Unlocking Better Sleep and Understanding the Power of GABA

Trozy was created to be a comprehensive sleep solution, really leveraging the GABA system that we've been talking about. So it has the hanokayol that we were talking about before. It has the agarin that we were talking about before as well. Agarin from the psychedelic mushroom, the Amanita. Very, very low doses. No psychedelic experience, just long acting. GABA support throughout your whole evening has cbd. It has CBN in it as well. It also has adenosine. So adenosine is not acting on the GABA system. It's working on the adenosine receptors in the brain. And you were mentioning caffeine earlier. So this is for your people that like to drink coffee all day long, but it can script their sleep. Having some adenosine before you go to bed can really help with that unbinding of the caffeine to the receptor and getting adenosine to allow it to bind.

All right, folks, so several years ago, I had this super smart guy write an article for BenGreenfieldLife.com about how to biohack your hyperbaric experience. Being like, if you do a hyperbaric chamber, how to use things like methylene blue and nitric oxide precursors and all sorts of crazy stuff to accelerate the healing or the recovery that might happen inside one of those chambers. The guy who wrote that article was actually my guest or is my guest on today's show, Dr. Scott Scherer. And Scott's interesting because he is a specialist in hyperbaric oxygen therapy. But he also is the founder of Health Optimization Medicine and practice, which is a nonprofit education company that trains doctors about how to treat the root cause of health. He also has this kind of cool sidearm of that called troscriptions. Troscriptions basically makes these teeny tiny things that you dissolve under your mouth. You may have seen the biohackers who have been accused of having smurf mouth that's all blue. Well, that's because one of the things that Scott makes is these little blue methylene blue trochees. But I actually don't want to talk with you that much about methylene blue today, Scott, because you've done that before. Yeah, we've done that before. We've kicked that horse exhausted. Yeah. Come on.

Nothing else.

Exactly. Yeah. So actually, it's a pretty fascinating molecule, but.

No, it is.

I digress. So gaba, though, is what I'm interested in. Gaba.

I'll say it. So you don't have to. Gamma amino butyric acid. Gaba the reason is not only because you were showing me some of the things you could put in these under the tongue troches to increase the levels of this inhibitory neurotransmitter, but you also, I think it was via an emo, were filling me in on a bunch of stuff I didn't even know about gaba. So I kind of stopped you and I was like, dude, let's just do a podcast about this. So all things gaba, which I think everybody should know about, this neurotransmitter, because it's super important, is the topic of today's show. So, Scott, welcome, man.

Well, thanks for having me, Ben. It's good to be on with you as you walk and I sit, and you're making me feel jealous that you're walking while I sit, but I think you do that all the time.

Anybody who watches the video version of this podcast knows that I move. As a matter of fact, I recorded a podcast last night about inactivity and about the very small contractions that need to take place, particularly in the calf and soleus upregulate lipoprotein lipase, which basically burns down triglycerides. So even just a very slow conversational pace walk, I find for me when I'm podcasting is not only a great way to spark metabolism, but I feel like I think better and, and I focus better when I'm moving just a little bit while I'm talking to someone. And I almost have this. Well, I mean, they've actually looked into this. You see increased levels of brain derived neurotrophic factors. So there's a little bit of neurogenesis going on and kind of a mental effect of the so called, you know, walking university, walking, talking chats. I think everybody should do this.

Yeah, I agree, I agree. I need to get one from my house when I'm not podcasting in my bedroom, maybe.

So just imagine all the people in Joe Rogan's podcasting studio walking while smoking marijuana and, you know, and watching whiskey ufc. It'd be a party. So. So gaba, man.

What.

What is gaba? Describe that to people.

Yeah, so you gave us the. The technical term, excuse me, the chemical name just now. The gamma aminobutyric acid. And GABA is the neurotransmitter that nobody knows about, but it's probably one of the most important. I mean, we all know about serotonin, we all know about dopamine and norepinephrine. Like, these are all the cool neurotransmitters. That everybody cares about because that's what you hear about on the news. Everybody's got dopamine problems because they're scrolling on their phones and everybody's got concentration issues. They can't concentrate on something for more than two and a half seconds. But GABA is what puts the brakes on neurotransmission, and it actually entails about 20% of the brain's entire neurotransmission. So it's a significant amount of. Of neurotransmission. And what the brakes means is it puts the brakes or it calms down the firing of your neurons, and it is throughout your whole brain. If you don't fire, you're going to calm down, you're going to feel a significant difference if you are in excitatory state. And so you have GABA around. And GABA is always being balanced by an excitatory neurotransmitter called glutamate. Glutamate and GABA make up in total, about 80% of your brain's neurotransmission. So this is a huge amount. And so GABA is made from glutamate. So glutamate actually gets converted in the brain and into gaba. But so many of us these days, Ben, are, are GABA deficient. And there are tons of symptoms which I can just kind of rattle off for people just so they can get kind of an understanding. But so top symptoms of GABA deficiency from a mental health perspective are anxiety, fear, depression, migraines, short temper, phobias, impulsiveness, disorganization, addictions, even schizophrenia and OCD have been associated with GABA deficiency. And systemic symptoms like ibs, diarrhea, hypertension, tinnitus, chronic pain, allergies, frequent urination, flushing, bloating, sweating, salt cravings, and muscle tension are the ones that we typically think about when you're thinking about GABA deficiency. But this is not. Obviously everybody that has these symptoms doesn't necessarily have GABA deficiency. But it's not on the radar for any clinicians that I really know. And it's not on the radar really for people when they're having these kinds of symptoms like they're depressed because they're GABA deficient. Oh, that's not what my doctor told me. They told me to take an ssri. Right. So we have all of these potential symptoms and conditions that may be related to GABA being deficient in the brain, because those brakes aren't working well.

Now, is there a way to test for this? Because for a while there were Some urinary neurotransmitter tests that I was aware of, like the Dutch complete, for example, which is a great test for hormones, will test for neurotransmitters. But I've heard many times, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, that the urinary neurotransmitter levels don't really tell you what's going on in the brain. Is that true?

Absolutely true, yeah. So they can only be corollary, and that's a significant problem because you really can't get a good sense of what's happening in the brain looking at, like an organic acid level of your neurotransmitters. Now, this is why it's really important to have a clinical history when you're talking to somebody and understanding in the context of that what neurotransmitter levels may be correlated to from a brain perspective, but it's still just a correlation.

So besides symptoms, are there any other things you could test to see if you could be GABA deficient, like any minerals or vitamins or hormones or anything like that?

