I started 100 mg of oral progesterone a little over a week ago, and I haven’t had a good nights sleep in at least 5 days. I wake up between 2 and 4 in the morning, usually within a half hour of 3. Sometimes from a nightmare, which I never used to have until I realized I was trans, sometimes I’m just awake. Last night I didn’t sleep at all so far as I can tell. I see most people saying it does the oppositw for them, just knocks them right out in underan hour, but I definitely don’t get that. I really don’t want the cause of my inability to sleep to be the prog because I’ve already noticed my boobs feel bigger, but has anyone else had this experience?
I wouldn’t say my boobs definitely are bigger in the last week, but I’m definitely noticing their size being in the boob range than slightly overweight guy range more, so it might just be my brain doing brain things. In so far as sleep habits, my wife saw a sleep specialist a while back and I’ve incorporated a lot of thing she was told to do into my routine, like getting up if I cant sleep. I’ve been able to get back to sleep eventually every night except last night when I felt on the edge of sleep the whole night. I just really don’t want to find out the progesterone is the source of my insomnia before I get to see any real benefit from it
It’s unlikely to be the source, but biology is wild - so who knows. Especially if you’re taking it orally and your liver is producing a bunch of secondary metabolites from it - those typically create drowsiness as well, but maybe your biology is different? Usually when you see “progesterone causing insomnia”, the discussion is about prog levels dropping too low or a lack of progesterone (not due to levels being normal or high).
So, I wouldn’t expect it to be the cause - have you found any evidence that shows insomnia can be a side effect of taking progesterone?
A couple reddit threads, but other than that, no. The timing just seems too perfect to be coincidental.
you could stop taking it and see if that helps?
oral progesterone probably isn’t helping much anyway, and even taking prog at all isn’t strictly necessary (I mean, ironically I mostly took it to help me sleep).
I was mainly hoping it would help my libido, but it sadly hasn’t done that yet. Estradiol didn’t really start effecting me for about 3 weeks.
It depends on the dose and route of administration as to why it took 3 weeks for you to notice changes from estradiol. I noticed changes within hours to days - particularly after 3 days my mood pretty radically changes as my body stopped producing testosterone. (But I injected a significant enough dose of estradiol valerate, so the estrogen was peaking at day 3 instead of like day 7 - 8 with estradiol enanthate injections.)
I find prog definitely helps libido, but … I don’t know whether taking it orally will help with that or not (since it doesn’t raise blood levels). My experience with taking it orally is that it just doesn’t work, I think I felt a different kind of drowsy that didn’t help me stay asleep like when I take it rectally.