The Peptide People Are Using to Fix Their Sleep

Joe Scugoza’s sleep was a mess. The 31-year-old, who goes by @longevityjoe on TikTok, would stir awake as many as five times a night for 10-minute intervals before falling back asleep. “I’d wake up in the morning and feel okay, but then I’d be four hours into the workday and feel so tired,” he says. “There were times when I left work and took a 20-minute nap in my truck.”Along with cutting back on alcohol and caffeine, Scugoza started looking into sermorelin, a peptide he’d heard about that people used to improve deep sleep. Scugoza was no stranger to peptides. He started taking a GLP-1 a year ago to prep for his upcoming wedding and BPC-157—colloquially known as the Wolverine peptide—to help recover from an injury. Technically, neither BPC-157 nor sermorelin are currently FDA approved, but Scugoza was able to gain access to the peptide through a company he did social media advertising for, System Labs, and felt safe taking them under the guidance of a clinician.His first week on sermorelin, Scugoza didn’t notice much of a difference. But a couple of weeks later, his shut-eye improved and he was able to consistently sleep through the night without waking up. “Week two, my sleep started feeling more consistent,” he shared in a TikTok video in May. He also noticed he was recovering quicker from workouts and had more energy generally. More than two months later, he’s still on the drug.Read MoreHot Peptide Summer Is Almost HereAfter a hearing that recommended the approval of six previously banned peptides, the injectable drugs are only going to get more popular.Scugoza is not alone in his experimentation. Andrew Huberman has talked about trying sermorelin “on and off for the last couple of years” on his podcast, but said that while on it, he “wasn’t getting nearly as much rapid eye movement sleep as I normally would.” A similar conversation played out in the forums for ExcelMale.com, a forum devoted to testosterone optimization for wellness. “Since I started 10 units nightly, it has robbed me of a good night’s sleep. Every two or three hours, I wake up in the middle of the night and wander around, watch TV, or snack,” one user shared. Conversations about chasing “sermorelin sleep” are happening on Reddit too. For most, the peptide did disrupt REM at first, but it eventually settled down two weeks in, just like it did for Scugoza.Conversation about sermorelin is picking up just as a new generation of drugs aimed at sleep disorders are approaching the market. At the start of August, the FDA approved a drug called oveporexton to treat narcolepsy, causing The Economist to declare that “the brain may be about to have its Ozempic moment.” Sermorelin is just one of a handful of yet-to-be-tested possible solutions to Americans’ longstanding desire to sleep longer and more soundly. But to best understand its potential impact, you have to first know exactly what it does.Sermorelin is a lab-made substance that signals to the body to make more of its own growth hormone, per sleep-medicine doctor Saema Tahir, MD. As we age, the body produces less growth hormone, which is one of the reasons why growth hormone peptides have become especially popular in the longevity space. In adults, growth hormone plays a role in regulating metabolism, improving muscle mass, and supporting bone density.The body naturally releases growth hormone during deep sleep, according to sleep-medicine doctor Domingo Rodriguez-Cué, MD. Since sermorelin mimics growth hormone, this is where the whole sermorelin-for-sleep idea comes from. Taking it sends a signal to the brain to increase deep sleep.“Growth hormone secretion normally peaks during the first period of deep sleep, and laboratory studies have shown that GHRH itself can promote slow-wave sleep [also known as deep sleep]. Because sermorelin mimics GHRH, some believe it may enhance the biological processes associated with deep sleep,” says David E. McCarty, MD, FAASM, a sleep-medicine doctor and the chief medical officer of sleep-medicine clinic and research institute Rebis.Since both growth hormone and deep sleep decline with age, says Dr. Tahir, the theory is that taking sermorelin could restore nighttime growth hormone signaling and therefore some of that lost sleep.There is some scientific evidence showing that sermorelin can increase deep sleep, but the studies are outdated and not very robust. For example, one study from 1998 published in Endocrinology taking into account 48 adults found that sermorelin increased deep sleep by 31%. Newer, more robust research on sermorelin and sleep doesn’t exist, nor are there any clinical trials on sermorelin and sleep in the works currently, according to the National Library of Medicine's clinical trials database.Dr. McCarty points out that because of the lack of clinical trials with the drug, researchers aren’t sure how taking sermorelin long-term impacts health. “As a result, the long-term risks, benefits, and durability of sleep effects remain uncertain,” he says. But even without robust scientific evidence, Dr. McCarty and Dr. Rodriguez-Cué say taking the peptide in the short-term can cause facial flushing, headaches, nausea, and dizziness. Dr. Rodriguez-Cué adds that sermorelin isn’t regulated by the government (instead, it’s compounded and prescribed off-label), so it could have ingredients in it you don’t even know about that could negatively impact the body, including high levels of lead, as doctor and writer Dhruv Khullar, MD, found in a 2026 New Yorker investigation in which he tested unregulated peptides.The known long-term risks of taking sermorelin are even more serious. Since the peptide stimulates growth, Dr. Rodriguez-Cué says it can cause any cancerous tumors in the body to grow faster—a common side effect when taking any growth-releasing hormone peptides.“There are safer ways to increase deep sleep than sermorelin that we know are effective,” Dr. Rodriguez-Cué says. He recommends a very simple one: exercise. “When you exercise, your muscles send the message to your pituitary that you need more growth hormone to build muscle, so exercise is a natural, easy way to increase growth hormone releasing hormone,” he says. A 2022 study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health supports this, showing that participants experienced an increase in deep sleep after 12 weeks of resistance training.All that to say, the sleep doctors I spoke with weren’t keen on using sermorelin for sleep when there are plenty of other more tried-and-tested solutions. “Sermorelin is mostly hype dressed in real biology,” Dr. Tahir says. “It’s a plausible mechanism, but with no real proof.”