Using Amino Acid Therapy to Balance Neurotransmitters with Dr. Doni | How Humans Heal

Hi, I'm Dr. Donni Wilson, and I'm so glad you're joining me on how humans heal. Today I want to cover the topic of neurotransmitters. I'm wondering for some of you, that might be the first time you've heard or thought of that word.

Whenever I'm learning a new word, I always like to say it. If you're one of those people, you might want to just say the word neurotransmitters. N, E, U, R, O. And then transmitters to me, they are like little messengers in our bodies, really, mostly in our nervous system. But actually the neurotransmitters, a lot of them are actually made in our digestion and then they work in our nervous system. A lot of times we're familiar with the concept of a hormone, right? Like we think of cortisol, which is a hormone, or thyroid hormone, or insulin is also a hormone. And these hormones circulate around our bodies sending certain signals. Signals to certain places, right? Well, same thing with a neurotransmitter. It's like a hormone, but it's in the nervous system and it's sending signals between our nerves and throughout our nervous system. The neurotransmitters affect a bunch of different things, but the four main areas that way I think about it, is the neurotransmitters affect our mood.

When we think of mood, are we in a. Not only are we in a good mood or a bad mood, but are we feeling anxious, are we feeling happy, are we feeling depressed, Are we feeling.

Irritable? So your mood is affected by the neurotransmitters, also your focus. By the way, if those of you haven't met, this is Allie. She's my desk cat. So she's here to help me talk about neurotransmitters today. Right? Ally, how was your mood? Ali?

And then focus, which has to do with.

Like, how well you feel like you can focus on a task or working through a to do list or staying focused to finish something. Sometimes people talk about brain fog or adhd, right? Where we feel like we're not so focused. Maybe we're distracted or it's hard to remember what we were just doing. That's kind of that brain fog. So that's how neurotransmitters affect focus. Neurotransmitters also affect our sleep. So if we're falling asleep easily and staying asleep versus maybe it's hard to fall asleep or you're waking up and feeling anxious or overstimulated, that could be related to your neurotransmitters, as does have to do with your energy levels. I call it your energy level. So it could be if you're feeling tired, then you have low energy, or if you're feeling overstimulated, then you have. Right, like a high energy. So your energy level in general during the day is also influenced by your neurotransmitters. So these are four key things that influence how we feel all the time, right? Our mood, our focus, our sleep and our energy have a lot to do with our experience day to day in our lives. So that means neurotransmitters have a lot to do with our how we feel in our experience. And I think this is why when our neurotransmitters are not optimal, we end up feeling anxious or having a low mood, or depressed or feeling distracted, or not able to complete what we're wanting to complete during the day, or not sleeping well, then we are going to be thinking, I need to do something about this. I want to feel better. My mood, my energy, my sleep feel better. And we end up in our system of medicine, we end up a lot of times then going to a mental health.

Practitioner or psychiatrist. That's where we end up using medications that influence or affect the neurotransmitter levels. These medications we might call psychotropic medications, antidepressants, antianxiety. These are medications that for the most part, the way they work is they work on the receptors in a nerve. You have this neurotransmitter floating along and it has to land in a receptor on the nerve. And when it hits the receptor, that's when it has its influence on our mood, energy, sleep, focus. If there's less of this neurotransmitter floating around, there's less of it to go into the receptor, Less of whatever that influence it's having on our nervous system. Or if we change the receptor, we make the substance stay longer or we prevent it from breaking down. If we change the way the receptor handles the neurotransmitter, it can have an influence on our mood, energy, sleep and focus. You see what I mean? These medications are often working from the receptor. They don't actually increase our body's ability to make more or less of these neurotransmitters. It's really shifting the way our body handles the neurotransmitters at the receptor level is how most of them work.

One of the tricky things with these medications is they can create a dependency, meaning the receptor gets used to that chemical being there. And so if we remove it, then we're going to have withdrawal symptoms. Any of you who've taken a medication that affects these neurotransmitter receptors, and then you try to decrease it or stop it, you might have personal experience with these withdrawal symptoms. It can be very tricky at first. It can be very helpful because now it could help with your mood, sleep, energy and focus. But then sometimes they have side effects and sometimes you want to decrease it. And when you decrease, if you decrease too quickly, you can have withdrawal symptoms because the receptors can readjust. But it takes time. It takes time for the receptor to adjust to changes in the chemicals that influence them. That's why you may have withdrawal symptoms or a dependency on certain medications, such as what we usually think of as antidepressants or benzodiazepines, for example, are also in this category. And many other medications that have to do with helping with mood.

Sometimes they're also used for helping with sleep.

