Poor sleeping quality due to frequent erections at night

'What We Know' here. I am laughing, but damn, I'm willing to try it. My only fear is that by suppressing the erection process in this way, something else will happen. What happens to the REM trigger when it is sqeezed out? Where will the blood go?

Mind you, there's nothing to say that damage is not being done by SRPE anyway. It might be a case of nothing to lose!

Eugene here. Hey, I have no idea " What we know" but give it a try. I am just testing it now, but it seems to have given some relief. Maybe only one erection towards the morning but that is much better than 4 or 5 a night. I am really curious is it helps other people too. I will keep you up to date on my progress. By the way, I have also thought about whether it could have a side effect too, but for right it feels good to have some relief and seemingly without any baclofen, which is something good!

Will here! Great, Eugene, that you are having some seeming success. I also tried the jock-strap method (with a cup), but had almost the opposite response to you; sensations were so strong and so distracting that, alas, I had to give up. But, not one to give up easily, I will try again -- with socks : )

I hope you will continue to update us on whether this method continues to work for you. I don't think there is any real risk to doing it, so long as you get a "breather" once or twice a night. And to be able to get off baclofen has to be good.

I'll be heading straight to the jock strap store tonight! Anything is worth a try if it isn't meds. The guy who originally posted it said he used one size smaller than normal, I wonder if that's the same as using the socks?

Thanks for the update,
Rezz

I had the same outcome as Will though different. The jockstrap killed the erections but the intense urge to urinate woke me three times. That's with the clonazepam and baclofen!

Eugene here. Well, I went to sleep at 11pm last night (I jave stopped all baclofen for the athletic supporter experiment) and slept until 4:45am without a problem, then two events about an hour apart.

So not great results but the almost 6 hour stretch of uninterrupted sleep initially was good. I keep a paper and pen and cell phone on the night table next to my bed with the time I go to bed and listing whether I have taken baclofen or not and the dosage and with or without athletic supporter, so when I awake I can record the times easily and quickly. I have been trying to adjust the socks to compress the area as best as possible, but not overly uncomfortable.

Let's see how things continue... Today I plan to print out some blank calendars on the computer tomusemto record my results. Right now I am using just a blank piece of paper.

I think I would happily settle for a regular 6hrs unbroken sleep (till around 5am) and then meditate for an hour or so -- so long as I didn't have to take drugs. I imagine the hour or so of meditation would easily compensate for any lost sleep, though I'd still rather be awoken by the birds than by "events".

For what it's worth, I'm finding 30mins in the sauna in the evening seems to diminish the number of times I'm awoken, either by my bladder or unwanted erections. I imagine it's because my body is generally more relaxed (and dehydrated?) and I therefore sleep deeper.

Keep us posted, please, Eugene.

Will,

This is exactly how I am. If I try to go down on Baclofen I will have some really, really bad nights. It's almost as if it causes damage. Then I have to load up to get it to calm down. 30 is my dose that always seems to work. It sucks but once on Baclofen you are kind of stuck on it. I feel like when we have these intense episodes they tend to perpetuate themselves and increase the intensity of recurrent/subsequent "attacks". It's really horrible.

I see some similar conditions to me here on the board. Past use of anti-depressants, IBS, possible AI link, Propecia/Finasteride, and biking. I stopped taking Prozac in 1993. Prozac had totally diminished my sexual function while i was on it and I can say it did nothing for me. In fact, when I finally stopped taking it my life got better. I felt better. The problem was when I went to quit I would feel so bad it reinforced that I had a problem with "depression". NO. WRONG. The discontinuation from SSRIs mimics depression. You could take a "healthy" person, give them ADs and then remove ADs and they would feel bad. So I had that horrible experience. I had some great years afterwards. I started mountain biking a lot in 94. My saddle at first was ridiculously hard and I'm sure it caused some damage. For me this mainly started in around 1998. That was the year I took Propecia. After 4 months I got what felt like a horrific prostate infection and that is when I first remember painful erections when trying to sleep. I think that once this syndrome starts, it perpetuates itself somehow. I think early intervention may be very important. I also think that messing with anti-depressants or other drugs that affect your hormones is about the worst thing you can do. You need to protect your perineum from trauma too. I am about 16 years in guys and the only non-drug thing that works for me is not sitting. If I go on vacation and am out of my chair I can have spontaneous (or used to be able to) after about a week.

Anyway, I'll be putting this information in my survey for Eugene.

