Are There Better Fixes for ADHD, Brain Fog? Peptides, Supplements & Biohacks

If your brain used to work and now you can't finish a task, let alone a thought, you're not broken, but you're definitely not alone. It might be ADHD, but it might also be that something in your biology has just shifted and nobody ever taught you how to fix it. I'm a board-certified primary care doctor, and I see this every day. People come to me desperate for better focus, so I've built a master guide on what actually drives it and things that you can implement to fix it. So let's start with a common question. Do I have ADHD or am I just overwhelmed and overstimulated? ADHD is real, and for some people it's debilitating. But I'm also gonna be honest with you. Modern life basically mimics ADHD. Our brains were not designed for 200 notifications a day. We weren't meant to switch tasks every 30 seconds, let alone get addicted doing it. So let's just take a few seconds here to explain how you focus. It'll be painless, I promise. We're gonna talk about dopamine and norepinephrine, neurotransmitters in your brain. Now, most people think of dopamine as a reward or pleasure chemical, but in reality, dopamine is drive. It tells your brain, this matters, stay with it, chase it, focus. In fact, research shows that low dopamine in the prefrontal cortex, which is here in the brain, is a hallmark of ADHD. And the prefrontal cortex is the center of your executive functions, which includes working memory, suppressing irrelevant stimuli or distractions, and maintaining focus over time. And these functions are accomplished with a balance of dopamine and norepinephrine. They specifically modulate the neural signal-to-noise ratio. It's when you need to focus on something. Basically, dopamine strengthens the signal, the thing that you need to focus on, and norepinephrine reduces the noise. It helps your brain suppress distractions. And you need both working in the right amounts. Okay, I hope that was painless. Since we all know we love jumping from tab to tab, let's just go ahead and switch gears again and talk about hormones. So you're not imagining it. Hormones do control your ability to focus. Let's walk through the big 3. Let's start with estrogen, the cognitive accelerator. I'm constantly seeing women needing help with menopause for 2 main reasons. One, the weight gain shift, which is another subject for another video. And 2, the brain fog. Okay, simply put, when estrogen is optimized, your brain feels fast, sharp, connected. But when estrogen drops, hello brain fog, distractibility, and short-term memory issues. You see, estrogen literally functions in the brain to increase dopamine sensitivity, and when it drops, you get brain fog and memory lapses because you're not able to respond to that dopamine anymore. All right, testosterone, the drive and initiation hormone. I check this constantly in men and women. You see, testosterone has an essential upstream job involved in the initial production and release of dopamine, making it the foundational chemical for motivation and mental energy. Low T leads to overall low dopamine tone, which leads to apathy and low drive. And last but not least, progesterone, the calming hormone. See, progesterone is like nature's Valium. It hits GABA receptors in your brain, which calms and winds you down at night and can help you fall and stay asleep. And so if you're anxious and overstimulated and awake at 3 AM every single night, your focus will be trash. All right, I hope you're learning something. Let's get to the fun stuff now. Let's create a biology-first toolkit for focus. So if you don't want medications or hormones, or you want to optimize beyond them, now that we've talked about dopamine, norepinephrine, and hormones, this is where we move into tools that actually support those systems. And listen, I'm not telling you to buy everything I'm about to mention. This is not a shopping list. It's just me saying that focus is a biological process. Let's actually know and support the biology. So now let's talk about mitochondrial energy because focus is metabolically expensive. Your brain is 2% of your body weight, but it eats up to 20 to 25% of your energy. So if your mitochondria are struggling, you will feel it as brain fog, distractibility, and mental fatigue. So let's talk about how we can support that. Okay. A supplement that a lot of people take to enhance clarity and focus is NAD+. Or its oral precursors NMN or NR. But you can inject it or get an NAD IV. It's just that you have to kind of keep the levels constantly up. NAD is basically the currency your cells use to make energy and repair damage. It charges up your mitochondria so they can keep energy production running. When NAD is low, which happens with age, stress, poor sleep, inflammation, your brain feels slow. And if you want to get really cool with something else, look into the research on methylene blue. This is one of my favorite non-medication ways to increase cognitive energy. We