A lot of times we're thinking that the only way to address neurotransmitter imbalances is with these medications. And what I want to really help you to know here today is that that's not the only way to influence your neurotransmitters. That neurotransmitters are made within our bodies. Our body makes our neurotransmitters from amino acids, which comes from the protein that we eat in our diet.

It's pretty amazing when you think about it. We eat protein, whether that's animal protein or plant based protein. Those proteins are broken down into amino acids. Maybe you've heard of some of them, like tryptophan and theanine and.

More tyrosine. There's a bunch of amino acids. Then our body takes these amino acids along with some nutrient precursors and it goes through a biochemical process to make. There's a different process for each neurotransmitter. They each have a different precursor nutrient and they have a different pathway. They go down to create these neurotransmitters in our body. As I mentioned at the beginning, a lot of these neurotransmitters are actually made in our digestive tract. Serotonin, for example, is a well known, pretty well known neurotransmitter. It's a messenger in the nervous system that affects mood, sleep, energy and focus. It's mostly over 90% made in the digestion and I think it's 95% and then other 5% is made in the nervous system. But the serotonin is signaling throughout our body and throughout our nervous system. And so to think, oh, wow, serotonin is made from protein that you eat. Your body, converts it and then uses it in your nervous system. If you have a sense that maybe your serotonin is low, or what I like to do is actually measure it. We can measure the serotonin in urine so we can find out for sure if your serotonin is low. If it's low, then we can, first of all, make sure you're getting enough protein in your diet. I think this is important for everyone to know to emphasize making sure you get enough protein. We usually think of protein related to muscle building, which is true. We also use amino acids to build muscle. But we need to make sure we're getting enough protein in our diet to make our neurotransmitters, too. And it's hard, like, to, like, say you need more serotonin. You could think, well, how do I get more in my diet? That's specifically tryptophan. That's the precursor to serotonin. So you could go, well, let's make sure I get enough. Let's say animal protein, probably, like chicken or turkey would be one of the higher sources of tryptophan. And so you can do that, but there's limits to how much you can eat, right? Like, you can only so much protein in one day. And if you're depleted in a certain neurotransmitter like serotonin, then we need. We might need more of that specific amino acid in order to help your body catch up. I actually think of it like, like I would anemia. We're more used to thinking of anemia when, when a person is deficient in iron, let's say, and they end up having too low of red blood cells. That's what we call anemia. What do we do in that situation? We go, well, we better take some more iron so our body can make more red blood cells so we don't have anemia anymore. I would say the same thing of serotonin. You could have essentially an anemia of serotonin. You have too little. And in order to make more, we need to increase your dose of the precursor nutrients, which would be either tryptophan, but actually when I use supplements and when I use this clinically, I usually use not the tryptophan, but the next step in the process called 5 HTP or 5 Hydroxytryptophan. So what happens in the pathway is the tryptophan turns into 5 HTP and then the 5 HTP turns into serotonin. When I'm using it as a supplement, I tend to use 5 HTP because then it's only one step to get to serotonin.

Because the tryptophan could go down a different pathway. We don't want it to go, we want it to go this way towards serotonin. We can use other nutrients that are involved like vitamin B6 and zinc to help with this process of making serotonin.

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Now.

I'm saying this, but I don't encourage all of you to just guess and run out and grab some 5 HTP because I've been helping patients with this for 20 years to help with balancing their neurotransmitters using amino acid therapy. It's called targeted amino acid therapy and it's a very specific and specialized treatment protocol. It's, it involves a lot of clinical nutrition and the best to get the best results. You really want to have a practitioner guiding you, especially if you have a history of more severe anxiety or depression. Definitely. If you already are taking medications to help with serotonin, I would say don't try to do it on your own because I want you to be successful. And if you just try and guess on your own, you're less likely to actually get the benefit from it because we, it's going to work way better if we can do a urine test even if you're on a medication. Let's see what your levels are. See where we're starting from. Many times when you're on even an antidepressant that's an SSRI or ssnri, you can still have low serotonin levels because, again, the medication doesn't necessarily raise the neurotransmitter level. It just adjusts and manipulates the receptor.

