Curb Your Adrenaline, Improve Your Health – Dr Michael Platt
In this Bulletproof Radio interview, host Dave Asprey talks with Dr. Michael Platt, a board‑certified internal‑medicine physician and hormone‑replacement specialist, about the concept of "adrenaline dominance" – a state of chronically elevated adrenaline that he argues underlies a wide range of chronic conditions such as fibromyalgia, ADHD, autism, bipolar disorder, depression, weight gain, and addiction. Dr. Platt explains that adrenaline’s primary physiological role is to supply the brain with fuel during low‑blood‑sugar episodes, especially at night, and that modern lifestyle patterns (late‑night hypoglycemia, poor sleep, intermittent fasting, low‑carb diets) can trigger excessive adrenaline releases. He outlines practical strategies to curb adrenaline spikes: consuming a small pre‑sleep snack that raises liver glycogen (raw honey), provides ketones (MCT or brain‑octane oil), or supplies low‑insulin protein (collagen). He also discusses using bioidentical progesterone as a hormone‑replacement therapy to balance the adrenal axis. Throughout, Dr. Platt critiques conventional medical training and pharmaceutical influence for overlooking hormone balance, and he offers guidance on how listeners can recognize adrenaline dominance in themselves or family members.
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Bulletproof radio. A state of high performance. You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today's cool fact of the day is about adrenaline. It turns out it has short term superpowers. Adrenaline, also known as epinephrine, is a neurotransmitter. It's made mostly by your adrenal glands and, and your body secretes it in a moment of crisis. And it gets you ready to meet an emergency. Oh, say a tiger eating you, your boss yelling at you, someone cutting you off in traffic, or whatever you perceive as an emergency, even if it's just something that really wasn't an emergency. And it makes your heart beat faster and increases blood flow to your muscles, and it helps you use oxygen more efficiently. And it turns on your nervous system in interesting ways that causes the neurons in your brain to fire two to three times faster. Now that could be interesting because in a study, mice and rats who were exposed to a maze in a previous day could navigate the maze with more correct choices when they were injected with adrenaline. Does that mean adrenaline is a form of nootropic or a smart drug maybe? Sorta. Because adrenaline does act like a chemical messenger in your brain to make you more alert during those stressful times. It can distract your brain from sending pain signals and redirect your attention on your immediate task, like that running away from a tiger thing. Even if you stub your toe, it can stop an allergic reaction by increasing blood pressure and relaxing muscles in your airway so you can actually breathe. And you get something called hysterical strength from certain amounts of adrenaline that allows, say, mothers to lift cars off their injured children. And it even gives you better eyesight by cueing muscles of your iris to contract so that your pupils can expand. And no, you don't have to eat carrots to do that or even take eye armor. Pretty interesting that adrenaline could do this. And yes, you may have guessed that we are going to be talking about adrenaline today on the show. Now, today's guest has spent a very long time looking at adrenaline and other neurotransmitters and other parts of aging. Bioidentical hormones Board certified internal medicine specialist with about 34 decades of experience working directly with patients, everything from medical groups to elder care to health research. And he runs something called the Platt Wellness center in Rancho Mirage where he's looking at the root causes of illness. And this whole show is going to be about one of the things he studied in his life's work. I'm talking about Dr. Michael Platt, by the way. But in his 40 years of practice, he's looked at what happens when we get excess adrenaline. And what he's come up with here, which is also in literature, of course, is that things like fibromyalgia, autism, adhd, bipolar disorder, depression, anger, weight gain, and addictions are a part of excess adrenaline and how another hormone that's typically used in hormone replacement therapy for women called progesterone, can help to fix the problem. So if you're listening to the show going, what the heck? Here's the deal. If you're alive and you have social media, you probably have excess adrenaline or maybe even not enough adrenaline because you've burned yourself out. Listen to the show. It is going to describe you or someone that you know. Michael, welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me.
All right. Did you get interested in adrenaline just because you're a native New Yorker and New Yorkers are always angry? Is that how it works?
That's a good point. But I've been doing hormones for a long time, and one of the advantages that I had is that when I saw patients, I sat down and talked to them for about two hours. And when you sit down and talk to a patient, you learn a lot. And I started seeing a certain pattern, and so I started putting things together, and it came up with, excess adrenaline is the underlying cause of a lot of conditions, and some of them are felt to be incurable.
Why isn't everyone talking about this?
You know, that's an excellent question. I don't really have the answer for you. But part of the problem, if you allow me to vent a little bit.
Sure.
Is that doctors are not trained to treat the cause of illness. They're basically trained to give out band aids to treat the cause of illness, and they actually get very little training in hormones. And, you know, so part of this is probably related to, you know, our friends, the drug companies who control what doctors learn in medical school. They control the fda, they control the medical courts. They control medicine. And if you don't mind my saying so, and I hope they're not part of your sponsors, but, you know, for the most part, drug companies have no interest in people being healthy.
