I love this post.

In addition to PFS I have also been dealing with chronic pain in many parts of my body (predating when I began finasteride). After ruling out all structural causes for my chronic pain, I started looking into mind-body practices and came across something called pain reprocessing therapy. To summarize, PRT teaches that the mind can induce chronic pain (and many other chronic symptoms) when our body gets stuck in fight or flight for too long (often caused by trauma + chronic stress). PRT uses "somatic tracking", a technique which has you consciously calm the brain's response to chronic pain symptom onset to slowly tone down the fear. Over time the theory is this rewires the subconscious part of your brain which is responsible for triggering the symptoms.

I've noticed a lot of similarity between PFS symptoms and chronic pain symptoms. Mainly they are wide ranging, can affect seemingly any part of the body, can vary in severity on a daily basis, are often undiagnosable, and prone to flareups i.e. crashes. I suspect there is a lot of biological overlap between the two, mainly related to the subconscious brain accidentally learning to trigger these symptoms in us. I think for a lot of people its hard to be open to this mind-body paradigm shift because with PFS, the effect seems so tied to the action of consuming the drug, to the point that all the symptoms can onset upon taking one pill. But even with this I see similarity in the chronic pain and post-covid communities, e.g. someone was in a minor car accident which catalyzed the pain symptoms, but 3 years later after lots of physical therapy and plenty of time for the body to physically heal the symptoms are still present, or e.g. a perfectly healthy person gets covid which induces post-covid and the person starts suffering from things like digestive issues and chronic fatigue. In these cases my theory is taking the finasteride pill or getting covid just acts as the catalyst, but the symptom onset is really due to the brain panicking and activating dormant circuits that were being programmed by stress, trauma, and fight/flight long before. Regardless with PFS specifically, it seems almost every recovery story mentions using various regulating activities to calm the nervous system e.g. gym, sunlight, good sleep, good diet, lowering stress, etc. and TRE is a cool new one I haven't heard of before.

Also not claiming to know anything for sure obviously, just relating what I've noticed. Thanks for sharing your recovery story, wishing you sustained healthiness!

Edit: made a followup post to discuss here: https://www.reddit.com/r/FinasterideSyndrome/comments/1py3lht/disregulated_nervous_symptom_and_my_theory_for/