Yeah, exactly. So what you can do is look at what actually turns into glutamate in the brain. So what you do is you start off with the amino acid that typically is the one that's going to get converted into glutamate, and then glutamate getting converted to gaba, which is glutamine. So glutamine is amino acid that you can measure. You can measure it in urine. You can also measure it in your plasma. And so you can measure your plasma glutamine levels to get a sense if you have enough precursor to make enough GABA in the brain. GABA precursors include the most important amino acid in this sort of whole process is glutamine. So glutamine is an amino acid we can get from food sources. As many of us know, glutamine gets converted into GABA via glutamate. So glutamate then gets converted to GABA, but it requires vitamin B6 and it requires magnesium to do that. So you can measure glutamine levels, you can measure glutamate levels, you can measure vitamin B6 levels, you can measure magnesium levels. So all these are extremely important in the whole process of making your GABA.

Okay, so if I'm deficient in vitamin B6 and magnesium and glutamine, it could be a clue that I'm GABA deficient. Especially if you pair that with some of the symptoms that you talked about earlier, this kind of reminds me of like glutathione. Right. You could supplement with glutathione, but also including sulfur rich foods like say eggs or whey protein, or having the amino acid cysteine, or taking selenium can all help with your body's own glutathione production. Sounds like it's kind of similar with gaba.

Yeah, absolutely. And the thing about to think about too is that glutamine is one of our most important amino acids too. It's not just used to make gaba, it's also the main fuel of your enterocytes in your small bowel. So if you have a leaky gut, if you have small bowel overgrowth, if you have small intestinal bowel bacterial overgrowth, excuse me, then you're going to also have a hard time utilizing that glutamine in another way to make it into glutamate and then to make it into gaba. So you really do want to be thinking about the precursors here. And when we do testing and health optimization medicine, and I'm one of the co founders of that company, Dr. Ted Achicosa is actually the pioneer over there. But when we think about doing health optimization testing, we are looking at plasma amino acid levels and glutamine levels as a marker along with obviously B6 and magnesium. But what I think is important for people to remember is that this should be on your radar. It's. But it's not because we're more focused on dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin. We're forgetting that the brakes are as or more important than the actual.

Drive of the brain itself and how that's causing the brain to fire as opposed to calm down.

Okay. And hopefully I'm not getting too into the weeds here, but the idea of gaba, like a lot of neurotransmitters, is I'm assuming it's interacting with the cell receptor in some fashion. And based on that.

Let'S say I had enough gaba. Are there things that could block that receptor, block GABA from working properly? With caffeine, for example, one of the ways it works is it blocks adenosine, which is a molecule that increases sleep drive from making you feel sleepy, because caffeine is almost like a receptor blocker or taking up the space in that sense. Are there things like that with GABA too?

Yeah. So GABA has different receptors in the brain. It has, there's called the GABA A receptor and the GABA B receptor and caffeine is actually a well known desensitizer of the GABA receptor. So it desensitizes. Desensitizes the, the ability of GABA to bind to its receptor and to cause its function. So what GABA will typically do when it binds to the GABA A receptor, these GABA A receptors are all over the brain. The GABA A receptor will open when GABA actually binds to the receptor. And when it opens, it's actually a chloride channel. The chloride channel opens. Chloride goes into the postsynaptic neurotransmitter. Neurotransmitter. Postsynaptic neuron. And as a result of that, it blocks the transmission of the signal going forward. So if you have things that are going to desensitize the GABA receptor hypothetically, or antagonize that receptor itself, there's other things that we can talk about that do this that'll also decrease the ability for GABA to bind to its receptor on the actual the site and then decrease the ability for it to actually get that chloride channel to open and to stop firing.

Yeah. With the biggest issue with that being that if you're keeping an inhibitory neurotransmitter from being active, you're going to reduce your ability to be able to sleep and relax, which is obviously a problem for a lot of people. What else besides caffeine could do that?

Yes, all the stimulants can do it, really. So things like yerba mate, guana, kola nut, they all have the same effect by reducing the sensitivity of the GABA receptor itself. Um, many people think about L. Theanine as something that can enhance gaba and it actually can do this. But if you take too high of a dose, it actually has a paradoxical effect and it'll actually block the GABA receptor. Opioids do this too. So pain medications, like your morphines and heroines of the world, I don't recommend the heroin heroine, as they used to say in Baltimore where I trained. Um, but so what, what opioids do is they, they actually inhibit the release of GABA by binding to the. The opioid actually will bind to the GABA receptor itself and prevent the release of, of this chloride channel or the opening of the chloride channel. THC does it too. So people who like to smoke marijuana, THC will actually inhibit GABA release. And this is what sometimes can cause anxiety. So that's important, Right? If you're inhibiting gaba, you're inhibiting an inhibitor. So what do you do there? You're actually causing excitatory kinds of symptoms. So that's why people who take or have THC might get anxious as a result of that, because you're inhibiting the GABA receptor. And then of course you have other things that are also going to downregulate the GABA receptor over long periods of time. This is kind of more nuanced, but this makes sense. So if you're drinking alcohol all the time, so alcohol is something that binds very tightly to the GABA receptor. It's going to decrease the number of receptors that you have. Okay. So it's going to down regulate the number of GABA receptors that you have available. And anxiety drugs will do this the same way. Sleep drugs will do the same thing. If you're having a lot of these things that bind tightly to to these receptors and actually enhance it, you're going to have a downregulatory effect to the GABA receptor itself. And that's going to cause major issues, especially if you stop these things cold turkey. As you know, if you stop benzos or alcohol cold turkey, you can die from the inhibiting the inhibitor. You don't have enough of these GABA receptors and all of a sudden you get all this excitatory glutamate. Because remember, glutamate and GABA are always in balance with each other. So if you have this imbalance of glutamate, you're going to get this excitatory type of scenario. You get high blood pressure, you get labile blood pressure, you get hallucinations. These are the things that are happening when you have too much glutamate around when alcohol withdrawal is happening.

One of the arguments that people make for mitigating nighttime alcohol consumption is that it causes you to. I don't know if it contains GABA or if it causes your body to make more gaba, but that, that wears off later on in the wee hours of the morning, like 1 or 2am and results in impaired sleep the rest of the night. Is there something to that theory?

