Hibernation Protocol

One peptide. Three supplements. Exact doses, exact timing, and a shopping list at the bottom with every product linked. You can read this and order in five minutes.

I sleep about six hours and wake up feeling owed two more. I've been running a commercial night formula plus GH-secretagogue peptides before bed and it isn't getting me there. So I went through the evidence properly and picked. Not ranked — picked.

First, What My Own Data Actually Says

Before buying anything I pulled my own numbers. A representative night: efficiency 90%, latency 9 minutes, deep sleep 64 minutes (in band), REM 121 minutes, awake only 37 minutes.

Total sleep: 5h 53m. Time in bed: 6h 30m. Lights out at 00:26.

So my sleep quality isn't broken — my sleep *window* is. Efficiency flatters a short sleeper: ninety percent of too little is still too little. And with a 9-minute latency I don't need to be knocked out faster. I need to start earlier.

Which means everything below is a multiplier on a window I have to create myself. Take it inside six and a half hours and you'll get slightly better short sleep. That's the last time I'll say it.

The Peptide: DSIP

Delta Sleep-Inducing Peptide. One peptide, and it's this one.

It acts directly on sleep architecture — promoting and normalising slow-wave delta sleep through GABA, serotonin and the hypothalamic sleep centres. The reason it wins on your criteria is what it does *not* do: no sedation, no respiratory depression, no morning grogginess. It doesn't knock you out, it deepens what you already have. It also normalises the HPA axis, pulling cortisol and ACTH down in stressed people.

It also doesn't collide with what I already run. My current pre-bed peptides are a GHRH analogue plus a GH-releasing peptide — adding a third secretagogue would just risk receptor desensitisation for nothing. DSIP isn't a secretagogue. Different mechanism, no overlap, no competition.

Honest limits, once: the effect is real but modest — roughly 5 to 15 extra minutes of slow-wave sleep. The human trials are small, decades old, and used IV dosing. It's not approved for any indication anywhere. Anyone selling it as a knockout agent is lying to you. I'm taking it because it's the only sleep peptide with a real mechanism and a clean profile.

Why Not MK-677

Because someone will ask. MK-677 has better slow-wave data than anything here — stage IV deep sleep up as much as 50%, REM up around 20%, at 25 mg.

It's still wrong for me. Its 24-hour half-life holds IGF-1 elevated 40–72% continuously, and IGF-1 is a marker I actively titrate against — flooding it destroys the signal I steer by. It raises fasting glucose and cuts insulin sensitivity. And it drives a large appetite increase, while I'm running a compound whose entire job is suppressing appetite. Great molecule, wrong stack. Moving on.

The Three Supplements

Three items. Each has one job. They don't overlap and they don't compete — magnesium and glycine work through completely different mechanisms, and ashwagandha operates on the cortisol axis over a longer timescale.

Glycine has to be powder. Its effective dose is 3 grams and a capsule holds a fraction of that — which is exactly why every all-in-one blend on the market lists about 350 mg. That's a tenth of the studied dose, present so the label can name the ingredient. Not a scam, just geometry. But a tenth of a dose is a decoration, and it's the single reason no one bottle does this job.

Ashwagandha is the standout — the only compound here that improves sleep *and* is anabolic-positive. Cycle it: 12 weeks on, 3–4 weeks off. Not for dependency, but because adaptogen effects blunt with continuous use.

What I Deliberately Left Out

Melatonin. It's a timing signal, not a sedative. Multi-milligram nightly dosing causes morning fog and dampens your own production. It's for shifting a body clock across time zones, not for sleeping longer tonight.

Apigenin. Mechanistically plausible, thin clinical support at supplement doses. It's in the good products; it isn't earning its place.

Every all-in-one blend. They under-dose the ingredient that matters most. See above.

One Thing Worth Ruling Out

Six hours, waking unrefreshed, a BMI in the low thirties, and intermittent overnight blood-oxygen readings dipping into the low nineties — I've logged three sub-94% nights in a four-night stretch — is the textbook presentation of mild sleep-disordered breathing.

No supplement on this page touches that. If it's the mechanism, you can't supplement your way out of an airway that partially closes when you lie down. I'm booking a sleep study. It costs less than a year of capsules.

The Shopping List

Four things. Buy these exact items.

• 1 · DSIP — 5 mg lyophilised vial
  Buy from a lab you already trust. Read it up first: the DSIP rundown and the peptides.org dosing reference. You will also need bacteriostatic water and U-100 insulin syringes.
• 2 · Magnesium bisglycinate
  Thorne Magnesium Bisglycinate — 200 mg elemental per scoop, powder, and NSF Certified for Sport, which means the batch is tested for banned substances. That matters if anyone ever tests you.
• 3 · Glycine powder
  Nutricost Glycine Powder — plain glycine, no additives. Powder specifically, so you can actually hit 3 g.
• 4 · Ashwagandha KSM-66
  Transparent Labs KSM-66 — 600 mg, the exact standardised extract used in the trials, third-party tested. Generic "ashwagandha root powder" is not the same product.

How to Take It

Mixing the DSIP. Reconstitute the 5 mg vial with 2.0 mL of bacteriostatic water — run the water slowly down the inside wall of the vial, don't blast it onto the powder, then rotate gently until clear. Never shake it.

That gives you 2,500 mcg/mL. On a U-100 insulin syringe, 4 units = 0.04 mL = 100 mcg. Write the mixing date on the vial, keep it at 2–8 °C, and bin whatever's left after 28 days.

Start at 100 mcg (4 units). If after two weeks it's doing nothing, go to 200 mcg (8 units). Don't go higher.

That's the whole protocol. Magnesium and ashwagandha together at the 90-minute mark, DSIP and glycine together at 45 minutes, then sleep. Nothing to decide, nothing to titrate except the one DSIP step-up after two weeks.