No, there's no drug company sponsoring bulletproof radio. I don't think you have to worry about that.
Okay. Well, it just. Yeah, so it's. You know, I've written a book, as you may know, called Adrenaline Dominance. And as far as I know, it's the only book that's ever been written that talks about adrenaline and the clinical consequences and the conditions related to it and why it happens and how to fix it. And. And so doctors. It's a whole concept that has not been taught to doctors.
One of the things that brings me great joy is just finding these things that are massive problems that we just didn't see for whatever reason, and then shining a little bit of light on them because it changes sometimes millions of people's lives. Toxic mold is an example there. In fact, there's a tie with adrenaline there where toxic mold will cause an adrenal response in people who are sensitive to it. You walk into a moldy building, you get a surge of adrenaline as your body's like, what do I do with all this? But people don't know about that generally, so they just wonder. I don't know. I have a headache and I don't feel good, and all these weird problems happen, and I know the incidence of that. But how big of a deal is adrenaline dominance? Is this 5% of the population? Is it 50% of the population?
Well, you know, if you look at the number of people with adhd, it's kind of growing. Yeah. And if you. And then, you know, you mentioned fibromyalgia. There are 10 million people in this country with fibromyalgia. They've all been told that there's no cure for it. In fact, doctors don't even know what caused the pain of fibromyalgia. But it's an easy condition to actually eliminate. You know, once you treat the cause of fibromyalgia, you can actually get rid of ADHD by treating the cause of adhd.
And you're saying it's always too much adrenaline that's causing fibromyalgia and these other conditions. Is it some of the time always?
Well, I'd say I don't want to say 100%, but certainly well into the 90s.
Interesting. All right, so given that we've got a ton of people listening with adhd, in fact, the majority of entrepreneurs seem to have adhd. In fact, it might make you a better entrepreneur. And all of the people seeking a flow state through extreme sports, generally, ADHD correlates very highly with that. What is adrenaline dominance? Can I walk me through it? But say as if I was new to the idea, listening to the show and saying, how would I know if it's me or my spouse or my kids or whatever else?
All your listeners have heard of adrenaline, and basically they know it is what they call the fight or flight hormone, but. And it's released in times of Danger, whatever. But the fact is is that danger rarely occurs. And if it does occur, it's short lived. What people don't understand is that the primary reason why the body releases adrenaline is to provide fuel to the brain. You know, the brain per weight uses more sugar than any other part of the body. And you know, when you take sugar away from the brain, they call that hypoglycemia, low blood sugar. And people get sleepy, and especially between 3 and 4 when insulin peaks. And a lot of people get sleepy when they're driving. In fact, some people fall asleep when they're driving, go off the road, hit a tree and kill themselves. So you can see from a survival standpoint, the body always wants to make sure the brain has enough fuel. So the thing about adrenaline, so it's normal for people to release adrenaline at certain times, but I use the term adrenaline dominance to indicate where those people have excess amounts of adrenaline to the point that it actually has clinical consequences.
One of the things that I wrote about in my blog post on sleep hacking, people tend to wake up or people who tend to wake up at four or five in the morning and can't go back to sleep, they oftentimes have had a blood sugar crash. And then the way the body responds to a crash in blood sugar is adrenaline and cortisol, because those are the fastest ways to raise blood sugar back up. And then of course, you can go back to sleep after an adrenaline surge. Is that the source of this excess adrenaline or is it that these are traumatized, fearful people? Or is it some environmental thing or like, why this change in our population? Or has this always been there throughout history?
Well, first of all, the primary source of adrenaline is in relationship to low sugars in the brain. Adrenaline actually peaks at 2:30 in the morning. That's the classic time that it's released because that's the time that the brain basically runs out of fuel. All this advice about not eating anything before going to sleep is actually incorrect. You know, you know, part of the treatment, and we're going to, we'll be getting into treatment, is to eat something before going to sleep. So the brain has fuel, so the body doesn't have to put out adrenaline to provide it. You know, people that have insomnia, you know, people that have, you know, their brains race, or people have trouble falling asleep, staying asleep, people that grind their teeth at night, people that keep their jaw clenched, restless leg syndrome, people they get up at night to urinate, all related to excess adrenaline. And you mentioned adrenaline does create stress almost all stress is related to increase adrenaline. And the body does respond to stress by putting out cortisol. And you're right, these two hormones come out at night and they're both raising sugar levels. The adrenaline raises sugar levels for the brain and cortisol raises raise your sugar levels to deal with the stress. And it's probably the number one cause of weight gain. And nobody ever talks about this. People diet and exercise during the day, but they put on fat during the weight because any excess sugar that the body is not burned up is stored as fat in the fat cell.
So if we have low sugar at night, we're going to have adrenaline. If we have high sugar at night, we're going to get fat.
Right.
That sounds like blood sugar regulation might be the key here.
Well, it's the key to it. You're absolutely right. That's adrenaline. That's its main function.