Yeah. So what you're really talking about is there's different ways to bind to the GABA receptor. And this is the weeds for the people who like this kind of thing. You have something called orthosteric ligands of the GABA receptor or you have allosteric modulators of the GABA receptor. So orthosteric ligands are things that bind directly to the GABA receptor or the GABA binding site on the receptor. And you have allosteric modulators which are things that Bind outside of that site to the GABA receptor that modulate GABA release. Either they inhibit it or they are what are called positive allosteric modulators that actually bind to the receptor and enhance GABA function. So alcohol is a positive allosteric modulator of the GABA receptor. It's a very, very tightly bound GABA allosteric modulator. So when it binds, it binds tightly, but as you said, it does bind for a very short period of. And, but that tightly bound aspect of it is what makes it so addicting for people over time. Because when it's so tightly bound, what happens is that receptor starts down regulating itself or there becomes less of them. So you need to drink more alcohol to get the same benefits or the same sort of effect. So this is a tolerance effect. So if you have a longer acting positive allosteric modulator that doesn't have as much of an affinity, this could very much help with sleep actually and not have the same potential downside. But those are more natural things. These are not things that you're going to get in a prescription, but these are things that I've been very interested in is how you can modulate the GABA system. Because GABA is really, really important for sleep too. You need GABA around to help maintain your sleep. When you're in your REM sleep. When you're getting your dreams of being chased by a lion, you don't wake up because there's GABA around and serotonin too. But they're both really important to maintain sleep as well.

Now what you've just said kind of makes sense as to why a lot of people who will use marijuana or THC prior to sleep have impaired dreaming cycles because they're not getting into those REM phases and probably also inhibiting GABA production, resulting in less memory consolidation on emotional processing during sleep. That's why I'm not a huge fan of. Well, I'm okay with cbd. I think that's actually pretty good for sleep.

It is.

And nice for the anti inflammatory effects, but not so much thc.

Right. CBD and cbg, which are both fantastic cannabinoids that are non psychoactive. They both modulate the endocannabinoid system in the brain, but they also modulate the GABA system. They're positive allosteric modulators of the GABA receptor. THC as I mentioned earlier, has a negative effect. It has a negative or a negative allosteric modulating effect. So it's actually inhibiting the inhibitor which is gaba, of course, so causing more anxiety. Now, some people will get a beneficial effect initially if they're having a hard time sleeping. THC can help a little bit, but it does break the architecture of your sleep. Just like your Z drugs, like your Ambiens, Lunestas of the world, your benzos of the world too, they all break your sleep cycles and they can help you in a pinch if you're really having a hard time. But in the end, they do have significant detriments on your REM sleep, as you mentioned, for thc, your deep sleep for your benzos. And, and we know that those are kind of a big deal when it comes to longevity and health span. So at all times I'm really trying to get my patients off of those drugs and wean them onto natural equivalents. But of course, looking at their underlying foundational biology, are they B6 or magnesium deficient? Should we use those at night to help them sleep? Should we think about their glutamine sources? Do they have a leaky gut? If they have a leaky gut, do we need to seal that up and truly optimize their gut function so that they can actually utilize as sources of glutamine and glutamate in their diet and utilize them and transition them or convert them over to gaba, as we were talking about before?

Now, painkillers like opioids could also inhibit your GABA production or affect those receptors deleteriously. What about something like Kratom? A lot of people use Kratom. You've looked into that, how that could impact gaba.

Yeah, so it's not clear because it hasn't been studied at this point. But if there's any mu. Opio. Opioid receptor antagonism or agonism in this case. So the mu opioid receptor, the number of different types of opioid receptors, and I believe some of the kratoms do affect the mu opioid receptor. If that's the case, it's going to have the same effect as something like morphine and heroin. So it is something to be aware of. It probably is strain specific and I don't have enough data as far as which ones specifically that the kratoms are for.

Probably because I forget if it's red or green or white, but some are better for sleep and some aren't. But I know a lot of people use that and that's interesting to know. That affects gaba. So in terms of the.

Deficiency of gaba, that makes sense. And I want to ask you about ways that we could increase gaba. But before I do, I think this might be important so that people don't take too much. Could you have such a thing as a GABA excess? Let's say if people are hearing you and me talk and they're rushing out to get a GABA supplement or more glutamine and some of these precursors, could you have too much gaba?

Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, so what we're really seeing in clinical practice is, is a GABA deficiency, right? And we talked about a lot of the reasons. I forgot to mention some mineral deficiencies can do it too. Like if you're low in copper, for example, you're also going to be potentially not able to bind GABA to that receptor. Also, if you're stressed all the time, if you have sympathetic overload and cortisol all the time flying around, you're also going to be GABA deficient as well. Infections will prevent the conversion from glutamate to gaba. So most of the time, Ben, what we're seeing is people that are GABA deficient. Now, GABA excess is usually pretty obvious. It's in people that are really tired. And it's usually people that are taking GABA exogenously because the system is so well regulated between glutamate and gaba. Because what happens if you have too much GABA around is that you get tired, you get fatigued, you can't feel like, you feel like you have brain fog, you feel like you have imbalance, your blood pressure will go down. So it's very uncommon to see that happen without exogenous sources is what it comes down to. I just haven't. You don't see it in clinical practice. But what I can say in people that take GABA and then they say they can't wake up for two days, that often means that they don't need any extra. That if they took it and they didn't feel like they could wake up the next day because they were so fatigued, that often is because they have already a pretty well balanced system. Or it can mean they have a leaky brain and they're taking supplements that are getting across the blood brain barrier, like taking GABA supplements, for example. Like if you take GABA by itself, GABA itself is such a big molecule that it doesn't get across the blood brain barrier unless you have a leaky brain or you take a lot of GABA and people get scared about the leaky brain. But all that really means is that the blood brain barrier is not doing its job, keeping things out. And that usually means you have a leaky gut as well.

I know a doctor in Seattle who makes a transdermal GABA cream. I think it's called somnium. What about transdermally? Do you think that if you're applying it to the temples or to the neck that you could mitigate the blood brain barrier issues?

I mean, I think possibly. I think there's also some liposomal derivatives. I know Quicksilver makes one, for example. That's pretty good. And I talked to Chris about this. A detail. Chris Shade. And so I do think that with liposomal delivery, maybe transdermal, these are other options. But you know, what we did as a company was thinking about actually working on those allosteric sites for the most part, because those allosteric sites are really easy to reach overall. And there's good plants and good supplements that we can use to do that. And there's actually a fantastic mushroom derivative called agarin. And Agarin is from the Amanita muscarium mushroom. You probably know that mushroom.

Isn't that like the Mario mushroom?

Yes, the Mario mushroom. It's the red and white one from Santa Claus mythology, the one that causes psychedelic journeys. But, but, and this is the thing. So there's two major components of the Amanita muscaria mushroom. There's one called ibotenic acid. Ibotenic acid is neurotoxic. That's what causes the tripping experience. You drink your shaman's urine from the reindeer who ate the mushroom.

Yeah, I read that book. My friend Tara of forcing mushrooms wrote the book Santa on Shrooms. And look.

Since my father is Christian Orthodox and St. Nicholas is actually one of the reverend saints in that religion, I've taken a deep dive into some of what I would argue to be the Truer History of St. Nicholas. I don't think he was necessarily a mushroom enthusiasts, but regardless, it's an interesting story. But back to the amanita. So. So there's different forms of the Amanita?

