Dr. Nicole Cain explains how epinephrine and norepinephrine affect mood and physical symptoms. High adrenaline causes anxiety and racing thoughts; low adrenaline brings fatigue and depression. You can support balance through tyrosine-rich foods, rhodiola, and lifestyle changes like meditation, though she recommends testing and working with a clinician before supplementing.
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Today you're going to learn about epinephrine and norepinephrine and how it impacts your mood. Hi, I'm Dr. Nicole Cain, and my passion is to help you turn the page on your anxiety. And instead of going for the pill for an ill model, let's put a comma at the end of your sentence and figure out how to get your life back safely, effectively and naturally. Today we're going to talk about epinephrine and norepinephrine. The other name for epi andorapine are adrenaline. These are stress hormones that your body releases under periods of high stress, whether it's good stress or bad stress. Whether your body is getting ramped up because of a wedding or a roller coaster ride, or fear on an airplane or something else dangerous happening, your body produces a very similar cascade of chemicals to your brain. It may feel very different. And the emotional ties that you attach to these different things could feel very vast and different, depending on what they are. But to your brain, a tiger is a tiger is a tiger. When the body is under stress, it releases a cascade of stress hormones, among which are norepinephrine and epinephrine, which we're going to call adrenaline today. So it does this. And when these neurotransmitters are really elevated, it can cause symptoms of anxiety, palpitations or trembling of the heart, brain fog, forgetfulness, high blood pressure, high blood sugar, and so much more. They can also go too low. And so if you don't have enough adrenaline, you can feel tired, lethargic, you may feel completely unmotivated, you may have a hard time with sleep, and you could have high blood sugar or low blood sugar, depending on how these levels are interacting with your other neurotransmitters. Medical issues can also lead to either too high or too low amounts of adrenaline in your system. And so we want to do appropriate and adequate testing to figure out if this is out of balance and to figure out why your adrenaline may be out of bounds. But the good news is that you can start to learn what it feels like when your body is in a state of high adrenaline or in a state of low adrenaline. And there are things that you can do about it which I'm going to share with you today right now. The first thing is, if you have insufficient amounts of adrenaline, sometimes the body may respond to make more cortisol to try to compensate for that. So when you need to get up and go and when you need to do things and mount that stress response, which can be helpful and if you don't have enough adrenaline, your body may make cortisol to try to compensate for that, to try to get you that get up and go. But there are things that you can actually do to help your body mount that response. The first is to consume foods that are high in tyrosine. Tyrosine is a precursor to adrenaline. Tyrosine is a precursor to supporting epinephrine and norepinephrine levels. So foods that have tyrosine, number one is legumes, number two is chicken. And then fish. Fish is such an awesome way to do this because fish as a mainstay of the Mediterranean diet is so good for your brain and it's anti inflammatory. It's just awesome. Also, walnuts, apples, bananas, beets, avocados, cheese and licorice root. And believe it or not, vanilla can actually increase tyrosine. And by increasing tyrosine, you're going to increase your dopamine and therefore increase your epinephrine and norepinephrine. Unless of course, you have metabolic changes that are impacting how you're processing these things. If you have low epinephrine and norepinephrine and you would rather go the botanical route, there are plants that are really good for this. My favorite is rhodiola. But you could also try hypericum and even capsicum, which is cayenne. So if you feel like you have that low ability, you don't have an epinephrine and you don't have norepinephrine. My first recommendation would be to figure out what your symptoms are and then ask your doctor if he can or she can actually test your metabolic byproducts. A couple of tests that do that would be the oat test or organic acid test. Or if you want to include sex hormones into that, then doing the Dutch test is my mainstay. My favorite. Go to formula. If you don't have enough epinephrine or adrenaline is rhodiola tincture. Three squeezes in the morning. And then have some walnuts and apples as snacks, and then maybe even some tyrosine, like 500 milligrams at bedtime. But of course, talk with your doctor and find out if this is actually what your experience is. If you have too high epinephrine and norepinephrine, you might find that you feel frazzled and anxious and you have insomnia and you have a really difficult time focusing because your brain is starting all over the place. Does anybody here resonate with that? You may deal with High blood pressure, high blood sugar, your heart is racing, your nerves are trembling, and your muscles are quivering. If you're dealing with that, then it's likely that you have high amounts of stress hormone. And so mindfulness and meditation and anything that can get your stress down is going to be a mainstay to help you put that comma at the end of your sentence. You also want to support those pathways, so make sure that you're getting in enough magnesium and zinc and B vitamins and vitamin C and vitamin D. Three supplements that you could also consider are phosphatidylserine, cordyceps, mushrooms, GABA supplementation and rescue remedy. Bach flower. My favorite go to formula would be a multivitamin with a B complex and minerals every single morning, mindfulness every single day before you go to bed, and then phosphatidylserine at bedtime, and then rescue remedy throughout the day as needed for stress. But of course, always talk to your doctor first, look at your symptoms, get that good clinical picture, and then do the appropriate testing. The really important thing I do want to mention is that we can't actually test monoamines in the periphery. That was a mouthful, right? So when your brain and your central nervous system, they produce neurotransmitters, they produce things like adrenaline, or they produce serotonin and dopamine, and then your adrenals are producing adrenaline. And so when you're doing these kinds of tests, you want to take into consideration of what you're actually testing. So we can test adrenaline with a simple urine test or a blood draw, but in order to figure out what's happening with your dopamine and serotonin levels, we have to actually do byproduct testing. And the metaphor for that is if you imagine driving your forward focus into a building in order for us to see you have a forward focus. And we can't do that. If something's made in your brain, we can't pull it out unless we do a spinal tap or something like that that you don't want to do. It's very invasive, right? But we can take pieces off of the Ford Focus and bring those into the office building, and then we can get data about, okay, so I have high adrenaline, but I have really low dopamine, or I have really high dopamine and high adrenaline. So you want to look at the relationship of all of those together. So if you have too high adrenaline, if you have too low adrenaline, you want to follow it up with testing, and then you want to treat the cause with meditation and diet and super wonderful supplementation that will actually help you get the answers instead of just a pill for a nil. So this has been Dr. Nicole Cain. If you have any other questions, leave a message in the comments. Send us a DM to learn more about the cool stuff that we're offering, scroll through this Facebook page or you can also go to our website www.drnicolecane.com. i look forward to seeing you guys later. Take.
