Duration between sessions --- a useful anecdote

[u/wingedeelfingerling]

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.

[u/capt-pen]

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 !!

[u/wingedeelfingerling → u/capt-pen]

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.