touched on the fact that mitochondria are responsible for making your energy and thus your ability to focus, and they do this by using an internal assembly line called the electron transport chain. It lives on the inner mitochondrial membrane, and the long and short of it is that electrons get passed down along this chain in order to produce energy in every cell that you have. Now, this assembly line is crucial, and there's actually a lot of different pieces to it, which makes things really complicated. Any one of these pieces along the line can kind of get messed up or jammed up depending on lifestyle factors, nutrient deficiencies, etc. Methylene blue can actually act like an emergency shuttle bus inside the mitochondria. It quickly picks up the electrons that are stuck in like a traffic jam in the mitochondria and drives them past the damaged pieces, kind of like an ambulance just bypassing all of traffic. And this just ensures that your mitochondria can run smoother and make the energy that's needed to fuel focus. And I've said this before, but don't take methylene blue if you're on antidepressants, and don't take it if you have something called G6PD deficiency. Moving on to creatine. Creatine is an energy buffer. It helps store the phosphate you need in order to make ATP. It's the P in ATP. It gives your neurons a quick access reserve to pull from during hard cognitive work. It also does that for muscular energy. That's why it's so popular for taking before a workout. There are actual clinical trials showing improved working memory, processing speed, and resistance to fatigue, especially when you're sleep deprived, by taking creatine, which is really cool. Okay, last of the supplements I'll give you today is L-theanine. L-theanine increases alpha brainwaves, which are what you need for calm attention. It boosts GABA just enough in the brain to smooth out anxiety and reduces distractibility without sedating you. All right, now let's talk about some fun stuff. Let's talk about peptides. And I have to let you know that for now, the things I'm about to talk about are research compounds only. They're not approved for human use. Feel free to put a comment in if you think they should be. And just please remember, this is not meant to be medical advice from me to you. This is literally just me A random doctor on the internet talking about science. Just really cool science. All right, this one I'm excited about. Dihexa. I've talked about dihexa in a video about dementia. Please watch that if you haven't. Dihexa is one of the most intriguing and frankly most powerful research peptides out there. But let me be clear, this one may never be studied in humans because it activates something called the hepatocyte growth factor 2 c-Met pathway, which is one of the most potent synaptogenesis signals in the brain, but it's also heavily upregulated in cancer cells. So you see why the potential of studying it, let alone approving it for human use, is kind of low. But anyway, when this HGF to c-Met pathway is activated, the brain ramps up the formation of new synapses, especially in the prefrontal cortex. But okay, if dihexa kind of scared you a little bit, this next one's potentially safer. Actually, in Russia where it's approved for human use, it's been shown to be pretty safe. It's just not approved here where I live in the good old US of A. Now I'm talking about Semax. Semax is a peptide that significantly increases something called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which is the brain's primary growth and repair signal. If dopamine is the ignition and norepinephrine is the spotlight, BDNF is like the technician keeping the whole system alive. By increasing BDNF specifically in the prefrontal cortex, C-Max enhances the circuitry that allows you to stay on track, ignore distractions, and actually finish what you start. And it does this all without causing overstimulation, which is something that people are concerned about when they take things like Adderall and Ritalin. Okay, this next one is one of my favorites, and you'll hear me talk about it a lot because I really do love it, and it's also considered pretty safe. I'm talking about MOTS-c, the metabolic booster. MOTS-c is a mitochondrial-derived peptide, meaning that you make it naturally in your mitochondria, which makes it unique for our purposes today because instead of working on neurotransmitters, it works on the cellular energy system that powers your entire brain and body. It activates something called AMPK, which is like a master regulator of metabolic efficiency. Exercising activates AMPK. Fasting activates AMPK, but so does MOTS-c. And the activation of AMPK pushes cells into a more energy-efficient mode, supporting the formation of new mitochondria. By doing this, it can improve how neurons make and use fuel. It's not a stimulant. It's not a wakefulness drug. It's an energy-stabilizing compound. At least that's what the research in animals show. And it also has been shown to