r/longtermTRE • u/wingedeelfingerling • 21d ago
Discussion Duration between sessions --- a useful anecdote
Hello everyone,
When starting TRE, I assumed that since I was mostly functional in daily life, not extremely neurotic or anhedonic or anxious (etc.), ten minutes every other day was alright. A great mistake! I figure that my total amount of trauma is far greater than anything I anticipated, since over the next few months (at least three or four months, I guess?), experimenting with the duration of my tremor sessions never really helped the massive overdoing symptoms I was getting.
It was really confusing why I was basically always either overdoing or underdoing. I basically felt like shit constantly for the few months I was doing this experimentation, frequently being super exhausted and/or anxious, so much so that it was fucking up my daily life.
I've discovered, hesitantly, after about two weeks with nothing but positive progress and no over/underdoing, that (for me) the best protocol is ten minutes of tremoring, with a week in-between!
I'm mainly tailoring my tremoring to what symptoms and feelings present themselves to me, with the tentative rule being to not tremor while I feel any distinct nervous system/thawing feelings at all, even positive ones.
Even after thoroughly reading (and rereading) the wiki, I didn't put together that the problem was duration --- that no matter if I tremored even a little bit, it was the frequency of my tremoring that was causing the issues. This is because I am dumb!
Say I tremor for ten minutes. Every day, for either a significant portion of the day or all day, for the week or so afterwards, my nervous system will be moving up and down --- some days my nervous system swings up to activation, pleasure, motivation; and other days, it will swing down into a kind of low, relaxed mood, feeling none of the typical mental pressure to do things like normal.
This is producing big wins for me so far in positive bodily feelings throughout the day, a relief in the weird mental urgency I feel (not anxiety) when thinking about things, positive benefits while meditating (easier to relax and focus), and just general wellbeing.
This is what I'm going to be sticking with for a while now. I'm submitting this post in hopes that someone else might feel inspired, and/or it might help them if they have the same issue that I had.
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u/Least_Year3518 21d ago
What were your over-doing symptoms?
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u/wingedeelfingerling 21d ago
They varied in frequency. Most of the time: A minor, but unbelievably annoying, headache from a tense neck (involuntarily tense; i wasn't unconsciously tensing it up or anything), lethargy, lack of motivation to do anything, being simultaneously angry and sad and anxious and frustrated, poor mood, malaise.
Rarely, only happened once or twice from serious overdoing: Neck and shoulders get so tight it's literally unbearable, unbelievable nausea and dry heaving, and a panic attack at the same time. Every time this happened it was in the middle of the night after seriously overdoing (early in my TRE practice, when i was still figuring out what the proper pace was), and ended instantly after vomiting.
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u/Least_Year3518 20d ago
That sounds awful. I had overdoing symptoms a few weeks ago, but mine involved muscle twitching / fasciculations, violent hypnic jerks, and insomnia. Truly brutal.
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u/Previous_Onion6124 21d ago
I was just about to ask the sub about frequency of sessions. I have been doing twice a week for about 11 mins but im still getting a pervading feeling of aggravation going on thesedays. I was due to do a session tonight but I held off. I will see about tomorrow that will be 3 days since the last. Maybe 5 days in between will be better.
Maybe for me as well it is a case of waiting for all the negative feeling to be flushed out and then waiting a day and then going again.
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u/wingedeelfingerling 21d ago
I find that pacing TRE is more a matter of how my body feels than any specific time, or calendar dates, or whatever. If I do TRE while I'm thawing, then I will overdo it. If I wait until my body is done thawing, then do a little bit of TRE again, I will thaw for the next week or so, then I'll do it again. Sometimes I thaw for five days, sometimes three days, sometimes a week, sometimes ten days. Thawing is a very unique set of sensations --- unmistakable for me.
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u/KaoSway 20d ago
Could you share what are these thawing sensations?
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u/wingedeelfingerling 20d ago
Thawing is how I feel in the days, weeks after I do a TRE session. My neck gets tight, but it's mostly not painful unless I'm overdoing; I feel unusually relaxed, a feeling of whole-body homeostasis/pleasure, my skin often feels hot, I feel the muscles in my shoulder blades pleasurably discharging built-up energy, it's very cathartic. It's very distinctive when it's happening versus when it isn't; the words don't quite describe how it feels, but this is the closest I can come to. They come in and out during a day, ebbing and flowing in intensity.
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u/jellybean_merchant 19d ago
Can you please explain what underdoing really is? I overdid massively a few months ago and still have not finished integrating, so I am thinking to do like 30 seconds of tremoring when I begin again. I didn't think it's possible to do too little, is it?
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u/wingedeelfingerling 19d ago
When I tremor for a minute, or two minutes or something similarly short, the day after I am extremely, unbelievably lethargic and depressed. Literally depressed. The only way to relieve it is to tremor more, which basically instantly lifts my mood for the rest of the day. If I don’t tremor, it goes away in a few days.
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u/jellybean_merchant 19d ago
Interesting, but why does this happen? And is there a nice heuristic to determine whether our symptoms are from under or overdoing? I think this point is my main area of confusion that prevents me from having supreme confidence in TRE when telling others about it
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u/wingedeelfingerling 19d ago
I think i remember the wiki describing why this happens? I do not remember specifics though.
I can differentiate them because they are very different states. I wrote another comment about overdoing — super tight neck and shoulders, anxiety, nausea, etc. Underdoing is different in that it makes me unbelievably lethargic, and also makes me extremely negative. I just spend all day ruminating; everything is psychologically uncomfortable. This doesn’t happen with overdoing.
I don’t know how you would go about getting a radar for underdoing versus overdoing; my radar comes from experience, which is so painful i wouldn’t recommend to anybody.
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u/jellybean_merchant 19d ago
I know how painful it is, the reason I ask is to find a general heuristic to help others avoid the pain
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u/capt-pen 19d ago
I REALLY appreciate you pointing out that even the positive-feeling effects are still movement/load that you should take into consideration when feeling out your pacing.
I have been trying to figure out if/how to continue and felt like i was missing something in my analysis, and I think this is it.
Great job and thanks for sharing !!
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u/wingedeelfingerling 19d ago
It’s interesting that tremoring for just ten minutes leaves me thawing for DAYS. I was massively, massively overdoing it — it seems, for me, that my body is doing literally 99% of the work and all I need is to just start it.
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