmoing. On the one hand it is possible to extinct a pavlovian conditioning by removing the unintended brain training, on the other hand we can boost the same neurotransmitters we have downregulated through simple activities, besides of course abstinence: do intermittent fasting a couple of times a month and try to make as much aerobic exercise as possible. I suggest not masturbating either, even without porn, because the idea is to let the brain time to reset or replenish the baseline levels of these molecules, not waisting them when we already have a scarcity baseline state we need to shift.

 

Ehh, it doesn't create erectile dysfunction in a physical sense, but it 100% does contribute to the inability to get an erection due to lack of sexual arousal. Seen hundreds of guys with low T treated with TRT, almost 100% of them reported erectile dysfunction. The only guys who don't recover are those with a physiological condition effecting the penis's ability to get erect. Also the majority of men we treat are under 40, hypogonadism is a real condition. Levels are stable in most men until natural aging decline, but if you have hypogonadism this does not apply.