improve endurance, which is a talk for another video. Oh wait, I made that video. Feel free to look for that. I'll link it in the description. Now you might be thinking, well, if MOTS-c is considered safe, then why isn't it approved? And basically it lacks the formal studies saying that it's safe, but I'll just say this. Because MOTS-c powerfully modulates glucose utilization and insulin sensitivity by activating that AMPK pathway, it carries a theoretical risk of metabolic interference. Particularly in people with diabetes or pre-existing blood sugar conditions. So maybe we should just push for more doctors to understand this so that they can know, you know, if their patients are asking for theoretical risk about using the peptide. Moving on, Selinc. This is an interesting peptide because it works on the same inhibitory systems that benzodiazepines like Xanax and Valium use. But it doesn't give the sedation and the memory issues or the addiction potential that benzos give you. It acts as a positive modulator of the GABA-A receptor, meaning that it gently boosts the brain's natural calming signal instead of hijacking it the way that benzos do. And this results in a calm, reduced overactivation of the brain without the brain fog or the rebound anxiety. And this is why Solanque could potentially fit so beautifully into a focus protocol. You know, if someone's attention is breaking because of anxiety, anxiety or internal noise or tension, Selinc could be very useful. Selinc is also not approved for general human use in the Western markets. It's basically just also not been through the phase 3 clinical trials and regulatory shenanigans that the FDA needs, despite its established use in countries like Russia with little to mild side effects. So you can see how together these compounds and peptides support kind of Different layers of cognitive function. DiHEXA could potentially build new neural connections. C-Max boosts brain-derived neurotrophic factor to reinforce them. MOTS-c can fuel the system with good clean mitochondrial energy. And Selinc can calm down the noise in the brain. Oh, I just did a peptide stacking video without even realizing it. Oops. All right, to finish off this video, I'm just going to give you a couple of behavioral things that you can chew on if you're not into all that peptide and supplement stuff. Let's go with some strategies that cost nothing and actually can help. The first one I'll talk about is something called body doubling. I don't really like this one. It's interesting to me because I'm somebody who needs to be alone in order to focus. But apparently, when someone else is in the room with you, even just quietly sitting there, your brain automatically increases activity in the prefrontal cortex. And for some people, this is great because it can help you focus. It's like borrowing someone else's executive function to overcome inertia. It helps you start and stay focused. This is why things like study groups are very helpful. For me, it's like sensory overload. I have to be alone. But this next one is something that I actually really like. It's called timeboxing. Timeboxing is a method where you use specific blocks of predetermined time, like 10, 20, 30, or 40 minutes, to work on a single task with no expectation of actually finishing the task. But if you do, it's great, but you're only working on that one thing for that predetermined amount of time. I actually did this very thing to get through med school, and I didn't even know it had a name for it, but it helped tremendously. But by limiting the work to a defined window, your brain feels less overwhelmed and pressured to get everything done, and it's more willing to go ahead and start the task. That clear timing of a beginning and an end create this structure that boosts dopamine and actually makes the task feel doable. Let's move on to cold exposure. This is basically my favorite thing ever. If you want a natural dopamine and norepinephrine spike, this is it. A cold plunge or a cold shower increases dopamine and norepinephrine a lot, and it keeps them elevated for hours. I kid you not, I cold plunge almost every morning, and the days that I don't, I can literally feel the lack of motivation on my way to work. I mean, this is possibly the closest thing to a natural legal stimulant that we have. The effect on your focus is very real. So there you have it. If you've been beating yourself up because you can't focus, please stop. This isn't a character flaw, it's biology. And when you support the brain, the mitochondria, your hormones, the dopamine system, focus becomes something you can do again. I'm Dr. Ashley Frazee. I have a direct primary care clinic in Mesa, Arizona, where my patients and I basically have the time to sit down and talk about things that really matter to them without the burden of insurance. Because things like this just keep popping up. And while health insurance may pay for your Adderall, there's just a lot more to it. You guys have a great day.