So we always want to test and see what your levels are first. Definitely, if you're taking a medication, you would not want to do this on your own because there is such a thing as too much serotonin. And you wouldn't want to just guess and take five HTP and then end up with side effects from having too much. So it's better to work with someone like me, do measuring and do your dosing so that you can be most effective and efficient about helping your body rebalance your neurotransmitters. But what I want to emphasize is that it's definitely possible. I see. I saw it for myself. I had low serotonin levels at one point and I was able to get my levels back to optimal. And I've seen it since then in thousands of patients where we can get their serotonin levels back to optimal. And not just serotonin. We're talking about all the neurotransmitters. So there's also gaba, and GABA is an serotonin and GABA are both calming neurotransmitters. They're on the calming side. When it comes to neurotransmitters, we want a balance of calming and stimulating. So we have serotonin and GABA that are calming neurotransmitters. And on the other side, we have dopamine and adrenaline, for example, as well as glutamate that are more stimulating neurotransmitters. So if you think about our nervous system in terms of mood and energy and sleep and focus, we want to have a balance of calming and stimulating, right? We need to be. During the day, we need to, to be awake and having our brain working and our thoughts happening. But we don't. We don't want to be overstimulated. We don't want to. And if we have too little calming or if we have too little stimulating. You see, there's a lot of different possible variations. It may be that you have low serotonin and low gaba, or it might be you have maybe you have plenty of serotonin and gaba, but you have too much adrenaline or not enough dopamine, right? So all of these possible variations exist, and it doesn't if you're just going to guess. Like even if we just guess on a certain medication and just address the serotonin we might be missing all the other neurotransmitters that need attention. Or even if you just take 5 HTP, you might not realize, oh, my gosh, I also needed to support GABA or I also needed to support my dopamine. I really encourage you instead of just guessing and shooting in the dark. When there's urine testing that's well established, it's existed for, I think, at least 40 years. They use it in research all the time. And it's not become standard of care. It's a specialty test, but it's a urine test you can do at home. Even if we just measure the neurotransmitters, it's like a $280 test. It's not like it's $2,000. I usually always recommend measuring neurotransmitters along with measuring cortisol because cortisol is our main stress hormone and cortisol influences all the neurotransmitters. When people say to me, well, how did my neurotransmitters get out of balance? How come I have too little of one and too much of another? How did that happen? It happened because you're a human and you are exposed to stress like all humans. Humans, we have stress, whether it's from work, from relationships, from being a parent, from being from having a parent, from just being human, there's going to be loss, there's going to be stress. That happens. And whenever we are exposed to stresses of various types, even from toxins, from injuries, from infections, all of these different things we're exposed to as humans are going to influence our body's neurotransmitter levels. See, what happens is when we're under stress, our body automatically tries to help us out with stress. So it's going to automatically make more adrenaline. But does that mean it's going to get stuck in making way too much adrenaline all the time, or is it going to get depleted in adrenaline because you're under stress and you use up your resources and you end up getting depleted? Same thing with the serotonin. And this is where also some genetics come into play. We all metabolize our neurotransmitters at a different rate based on our genetics and our environmental stress exposure. One person might use their serotonin more slowly. Their serotonin lasts longer even if they're under stress. Another person burns through their serotonin fast. As soon as stress comes along, they use up their serotonin really fast. That's my case. I use up my serotonin super fast. Then I know based on my genetics and my stress exposure, I'm going to have to give myself more 5 HTP in order to keep up with maintaining my serotonin levels when I'm stressed. Now, if my stress level decreases, which is always a beautiful, wonderful thing we can aim for, is to help our bodies be less stressed. But as our stress is minimized and we help our bodies recovering from stress, then maybe I'm not going to burn through my serotonin so fast. I'm going to be able to maintain at an optimal level. You're going to know that based on your mood, your energy, your sleep and your focus. And you go, oh, how well am I maintaining my serotonin levels based on my current state? How much extra 5 HTP do I need to maintain? Same thing with the GABA. GABA I think of as our stress buffer. It's our buffer. It's our cushion between me and stress. There's a cushion almost like shocks on your car. And if you have enough gaba, you have this buffer between you and the stress. If you are starting to run low on gaba, your body is not keeping up with making enough. Maybe it's because there's digestive issues, maybe imbalanced gut bacteria because they influence your GABA production. Maybe it's from not enough amino acids and protein in your diet. Maybe it's just from having too much stress and using it all up for whatever. Any of those reasons GABA goes down now, you're going to feel like you're driving a car and you're going to feel every bump in the road without any, you know, if you don't have any shocks, it's going to be a very bumpy road. So you're going to be more irritable, more anxious, difficult to sleep, hard to focus. Right. So some of these same symptoms happen from different variations. It would be hard to guess. It's hard. Even with all my experience and observing patients for all this time, it's hard for me to guess. I don't even like to guess whether what's going on with your neurotransmitters because the symptoms can look very similar with very different scenarios. I'd much rather measure so I can see exactly where's your gaba? Okay, your GABA low. Let's start supporting it with those precursor nutrients like theanine. And we can use actual GABA in a supplement form to help get your GABA levels back on track again. We can also, if you have low dopamine, we can support the dopamine with that precursor nutrient, which is called tyrosine. Now, what I found, and this is again over helping thousands of patients, I started to see the patterns and I started to see what works for people. The thing is that it's important to follow a very.

