Insomnia

Depressed Mood

Low mood, flat drive and anhedonia. Concentrated in the withdrawal window after a cycle, when natural testosterone has not yet restarted.

Irritability

A lower threshold for annoyance, distinct from outright aggression and far more commonly reported.

Locus Coeruleus

The brain's noradrenaline source and its arousal dial. It sets how alert, how startled and how awake the person is, which is why compounds that raise sympathetic drive cost sleep before they cost anything else.

Noradrenaline Signalling

Arousal, vigilance and the physical side of stress. It sets whether the person is alert or wired, and it is the transmitter most directly raised by the stimulants that are commonly stacked alongside these compounds.

Sympathetic Tone

How hard the fight-or-flight side of the nervous system is running. Androgens raise tyrosine hydroxylase and change adrenergic receptor density, so a compound can lift this without touching mood directly. It is the shared cause behind a cluster people treat as four separate problems: a higher resting pulse, night sweats, a short fuse, and sleep that will not come.

Withdrawal Syndrome

The cluster that arrives after stopping, while the natural axis is still shut down: flat mood, no drive, no libido, disturbed sleep, and in some cases suicidal thoughts. Separated from dependence because dependence is about the pull to continue and this is about what happens when you do not. It is the window in which almost all of the serious psychiatric events in the literature occur.

Sleep Quality

How restorative sleep is, as opposed to how much of it there is. Deep and REM sleep are where growth hormone is released and where memory is consolidated, so this is the measure that connects a sleep effect to a memory effect. A person can sleep eight hours and get almost none of this.