What I found worked. And so for 10 years, I've slept with sleep monitors on my head and various other parts of my body and really dug in on the physiology of this. There's a group of people who, if they have a tablespoon or maybe a teaspoon or two of raw honey, which tends to raise liver glycogen, if they do that before bed, they don't wake up in the middle of the night and they sleep better. Then there's another group of people who will have brain octane or even just a little bit of coconut oil, which isn't quite as effective, but it raises ketones. And having slightly higher ketones, which is an alternate source of energy more for the neurons versus the glial cells, then they sleep better. And there's a different group of people that may overlap those two, who have a small amount of protein that doesn't raise insulin too much like a collagen protein. And between experimenting with those three buckets, people who have a hard time going to sleep or staying asleep, oftentimes just by changing a small snack, we're talking less than 100 calories, totally changes things. But the circadian researchers like Dr. Satchin Panda say don't eat anything after dark. And that seems to work best for people who are metabolically healthy. How the heck do you unravel this after 40 years of clinical practice? What do you see? Because I'm confused. I know it works for me, it works for different buckets, but I don't know how to put someone in a bucket.
I take a very logical approach to getting people better. And I know that the brain actually can use a fuel within three hours. So that's why people that have problems with adrenaline, they have to eat throughout the day. The problem is adrenaline actually takes away the appetite. In fact, it can cause nausea and vomiting. And so a lot of people with excess adrenaline don't eat breakfast because they don't have an appetite.
So that would be almost all intermittent fasters now. Right. Because, I mean, this is something I do. I skip breakfast.
Well, yeah, I don't recommend that because you have to remember breakfast is the first meal that somebody's had since the day before. And if they skip breakfast, they're going to be living on adrenaline. Yeah. So I don't recommend intermittent fasting, even though for some people, they can get away with it. What it comes down to is whatever works. But people with excess adrenaline should not be doing intermittent fasting.
I, actually, when I was much younger, was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue and all these other things. And I discovered through just the process of elimination and talking with a lot of people, there were things in my environment that were affecting my metabolism. I fixed my metabolism. I don't have those problems anymore. And I intermittent fast most mornings. Does that mean I fixed a high adrenaline problem or does that mean it means something else? I'm just putting myself in the mindset of someone listening to this going, but I've been intermittent fasting all this time. Should I stop? But I feel better. What's going on?
Well, I hear that, but maybe you've had access to some MCT oil somewhere along the line.
Sure, I made it popular.
You know, MCT oil is part of getting people better because, as you know, it converts into ketones, and ketones are one of the two fuels that the brain uses.
Oh, I love this. All right. How long have you known this?
For quite a while, actually.
Okay, thank you for saying that. MCT oils were like a 1980s bodybuilding thing, and they were sort of largely forgotten, and now they're popular and bulletproof. Coffee, I think, did that. I guess this goes back to my original question, Michael. The knowledge about excess adrenaline, the knowledge that you had about MCT oils going back a long time, you didn't hear about it at the American Academy of Anti Aging Medicine. You didn't hear about it in medical school. You didn't hear about it in dietitian school. How did you hear about it? For people listening who want to hear about things ahead of time the way you did, how did you do that?
I do a lot of reading and whatever. So somewhere down the line, and I don't remember where I read that the two fuels the brain uses are glucose and ketones. And I understood that the reason why the body puts out all this adrenaline is just to raise sugar levels or fuel for the brain. So because of my interest in ketones, basically MCT oil and coconut oil, which can convert into MCT oil, there's not a whole lot of other choices. People can go on a ketogenic diet, but again, that's a tough diet for a lot of people and it cuts no slack.
And also one thing that happens on unending long term keto is you're going to get low insulin levels over time. And low insulin levels are correlated with higher all cause mortality than high insulin levels. So it seems like an unending keto diet is not a good way to keep your adrenal glands healthy. You even get insulin resistance from it.
Well, but remember, part of the fuel that the brain uses is glucose, so that's carbohydrates. And, and actually the best source of glucose comes from vegetables, which are not a big part of a ketogenic diet, but they are a good thing to add for people that have trouble with adrenaline.
Yeah, the whole coconut oil MCT thing is a little bit of a controversy too. The anti aging group that I ran for a long time in Silicon Valley first started talking about this in the late 90s and started doing a lot of work with coconut oil and all. But it wasn't until about three years ago that Dr. Cunane at UC San Diego came out with really definitive research that said, hey, coconut oil raises ketones as much as not eating for eight hours. MCT oils, the broad category of all four kinds of MCT oils essentially doubles that. And then the one MCT oil, caprylic acid or C8, the one that's in brain octane oil, that one raises ketones four times more than coconut oil or than just sleeping for eight hours. And I certainly feel different when I can raise my ketones up like that. But I'm not on a zero carb diet. I'm on a very high vegetable diet, something that wouldn't be possible, it wouldn't be a ketogenic diet if it wasn't for the addition of brain octane. Do you have a number for how many ketones someone needs to deal with adrenaline problems?
