Hello together,
this is my first post here so i will briefly give some context:
I am a 25 year old man who struggled with POIS for about half of his life. My POIS usually lasts for ~3-5 days.
In december 2021 i found a way to partially reduce symptoms by taking 1g paracetamol as soon as possible after ejaculation. Maybe it is placebo, but i feel like it reduced my POIS to ~2-4 days total.
I explicitly DO NOT recommend that, since paracetamol is damaging to the liver and the results are not the best.
Other substances that partially worked for me are: THC (acts on dopamine), lysergic acid diethylamide (acts on serotonin), but since they might be illegal where you live and only partially reduced symptoms for me, i also DO NOT recommend them. Especially not THC, since it is addictive.
I also tried L-Tryptophan, which gets synthesised into (among other things) serotonin. This did not help at all.
Ok now to the interesting part:
I have found a way to remove my POIS.
Over the years i did lots of research and at one point stumbled upon the fact, that (as i understand it) after ejaculation, dopamine get suppresed by prolactin levels rising. This explained to me why THC helped me partially and i did not think more about it... until recently.
I was wondering what would happen if i somehow reduce prolactin levels. I thought, that might open the door for dopamine to be more active and thus might help, since THC partially helped me. I did not really want to take any medication for this experiment so i searched for natural ways to lower prolactin. I found, that monks pepper is known to reduce prolactin and we even had some monks pepper at home. I assumed i had to take it daily for some time in order for it to potentially show some effect. At the moment of finding this information, i was in POIS state and had taken 1g paracetamol some hours before (after my last ejaculation). The monks pepper i had available was in the form of tablets of 10mg monks pepper extract. So i took one. Not long after, i somehow felt better. I was curious and took another 20mg extra. I felt even better (although this might have been placebo). At that point i was not sure if it was only the monks pepper or the paracetamol as well. I wanted to know whether this works without paracetamol, so the next time i ejaculated, i took 40mg monks pepper within 5 minutes of ejaculation and no paracetamol. I felt only minimal POIS. I wanted to see if the effect get better with dose, so not long after this ejaculation, i ejaculated again and took 60mg extra (100mg total now). I could not tell if i at that point had POIS symptoms, or i was just imagining them since i was used to having POIS after ejaculation. Side note: if i ever was to ejaculate twice on the same day it would completely destroy me for at least 4-5 days; now none of that. The following times i took 80mg within 5 minutes of ejaculation. I now essentially live without POIS. I did not try 100mg because it is not necessary for me.
My theory:
I think some of us have trouble biochemically degrading prolactin and this leads to the body requiring way more time to recover from elevated prolactin levels. Since prolactin (as i understand it) suppresses dopamine, we get our POIS symptoms as a result of that. Maybe someone with a background in biochemistry can further look into this.
Closing remarks:
For some of you, monks pepper might help. For me, 80mg monks pepper extract within 5 minutes of ejaculation removes POIS. I advise anyone who wants to try it to start with lower doses, since every metabolism might react differently to monks pepper. I found that if i take it too frequently (e.g. 2 ejaculations within 90 minutes, so 80mg and then another 80mg ~90 mins later) i get dizzy. So start with a low dosage and with a good amount of time between doses and then work from there. I hope this helps some of you!
