selank log, 8 weeks in, trying to keep it honest

the nasal irritation thing, YES. i had that in my first few weeks and panicked that i was doing something wrong. turned out i was just being sloppy about which nostril and not letting it clear between administrations. alternating properly basically fixed it for me. also really appreciate you being upfront that the weight drop is food + movement and not the peptide. that kind of honesty is why i keep reading logs here instead of the usual stuff where everything gets attributed to whatever the person is running that month lol how are you logging the focus scores, like what's the actual scale or criteria? im curious whether yours is anchored to anything specific or more gestalt.

appreciate the honest write-up. the 'slippery' thing you mention at the end is real and i dont think enough people in these logs acknowledge it. i ran a 10 week Selank protocol about a year back and had a similar leveling experience around week 7-8. in fairness to the compound though, i was also going through a stressful stretch at work so my baseline was a moving target the whole time. hard to know what was what. one thing i'll flag: the vendor i used at the time had inconsistent stock on the intranasal formulation and i had a gap around week 6 where i was waiting on a restock. in fairness to them they did ship fast once it came back but that gap might have messed with any consistent signal i could have reported. still a bit annoyed about it honestly. anyway, curious if you cycled off at all between weeks or ran it straight through.

98.1% HPLC is acceptable depending on the column and what theyre reporting as the main peak. what method did the vendor use, reverse phase C18 or something else? i ask because ive seen vendors report that number on a short gradient run that doesnt fully resolve the adjacent peaks, so the "98.1" is flattering. ran a batch of Selank myself last quarter (Phenomenex Luna C18, 15-min gradient, UV at 220nm). came back 97.4%, which i was happy with given the source. the peptide degrades fast in solution if pH isnt controlled so reconstitution water matters more than people think here. not saying your batch is bad. just that a number without methodology is half a number.

logging this kind of thing in a spreadsheet is exactly right imo. i do the same for BPC protocols and the number of times ive caught myself narratively inflating an effect that the sheet just doesnt support... embarrassing. your week 5-6 description of 'background anxiety quieting', on my own logs i've called that a 3/10 to 1/10 shift in baseline noise. not dramatic but consistent. the nights where i marked it as placebo-suspect were usually nights where something else had gone well that day. hard to untangle. the adaptation thing is real. i see it in peptide logs too. week 8-10 you hit a kind of ceiling and then you have to decide whether to cycle or accept that this is just the new floor. open question whether the floor is worth maintaining or whether you need the washout to reset sensitivity.

the sleep latency comment caught my eye. i dont have data on Selank specifically but on my IPA/CJC logs (90 min pre-bed, consistent timing) the Oura ring picked up a meaningful deep sleep increase around week 3-4 that i wasnt expecting. couldnt tell you if it was peptide, the routine, or the fact that i stopped looking at my phone after 9pm that same week, which is exactly your placebo problem in wearable form. if you ever get a tracker even just for a few weeks mid-protocol it's worth it just to see if your subjective 'sleep felt shorter' lines up with the deep sleep graph. sometimes it does. sometimes it really doesnt and that's its own kind of information. vivid dreams picked up for me around week 5 btw, no idea if thats relevant to anything but figured i'd mention it since you're tracking subjective stuff.