Well, there's two different major compounds. The one is the ibotinic acid, and the other one is called agarin. And agarin is a positive. It's an orthosteric ligand of the GABA receptor, meaning it actually binds to the GABA receptor. Just like gaba, it gets across the blood brain barrier and it is long acting. The half life of Agarin is about six hours. So it's a fantastic compound for Sleep. And we are the only company using it in a product for sleep out there right now because it's very difficult to find and very difficult to make.

I'm assuming it's legal.

Yes, it's legal, yeah. So amanita actually is a legal mushroom in every state in the United States except for Louisiana. So you can purchase it. But the problem is if you buy Amanita online or at a store, you're going to have the ibotanic acid in there too. And that is going to cause some neurotoxicity. So we took the agarin out of there and it's a fantastic orthosteric ligand of the GABA receptor. It's long acting. You can use very, very low doses of it, like a half a milligram. A milligram. And you don't get a psychedelic experience from it. You just get long acting GABA support that the whole evening. And there are other compounds like this. So kava, you know kava is a positive allosteric modulator of the GABA receptor.

Kind of like legal Hawaiian weed.

Yes. So that's why there's kava bars. Kava bars are like you go and you feel like you've had a couple drinks of alcohol. But kava doesn't have the same addictive potential or the same tolerance or withdrawal potential. Kava is a natural plant. It's a positive allosteric modulator of the GABA receptor. It works on an entourage effect with multiple forms of something called cavalactones, which are the active ingredient of the kava plant. Of the kava plant. So you have kava, which is great. You've probably heard of magnolia bark or hanukayol before. Yeah.

Isn't that like the, the Chinese traditional medicine treatment for insomnia, Hanakayle?

Yep, it is. It's been around for a long time. And hanakyle is the at one of the active ingredients of magnolia bark. And this works at the benzodiazepine site of the GABA receptor, but it doesn't bind as tightly again, so it doesn't have the same tolerance, withdrawal or dependence issues as something like a benzodiazepine was or would. And so you have hanakyle, which is another one of these. So I've also discussed some of the cannabinoids. So cbd, cbg, cbn, they're also working as positive allosteric modulators of the GABA receptor and they're also working on the endocannabinoid system along with other, other areas too. I mean, CBG is a fantastic, fantastic cannabinoid working on the PPAR gamma side. And metabolically, it's got some really cool things happening there, too.

With cbg, a lot of people will say, well, that's the good endocannabinoid for focus. And they'll say CBN or CBD would be better for sleep. But what you're saying is you could take CBG and it would have a good impact on GABA in terms of supporting sleep.

Yeah. So I think more of CBG as an anxiolytic, overall, that's where the data is. And so I think more of CBN is something that helps with sleep support. And so. And there's a little bit of a difference. Right. So we talked about there's GABA A receptors, but there's different types of GABA A receptors. Each GABA A receptor has five subunits, and each of these subunits has.

A different composition depending on where they are in the brain. So you have Alpha 1 subunits, which are more responsible for sleep, and you have alpha 2, which are more responsible for anxiety. And so you can actually modulate the type of receptor you want to address depending on the issue that somebody has. And these GABA receptors, as I mentioned, are everywhere, but they're also in a really cool location, Ben. They're in a. They're called interneurons. Interneurons are these neurons that kind of like the way stations between other neurons. So you have like a huge serotonergic neuron and a huge dopamine neuron. And like, in between, you'll have a GABA neuron. And what GABA is really doing is it's helping with the processing of information. So learning memory, skill acquisition. Oh, wow. It's not all just about dopamine and serotonin. We actually have to be able to put on the brakes that, I mean, you know this as well as I do, Ben. It's like, how much information could we potentially be processing in any. Any one moment in any given time? We have so much coming at us. So what is preventing us from doing all that processing? It's actually the GABA interneurons that are actually modulating all this. So it's really cool that we have amazing abilities to do the. Actually some modulation with some of these compounds, but also looking at our foundational biology and making sure that we're, you know, we're foundationally optimized so that we can do this when we need to.

Yeah. Usually what holds me back most from the amount of information processing I can achieve is Whether or not we run out of coffee that day. I actually didn't know that about GABA and its interplay between serotonin and dopamine. You talked about the magnolia bark extract, cbn, cbg, some of these cannabinoids. In addition to that, you brought up the mushroom extract and the kava. Now, are these all things? Because you gave me two different products when we were the recent A4M, the American Academy for Anti Aging Medicine. We were talking there and you gave me some stuff to help me sleep in Vegas. But before that, I think you'd sent those same products to my home. One was called Trozy, one was called TRO Calm. I don't really understand the difference between the two, but does one of those have all the ingredients you just listed?

Yeah, man. So the trocom was created for anxiousness and for stress reduction. And it's a combination of Kava, cbd, cbg, and something called nicotinel gaba. We didn't talk about that one. But nicotinel GABA is a vitamin B3 attached to a GABA molecule. As I mentioned earlier, GABA itself doesn't get across the blood brain barrier very easily, but a vitamin B3 attached to a GABA does. And when it gets into the brain, this is super cool. It hydrolyzes or it breaks up into vitamin B3 into GABA. So GABA becomes the neurotransmitter GABA and vitamin B3 becomes vitamin B3. So it causes mild vasodilation and mild activation. So that's nice, because during the day, if you're taking something for anxiety or stress, you don't want to feel tired. You just don't want to feel anxiety and stress.

That's kind of like how some people like microdose with CBD. Like 10mg of CBD. Larger amounts would just knock you out, but they'll use that for a little bit of relaxed focus. You have theanine, which you mentioned earlier, people will use for that as well. So what you're saying is trocalm. It's helping out with GABA and relaxation, but in a more focused way that could be taken during the daytime.

Exactly, yeah. And as you know from our troches, these are titratable. So they're dissolvable lozenges that go between your upper cheek and gum. Take about 15 to 30 minutes to dissolve, bypassing digestion in your liver and small intestines. So you get it a faster effect and as a result of the troche itself. And how it's created, it's precision dose. So each quarter of it is the same amount =. = 4/4 = the amount that's in the troche. And so you can take just a quarter to take the edge off. And you do that during the day if you're having an anxious moment. So it's like the example I always give is you're about to give a speech, but you can't remember any of your lines because your brain is so sympathetically dominant that everything has gone blank. If you just take a little bit of a Trocom, just a quarter of that can take the edge off. And all of a sudden you're just firing all cylinders. So it's that calm, focused kind of feeling. But if you have more issues with stress and anxiety, taking more of it can significantly help. With that vitamin B3 attached to that GABA, though, it's super interesting because you just won't feel that tired. It's something that can help you wind down in the evenings, but it's not going to make you feel sleepy, per se. But for me and for a lot of my patients, it actually helps quiet the mind. I mean, on average, I think you probably know this, Ben, but I think on average, a human has about 70,000 thoughts per day. And if you are anxious or stressed, you have about 120,000 thoughts per day. If you have depression, it's the same thing. So you're ruminating on this stuff. And so what Trocom can do and any sort of GABAergic kind of ecosystem that we're creating with this, with this product, which is very cool, is that you can just tamper down or just as Dr. Ted would say, cause constipation of your thoughts. Thoughts to patient.