Well, I tried a jock strap and woke up after about 3 hours with the worst pain I've experienced yet in my penis. I woke up and had to immediately try and untuck it from the pouch because of a throbbing pain. It was rock solid as usual, but crushed and contained by the jock strap. I then tried to urinate and it burned (not sure if related). Guess it doesn't work for all of us! My erections are getting harder and harder, almost like a piece of actual wood. They're also bending up more and more...

Rezz.

Hi Rezz, Eugene here. I am sorry you had such a problem with the jock strap. Maybe it was a bad recommendation from me. Me ertheless, I am continuing my experiment with it as it seems to help me. These past nights I am only having about two SRPE events, one after around 5 hours and then another in the very early morning, almost time to wake up.
Yes, the jock strap does trap the erect penis, and I imagine this can be bad if the size of the erect penis is too large for the pouch ofmthe jock. In your case Rezz, if you are still willing to try the jock method, you may want to cut the top of the jock's pouch so it when youmhave an event it does not constrain the erect penis. In my case, the erect penis is just slightly smaller than the pouch. Anyway, like I said I stuff the jock with socks to compress the flacid penis, and this seems to help diminish the number of SRPE events, so far. And, best thing is that I have stopped all baclofen for the test. My next test will be to sleep again without the jock, and no baclofen, to see if the SRPE returns with greater frequency as in the beginning. this will allow me to test if the jock strap is really providing relief for me anyway.

Eugene! Very helpful details. Thanks for posting this info. I'll give the strap technique another go. BTW, anybody on baclofen and thinking about trying this or any other method should (I understand) be very careful in how rapidly you taper the dose. Going off too quickly can (I understand) result in terrible distress. Here's a quote: "My neuro told me there was no need to wean off the Baclofen and that i would be fine coming off the 5mg. I trusted him and just came off it. Three days later i began violently retching with an extreme sensation of nausea. The retching was not gastro intestinal but from the sides of my body. My stomach was also very touch sensitive as was the rest of my body. For two weeks the medical profession were baffled. I kept telling them that it was because of the Baclofen but they kept dismissing it. After two weeks of retching I was rushed to hospital where finally a doctor said that this was most definitely Baclofen withdrawal syndrome and that I was to go back on 5mg. As soon as I went back on the Baclofen the retching stopped but my intestines opened and all my contents came flooding out." 5mg is a tiny dose, and I don't think everyone is going to have such a reaction, but it's probably best to reduce by about 2.5mg per week or so. ALSO, if you are reading this thread because you or someone you know is suffering from SRPE, stuttering priapism, or anything similar, but have not commented or joined in the discussion, PLEASE don't by shy. We want to hear from you, and it's nothing to be ashamed of. You can be totally anonymous. Together, maybe we can find answers.

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Eugene here. It seems that some people, such as the person writing above, are much more sensitive to baclofen than others. For example, I have been taking baclofen for about 4 or 5 months, and have increased and decreased the dosage by up to 10 mg in just one night with no apparent effects. Also, just last week I went from 30mg a night to none in a single night to try the jock strap experiment with no apparent effects, certainly no withdrawal symptoms. So for me, I seem to be very insensitive to baclofen, and also i have come to feel that baclofen does little for me. even when I was taking as much as 50mg a night, I was still getting an event or two a night, a similar number that I am getting with the jockstrap method I am presently experimenting with.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3e/Sleep_Hypnogram.svg/1920px-Sleep_Hypnogram.svg.png

If you check out the sleep cycle, in the site I just posted above, you can see there are about 5 REM stages a night. Nocturnal erections are known to occur during REM. So, most people are saying that at worst they are having about 5 SRPE events per night. So this makes sense. However, It seems that SRPE events can be quite variable per night, sometimes 2 a night, other times 3 or 4 and then sometimes the extreme of 5. This has been true for me, has this also been true for you? I wonder why there is this variability? Why sometimes all 5 REM stages are causing SRPEs and sometimes some REM stages do not trigger a SRPE event?

interestingly, one person in the questionnaires said that they can have as many as 10 events. In this case, I wonder if some people have fragmented REM stages so that they can experience more events than 5 per night?

Anyway please confirm if you agree that 5 per night is about the maximum number of SRPEs you might have a night and whether you find this to be variable.

I am just thinking out loud here.

Eugene

Yes, 5x a night is the max for me. There seems to be some correlation between how deep I am sleeping and how many times I wake up -- and therefore how many perceived "events". I suspect that I have as many erections on the nights I'm not awoken by them. I think that's why clonazapam helps (somewhat), too; it diminishes REM sleep but also makes us less sensitive/more dead (possibly in many ways). There's also the confounding question of how often I am awoken by simultaneous bladder events.