Sleep Quality

Nightmares and Vivid Dreams

Intense, unpleasant, memorable dreams, usually alongside broken sleep and night sweats. Named separately from insomnia because people report it even when total sleep time is normal, and because it is one of the few effects that reliably resolves within days of stopping.

GABA-A Receptor

The brain's main calming channel. Some androgen metabolites sit on it as neurosteroids and change anxiety and sleep quality without touching the androgen receptor at all.

Hypothalamus

The control room above the pituitary. Appetite, body temperature, the reproductive axis and the GH rhythm are all set here, which is why so many peptides that produce whole-body effects act on one small area.

Memory Consolidation

Turning the day's experience into durable memory, which happens during deep and REM sleep rather than during the day. This is the step that breaks first when sleep breaks, and it is why memory complaints on these compounds usually trace back to sleep rather than to anything the compound does in the brain.

Processing Speed

How fast simple mental operations run. Included because it is the measure that moves with sleep debt, so it separates a genuine cognitive effect from an effect of being tired.

Serotonin Signalling

How strongly serotonin is signalling. The system most often named when 19-nor androgens are linked to impulse control, irritability and sleep. Almost all of the evidence is rodent work; nothing has been measured at these receptors in a human on these compounds.

Working Memory

Holding and manipulating information over seconds. The cognitive measure most sensitive to lost sleep and to raised cortisol, which makes it the one most likely to move on these compounds and the one least likely to be noticed as a cognitive effect rather than as tiredness.

HPA Axis Activity

The stress axis: hypothalamus to pituitary to adrenal cortex, ending in cortisol. Relevant to mood twice over. A compound that blocks the glucocorticoid receptor removes the brake the axis runs on, and a compound that shuts down the gonadal axis leaves this one carrying more of the load.

Insomnia

Difficulty falling or staying asleep, often with night sweats. Its own problem, and an amplifier for every mood effect above it.

Sleep Apnoea

Breathing interruptions during sleep. Worsened by weight gain, fluid retention and neck mass, and it drives daytime blood pressure up further.