Yeah. Yeah. I feel like I usually have thought diarrhea more often than thought constipation.

The trope. You said the upper cheek and the gum. I've actually been putting these kind of like right in my lower lip, like where you'd usually put. I don't like a nicotine pouch or something like that. Is that the wrong location?

So the lower lip has about two layers of mucosa. The upper lip between your upper cheek and gum, they have about eight layers. And the reason why we like it up here in the. In the upper cheek and gum is that it's going to actually get most of the ingredient to dissolve directly into your cheek mucosa, directly into your vascular system. There.

That's interesting. All right, well, I might have been wasting some of this stuff. Thanks. I'VE never put it up there.

Yeah, you're not wasting it because you're getting it. If you're swallowing it, you're still going to get the effect. It's just going to take a little bit longer. And what we find is that for the Trocom specifically and the Troz, that it's obviously going to work faster this way if it's dissolved up here. And also, you don't have to worry about degradation of any of your ingredients because you don't have any issue with digestion. You know, typically with things going through your liver, you're going to get some bioavailability that gets downregulated or gets decreased as a result. But you don't get that with dissolving in your mouth.

All right, well, I know there's at least one and a half listeners thinking this, so I'm going to ask it, what if you just shove one up your butt for, like, a rectal delivery?

So suppositories are great for mucosal absorption. There's no doubt about it. Um, our troches are not formulated in that way. They have some flavoring. They have a little bit of peppermint, for example, in our other products, and a little bit of cinnamon. So you don't want to be doing that in your rectal mucosa. Now, I have no problem with suppositories. I think they're fantastic, but not for our Cherokees. But like as I said, if people don't want to dissolve them in their mouth, they can swallow them.

And.

And they do work that way, they're just gonna be working a little bit slower. And they're also probably gonna need a little bit of a higher dose, for example. So if you needed a quarter, you may need a half. But I mean, honestly, 15 to 30 minutes and you start feeling the effect. It's pretty profound.

For most people, yeah, they kick in pretty quickly. Like, for me, for me, I've been using it just because I kind of stick to my tried and true habit. I use the kion, sleep, some cbd, and if I'm traveling melatonin before bed, and that works pretty well for me. But when I've been waking up in the wee hours, I've been popping, actually, I've got a little. I cut the little squares in half. I do half of the trozi and half of the trocalm, and that seems to just kind of like, get me back to sleep pretty quickly. It just kind of dissolves in the mouth. And the only issue with it is. Of course, I have to take my mouth tape off Scott and apply a new piece of mouth tape. Gosh darn it. Maybe that's why I asked the suppository question, because believe it or not, I don't tape my rectum for sleep. But the TRO Z, the other one.

What'S in the TRO Z? Because you were just talking about the TRO Calm.

Yeah. So the Trocom has those four ingredients that are really working synergistically together in low doses to optimize for stress and anxiety and help you get rid of those fast. And Troz was created to be a comprehensive sleep solution, really leveraging the GABA system that we've been talking about. So it has the Hanukayl that we were talking about before. It has the agarin that we were talking about before as well. Agarin from the psychedelic mushroom, the Amanita. Very, very low doses. No psychedelic experience, just long acting. GABA support throughout your whole evening has cbd. It has CBN in it as well. It also has adenosine. So adenosine is not acting on the GABA system. It's working on the adenosine receptors in the brain. And you were mentioning caffeine earlier. So this is for your people that like to drink coffee all day long, but it can screw up their sleep. Having some adenosine before you go to bed or can really help with that unbinding of the caffeine to the receptor and getting adenosine to allow it to bind.

You could use an adenosine and actually kind of knock caffeine off that receptor.

Yeah, you can.

You just gave a whole bunch of people a lot of excuses to have an affogato after dinner.

Yeah, I mean, I mean, obviously buyer beware. And it may not work for everybody depending on how much caffeine you have and how sensitive. But that's why we added it to the, to the actual formula. We also have another really cool ingredient in there called cordycepin. So it comes from the cordyceps mushroom. And people have some fun interplay with the cordyceps mushroom now because of the show on HBO called the Last of Us and the cordyceps mushroom. But it's, it's a medicinal mushroom that's been around in Chinese medicine for, you know, thousands of years. It does eat the brains of insects and take them over. So that does exist. It doesn't take over and make a zombies yet. But cordycepin increases slow wave sleep.

No way. So I always thought it was a.

Stimulant no, no, Cordycepin is, it's a, it increases slow wave sleep. It also has these profound effects on metabolism. It's been studied in cancer, it's got studied, it's been studied in insulin resistance. It is a very cool compound. And again, we're the first company to ever put it in a sleep formula. And this is of course out of Dr. Ted's brain. But the key with all this, Ben, is we are enhancing and optimizing sleep architecture. So we are only doing that in a very holistic way. And that's the key with taking anything for sleep. You really want to try to take things. I'm like, like your stuff, I'm sure too. It's trying to enhance your sleep architecture and not, you know, not mess with it. And we also have some, some five HTP and some melatonin in the formula as well to help round it out as a comprehensive sleep solution.

How much 5 HTP, do you remember?

Yeah. 50 milligrams of 5 HTP.

Okay, so that's not too much because you get a lot from the, I guess it's probably more like the Ray, Pete, Georgie Dinkoff, small niche community online. Dr. Joe Mercola is kind of on this as well. Like too much 5 HTP could actually be deleterious due to serotonin excesses.

Yes. Yeah, I'm, I'm definitely familiar with Joe's interest in that and Ray's interest in that as well, but I, I don't see it as being a big issue. I mean, oftentimes, like, it's a very low dose here at 50 milligrams. And the other people, other sometimes will also get a little upset about melatonin in there too. I don't know what your, your thoughts are on, but I mean, from my perspective, even if people are well dialed in with circadian rhythms, our melatonin production does go down as we get older and it's especially important when we're traveling as well. So Trozy is a great sleep solution. I feel like with the melatonin in.