System, a systematic sequence when it comes to helping with these neurotransmitters. Because even if we happen to see that you have, let's say you have low serotonin, gaba, dopamine, everything's low. So then we're like, okay, let's just start putting all these amino acids in and raise the levels up fast, right? That's tempting because we're always as humans wanting to do everything faster, better, sooner. And so we're like, let's just dive in. But in reality, that actually could make you feel worse. Because remember, it's all about a balance of calming and stimulating. And if you have too little stimulating and you have too little calming. But if you just dive in with stimulating, let's say you just start. I mean, this would be the case even with just drinking more caffeine, because caffeine raises your adrenaline levels, or taking tyrosine. Say you start taking a bunch of tyrosine, then you're going to have too much stimulating and not enough calming, and you're going to likely feel more anxious or more heart racing or more sleep disruption. So that's not the right way to do it. You don't want to dive in with stimulating. So my rule is always we have to start with calming first. If you start with calming first, you are going to avoid that whole scenario. You are going to make sure your body has enough calming. And what I talk about in my new book, the book is called Master your Stress Reset yout Health. I talk about how the first phase of stress recovery is to get out of stress mode. We have to calm down first. So we want to support the calming neurotransmitters. We can support gaba, we can support serotonin, we can do activities that help calm your body and get and help manage your cortisol too. If the cortisol is too high, we need to bring everything out of stress mode. Once everything calms and we get out of stress mode, we can move on to phase two, which is when we can bring in some more stimulating support if you need it. If you have low adrenaline, low dopamine, this is the time to support those levels. Not when you're in stress mode. We got to get you out of stress mode first. Then we can Rebalance what got out of balance like adrenaline and dopamine, and we can gradually raise these levels. And now everything's coming back to more optimal level. And then phase three is all about how to maintain that. How do you maintain optimal neurotransmitter levels as well as everything else in your body? How do we maintain optimal over time? And that's what's called resiliency. We want to create resiliency to stress. How do we make it so that even if whatever stress comes along, your neurotransmitters levels can stay where you want them to be, where you can have your optimal mood, energy, sleep, and focus? Right? That's what you want. You want to have this optimal serotonin, gaba, dopamine, adrenaline. You want that working for you. And then if it starts to go a little bit off track, you notice right away you're like, oh, my gosh, it just went whack off track. Now I know what to do, because now you've learned your body patterns. For me, I would know, oh, I must need more 5 HTP, because I know my serotonin tends to dip when I'm under stress, or I know my adrenaline starts to dip when I'm under stress. So I'm going to support that. Then you know what little tweaks you can make to maintain at this optimal level. And that's phase three resiliency. So I just really want you all to know this is possible, that neurotransmitters are made in your body from nutrients you get from your food. So, and we can measure them in urine. We can do this test, we can see where you are, and then we can go through this three step three phase process to help rebalance your neurotransmitters. Along the way, you end up learning about what your body needs to maintain over time. By doing that, you can then be improving your mood, energy, sleep, and focus just by understanding what nutrients your body needs to maintain optimal neurotransmitter levels. Okay. I hope that helps you guys so much and inspires you and helps you know that you have so much more control over the way you, you feel than you realized and that you can ask me for help along the way. I help patients through my online programs to help rebalance their neurotransmitters. And also by working with me one on one, I can guide you every step of the way, no matter where you're starting from. Sometimes people are like, oh, my gosh, I've been feeling awful for so long. Can you even help. And I've helped patients who've been having severe symptoms for a long time. It just we are going to need to make sure you have enough support, the right support. And sometimes we need to be connecting with each other every step of the way. So I can really guide you and teach you. But remember, neuroplasticity is a thing we can create new neural pathways. That's what neuroplasticity means. When we give our body different signaling, it can create new pathways for our nervous system. So I want you to know there's hope. There's possibility for healing your nervous system. There's possibility for shifting your experience of your mood, energy, sleep and focus. It doesn't mean there's something's wrong with you. It doesn't mean that there's something broken. It doesn't mean that it's impossible. It's possible. And it can be healed and it can be rebalanced and optimized. And I say this from over 22 years experience of helping myself and patients to do this. So if you have questions, please reach out to me. I'm going to be sharing more in blog posts about the neurotransmitters, including serotonin. And I'm going to be sharing. There's a lot more in my new book. So if this is intriguing to you and you want to get started, then definitely go order. Master your stress, reset your health, because I lay it all out for you in there. And then if you need more help, I'm here for you. Then you can always reach out and I'll guide you from there. Thanks so much for joining me and I look forward to catching you next time.

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