There, I travel so much, Scott, that let's say there is. Even though I don't think there is, let's say there is a negative feedback loop with melatonin and by supplementing you're shutting down your own endogenous production or whatever. For me, it's one of the best travel hacks ever. And it's kind of like guys who just want to maintain libido and strength and muscle mass as they age, who take testosterone, it's like, well yeah, you're going to shut down your own endogenous production. You could take enclomid or enclomiphene or HCG and mitigate some of that. But at the end of the day it's a decision about better living through science and shutting down something is the possibility of shutting down something your body makes. And for me, I'm okay with melatonin and if somebody says, well that means you're going to be dependent on it, look, it's so, so clutch for me for travel that I'm okay with that.

Yeah, I mean I think that's a great perspective. And I also think that people realize, I don't realize that melatonin is so important for. Not only for sleep, but it's like one of our most powerful antioxidants.

Yeah, amazing. Anti. Inflammatory antioxidant. I have a friend who just got a urinary tract infection and I have them, recommended them high dose melatonin protocol by day and methylene or by night methylene blue protocol by day for that very reason.

Yeah, for sure. And then people taking very, very high doses of melatonin as an anti cancer. And I know you've, you've talked about before that on the, on the podcast, I'm sure. So I think that my sense of it is that very low doses, like two and a half or five milligrams, they're not going to have any downregulatory effect on melatonin production. The other thing that people worry about is testosterone production going down with melatonin. And there's no indication that that's the case. There's no great studies at all. And there's been a lot of lay press biohacker type of people saying that not taking melatonin is decreasing my testosterone. That's also bullshit too. So I think that there are certain people that would be more sensitive to lower doses. I'm more sensitive in general, so I only can have about 2 and a half milligrams. Otherwise I actually get a paradoxical effect. Interestingly enough.

Yeah, a lot of people report that. That happens to my wife. She takes so much. How much is in the trozzi? How much melatonin is in the trozzi?

Five milligrams.

Okay. Yeah. So if you're cutting that, that's all. That's an entire square. So that's the entire half. You're getting two and a half.

Yeah, yeah. The average dose seems to be about a half a half a trochee for, for the TRO Z. So like almost all of our trochees, a quarter, a half, a full is kind of deal. But with the TRO Z it doesn't really work for most people if they don't have another sleep stack with just taking a quarter. You need to take at least a half to get a good experience. Um, but if you're already taking a sleep stack and you're adding it to the sleep stack, then it may be something you can start off with a quarter and kind of go from there. But people got to be mindful, of course, when they're stacking things together. I mean, obviously if you're taking any other GABAergic drugs that are prescription, those are going to be much stronger. And so you have to be careful if you're taking anything that's going to enhance the GABA system too.

Okay, got it. That makes sense. So, you know, you hear about glutamate and I, I know a lot of people who use ketamine. It's actually being used like recreationally as an intranasal spray by a lot of people. You know, parties, raves, social functions, et cetera. I've used it before, but from what I understand, it actually interacts with glutamate. So I wanted to ask you this. Is there any interplay between ketamine and gaba? If you were to take GABA and ketamine at the same time, would they counteract the effects of each other or would long term ketamine use have a deleterious impact on GABA or anything like that? Do you know anything about that?

Yeah. So it's interesting. I was just talking to somebody about this yesterday and the interplay is it's on the glutamate receptors. But what I have a friend in the er he told me yesterday that, you know, the pharmacists hate ketamine because it's a dirty drug. And by dirty means that affects tons of receptors. It's not just affecting the glutamate. Glutamate receptors, it's actually affecting multiple different ones, including dopamine, norepinephrine, and also GABA as well. So as a result of that, I mean, ketamine is a great drug. It's got some great therapeutic potential and it saved a lot of lives. And we should be using it in ERs instead of giving people Haldol and Ativan and shit. And giving them, giving, giving them Ketamine and getting them psychiatry. There's a big push for that actually. But, but certainly we know that when there's more glutamate around, you're going to make more GABA. And all because of that conversion factor. Right. The B6 and magnesium converting glutamate to GABA. So we know that's happening. Okay, so, but if you are always using, if you're using something like ketamine all the time, you are going to start depleting everything. You're going to start depleting GABA as well and you're just going to start depleting glutamate and then you're going to be down regulating your receptors. So there seems to be a bit of a balance. As far as I can tell when you actually are affecting these NMDA receptors, you're actually also affecting gluta, the GABA receptors as well. It hasn't been well described, but you don't see people getting totally excitable. I mean most people that take ketamine will actually have more of a calming dissociative effect. Right. They don't have this sort of what you would imagine would be a glutamate overactivity which would potentially present as excitability. It could present maybe as significantly as seizures, but that doesn't happen. So it's obviously affecting the GABA receptors and other locations too. So I think we don't know. But certainly, I mean, ketamine as a recreational drug is a little bit scary.

Yeah, I think a lot of people don't realize how depleting it can be. It's kind of like that, what do they call it, the Black Tuesday or whatever it is after the weekend when you've had mdma where everything's depleted and you gotta take glutathione. And Sami, what'd you call it?

Suicide Tuesday?

Yeah, Suicide Tuesday. And I would imagine a lot of people are using ketamine recreationally, maybe having those issues. Not even know that they've got depleted amino acids and depleted neurotransmitters and probably need to replace some building blocks and modulate dosage. Because I think it's, I mean, I can't swing a dead cat by the tail without hitting at least three or four well known biohackers, health influencers, people in the industry who are dependent on ketamine because they've talked to me about it.

Yeah, no, I'm not surprised. And I mean, I think the best description or the best experience for people to think about glutamate overdose is when you go to a Chinese restaurant and happen to have monosodium glutamate in your food. It's sweet, right? And then all of a sudden you start getting headaches and you feel irritable and you can't sleep. That is glutamate overload. That is your brain not being able to convert that glutamate over to glute to GABA fast enough. This could be hereditary to some degree, or it could be just something that you don't have the CO factors to be able to do it that's more common, your vitamin B6 and magnesium. And so you're going to get headaches. So if I go to a Chinese restaurant with my father, he's going to have headaches. If we have msg, I don't typically get them, but it can cause that excitability kind of thing. So if something's pure glutamate, it should cause something like that as opposed to something with ketamine, which is more of, like I said, a dirty drug. And I don't mean that in a bad way, I just mean it's dirty in the sense it's affecting lots of receptors. Or promiscuous, that's the other word we like to use for these kinds of drugs. Maybe that's nicer.

Yeah, makes sense. You know, you hear about like sauna use for example, or even exercise as ways to increase and feel good neurotransmitters like dopamine, epinephrine and the like. Are there lifestyle factors or even so called biohacks? I mean you talk a lot about the hyperbaric chamber, for example, but certain technologies or activities people can engage in that would support healthy GABA production.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think the biggest one is that we know that stress significantly depletes gaba. So doing things that are not stressful are going to have a relationship with increasing GABA production over time. So meditation, there's been studies on meditation, yoga and breath work. Increasing GABA production. Makes sense. The more parasympathetic you are, the more relaxed you are, the more you're going to replete your GABA levels overall. And also actually, interestingly, although this may be paradoxical to think about, but exercise does the same thing. So exercise increases your balance between your glutamate and your GABA production. So you're actually going to have more GABA production in various areas in the brain as a result of having.

Doing exercise overall. So exercise is going to do it, meditation is going to do it. And then of course, you know, we talked about optimizing your diet, right? So optimizing your diet for glutamine rich foods. Glutamate foods are okay too. These are fermented foods typically. And I can run a list if you guys want, but we can talk about those types of foods. And also your minerals, your, your magnesium, your copper, your zinc. All these are really important to, to build up the ability for you to be able to make glutamine or to get glutamine in the body, convert it to glutamate, convert glutamate to gaba.

What are the, the three foods that are the highest in glutamine? If we just wanted to pick three.

So a couple ones that are good. So steak. Everybody likes steak. Yes, Steak is really high in glutamine, sauerkraut and fermented foods. And I mean, I'm not a big fan of cheeses, but you know, cheeses also have a lot of glutamine in them too.

Does the cheese matter? Because usually it's like the hard artisanal cheeses that seem to be the highest in some of these beneficial compounds.

I think it's those cheeses. I don't think it's the soft cheeses as much, but I'm not like a.

Parmesan Reggiano or something like that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you have your, your glutamate containing foods. Seafood is as high in glutamate. Caviar, seaweed, mushrooms, spinach, dried cod. Those are the main ones that have a lot of, of glutamate in them. I think where I tend to focus with most of my patients that I work with is on the glutamine containing foods. Because I like, I find that if you're giving a lot of glutamate containing foods to people, sometimes they can get those headaches too for the same reasons that you get it from monosodium glutamate, Steak and caviar.

Sounds like a real drag, man.

I don't think that sounds bad. That sounds perfect to me.

There's a lot of websites and quizzes I've seen. Dr. Eric Braverman, he probably has the most popular one. I think that supplements company Newtopia, they have a quiz that I think is supposed to be kind of like a neurotransmitter quiz. But is there anything to this idea of genetic predispositions or personality types that would dictate whether you're GABA dominant or GABA deficient?

Do you have alcoholics in your family? That's the one thing, right? So. Because if you have alcoholics in your family, this could be a genetic predisposition to having less GABA available so that you have to actually increase gaba. Other ways to maintain some sort of mood regulation.

Because our ancestors didn't have trozies. They had wine and mead and beer.

Well, the thing is, Benny, you actually, this is. This you actually. That's a perfect segue. It's not so much that it's hereditary that they have a GABA deficiency. It's more that they're hereditary in the sense of their ability to methylate their B vitamins or their ability to sustain nutrition to optimize their glutamate and GABA levels. So my strong sense of this, and I've worked with several patients like this, and I have colleagues that have done the same. If you optimize somebody that has a history of alcoholism in their family, for example, if you optimize their vitamins, minerals and nutrients, they don't feel like they need to drink and they won't drink as much overall because they're not trying to maintain a GABA level that they couldn't maintain before because they had a genetic predisposition from a vitamin, mineral and nutrient perspective. Because actual inherited disorders of the GABA receptor are ridiculously rare. Like, they're just not seen in clinical practice at all. So I think most of the issues that we're seeing from a, you know, quote unquote, genetic predisposition, like, for example, alcoholism, are related to vitamin, mineral and nutrient deficiencies and maybe some genetic abnormalities or heterogeneities there that are causing it, but not the GABA receptor itself. So, I mean, but most of those, those, those quizzes are not going to ask about gaba. They're going to ask about serotonin and norepinephrine and dopamine, because those are all the sexy ones that, that people are talking about taking fasts from. Or at least dopamine.

Least. Yeah. Yeah. So when it comes to sleep, is there anything that you personally do besides Trocalm or Trozi for sleep that for you is just like a game changer? And this is kind of relevant to me right now because I'm working on a new book and there's a big chapter on it with a whole bunch of updated sleep hacks. So kind of like behind the scenes asking some of my guests what their personal sleep hacks are.

Sure. So from a product perspective, I'm actually more of a TRO Calm guy because for me, as long as soon as I fall asleep, I'm good. It's a matter, a matter of falling asleep for Me. And so that's the type A personality, the perseverating thoughts, the thought diarrhea as it were, as you were describing before. So my thoughts to patient would be Trocom in this case. So I'll take Trocom a couple hours before bed.

Oh, a couple hours before?

Yeah, yeah. I find that actually I could take it right before bed too. But I really like having it on board for a couple hours. It lasts for about three to five hours for me. So like having it right before, like that sort of wind down period when I'm with my kids and I'm relaxing and I want my mind to be sort of off work, phone away kind of deal and just having it as sort of an evening. So what people will do oftentimes is take Trocom instead of drinking a glass of wine with dinner or having their beer or whatever it might be is their wind down. So I like to use it that way. Overall it's sort of like my wind down for the evening. But you know, for me, actually, Dr. Ted Atrocosa, who's been on your podcast before, he probably gave me the single most important piece of advice that I've ever received from sleep. He calls it his sleep anchoring technique. And what this means is it basically changes the perspective on the importance of sleep. Instead of saying that your day starts when you wake up, say to yourself, your day starts when you go to bed.

Your day, see I've always heard it like your night starts when you wake up with ample light exposure, but this is interesting. Keep going.

Yeah. So the idea here is that if you consider going to sleep as the start of your day, not the end of your day, then you're going to treat it with more respect and with more care and take care and protect it on a day to day basis whenever you can. Because your day starts when you go to bed, not when you wake up. Now of course when you wake up, you have your morning routine, you have your, your sunlight exposure, you have your grounding, anything else that you do, but if you just focus on that, but you forgot about the other eight hours, you just went to bed, it's not going to help as much, right. As you know. So if you think about your day starts when you go to bed as opposed to when you wake up, that's the frame shift that helped me. I mean I, I'm a doctor, right. I had in medical school, my friends and I wore shirts that said sleep is for quitters. Okay. So I didn't think sleep mattered for a Long time. And Even through my 30s, I didn't think it mattered. I thought I could be up in the middle of night, do what I needed to do and just work the next day. But no, I mean, like many people, I crashed and burned. And when I turned 40, it's not going to happen anymore. Right. So most of us can get away with it for a period of time.

Yeah.

So that's the first thing. And that's the major thing for what I tell my patients. That's what we tell people at Troscriptions, because, again, we have great formulas here that can help you with anxiety, they can help you with stress, they can help you with sleep. But what you should be doing is thinking about what is this whole sleep architecture that we were talking about? So you asked about my personal thing, so I can give you my personal. If you'd like.

Yeah.

So for me, what I'll typically do is an infrared sauna. I have an infrared sauna in my house. When I found out that I was going to have four kids, we thought we were going to have three, and somehow we ended up having four.

Wait, quadruplets?

No, no, I have. I have three kids. I had three daughters, and then my. My fourth was a surprise.

Okay, okay, I understand.

Yes, yes. And so My oldest is 13. My youngest is 6 now and 3 girls, and my youngest is a boy. But when I found out that we were going to have a fourth kid, I was like a very small house living in Northern California at the time. So I bought myself an infrared sauna. And it's been, I think, one of the best purchases that I've ever made by far. So I'm in there most nights. I spend about 30 minutes in there. Typically. We do some reading, some meditation, some relaxation exercises of some sort during that time. And then after the sauna, I'll typically take, like, a temperate shower. So not too hot, not too cold. We'll do my sleep. Stack of supplements, typically some magnesium, some glycine, sometimes Troz when I'm traveling, but I don't take Troz unless I'm traveling, typically.

Okay.

Because I don't need it. And then I have what I call my. My Pavlov's dog routine. And Pavlov's dog is for those who don't know, this is an experiment done where they would ring a bell and give food to a dog, and the dog would salivate and the dog would eat and then eventually take away the food. Just ring the bell, the dog would salivate. So the idea for me, for My sleep routine is do the exact same thing for the last 10 to 15 minutes every night. And that's sleep. It's basically going to the bathroom, brushing my teeth, stretching and getting into bed with my eye mask on, having a sound machine on, doing gratitude and then just done bed.

That's awesome. I love the Pavlovs. I'm the same way to the extent to where I try to choose things for the Pavlov's dog routine that I can replicate when traveling. So if it's lavender essential oil, I don't use an oil diffuser anymore. I just sprinkle it on the pillow because I can do that same thing when I travel. The sleep mask easy. The red light headlamp that I used to get around the room at night or the red lights that's easy to bring to the hotel room. Putting the pillow underneath the back of my knees and breathing for about five minutes with four in, eight out before rolling over into a side sleeping position. I can replicate that in the hotel. So I try to not be dependent on any large bulky sleep technologies that if I'm on the road traveling again because I travel so much, I'm going to feel like I'm not getting my adequate sleep routine that I can replicate because I can't exactly call down to the front desk and ask them to bring me, I don't know, like a bedjet air conditioning unit or a chili pad for sleep. So you know, I try not to be dependent on that stuff.

I'm totally with you. So I have my long routine which is when I'm home and then I have my short routine when I'm traveling. I mean this is something you've dialed in so much because of how much you travel. But it's just certain techniques or certain things that I will do that just trigger my brain to know that this is time to get to sleep. And I think the biggest part for me actually is taking those 30 seconds or a minute when I'm in bed and just doing a full body scan, doing a small gratitude practice and just being comfortable and grateful for the day and setting intentions for the next day too. Right. So it's really important for me. So nothing fancy there really, but I like the fancy tools as well when I can, when I have them. Of course.

Yeah, the body scans are pretty incredible. The so called yoga nidra or non sleep deep rest protocols. There's not many voices that I don't find kind of grinding for those, but there's one lady on YouTube and I've got YouTube Premium, which I think is the ultimate life hack. Just you can download tons of stuff, view it online ad free. They still don't have the ability to take your downloaded videos and make playlists out of them, which I think they need to add at least that can be used in offline mode. So tip to anyone who works at YouTube, make playlists downloadable and available offline. But anyways, this lady, Ali Boothroyd I think is her channel. She has non sleep deep rest protocols that range from 20 minutes up to a full eight hours. And like when I flew back from Qatar the other day because I just got back from India, I did her eight hour on the plane with noise blocking headphones. Incredible. And you know, I usually what will happen is if I wake up at like 4am or whatever, I want to kind of lull myself back to sleep. I of course pop a trochalm. Scott. But I'll lay back and do her. It's like the two hour one, right? If I want to lay in bed until six or so. And it's incredible. Like you, you aren't actually sleeping but you're in this, you know, drool coming out the side of your mouth, non sleep deep rest state. And because you're scanning your body, I think this is why it works is my working hypothesis. At least you can't think about work when you're thinking big toe, breathe, next toe breathe, next toe breathe, small toe, ankle, heel, back of knee. So it just kind of keeps your thoughts from racing. But her voice in particular is incredible. And what I do, I'll get a little techy on you here, Scott. This will be the pro tip. There's another app called Sleepstream and it plays white noise. It blocks out a lot of ambient noise. A lot of times these yoga nidra sessions, there's long periods of just silence in between. What the person says is the next cue. So if the kids are up and awake getting ready for the day and I'm not ready to get up yet, or the dogs are barking or the rooster is crowing, which usually starts about 4:30. This sleep stream app, I can play it simultaneous to the yoga and the nuda and just like my cheapo headphones. And it'll block out ambient noise while I'm still able to hear the yoga nidra voice. So that's what I'll do if I just need to use some kind of like a sound to lull me to sleep. I still like that. There's an app called the nucalm. It's also really Good. But for Yoga Nidra, like combining something like Ali's Yoga Nidra tracks with the Sleep Stream app, it's incredible.

Do you have like one headphone going in one ear? How does that work? Is it also both being piped in your ears at the same time?

I have the. The sleep phones. They're like the soft. They're only 20 bucks, I think, on Amazon, but they're good for side sleepers. If I tend to roll on my side and if I happen to have forgotten to get those out before bed, I'll literally just use my old school Apple white wired headphones and put those in. But yeah, no, it layers over. So the sleep space white noise layers over the Yoga Nidra so it's not coming through two separate speakers. Both those tracks are coming through both headphones into both ears.

Cool. Like you're doing a real time mix, man. That's cool. I dig it.

Yeah, ye.

I'll use the old Apple old school headphones when I travel too, for the white noise. I find that helps a lot. And I have a free app that I use for the white noise piece of things too.

You know, the other hack for this, and this is something I learned from Luke's story. You know, like those underwater swim headphones that are. They're vibrate. They use bone vibration to transmit sound. You can have in your regular headphones and then in your underwater MP3 player that you're using on dry land, you can pump out. What Luke told me is he'll play Joe Dispenza meditation tracks while playing nucalm, and he'll play the new calm through his regular headphones and play the Joe Dispenza meditation tracks through his bone vibrating headphones, if you want to call them that. And that's another way to layer. So all sorts of different ways to sleep. If you, like many other people, can't turn the brain off at night or at least stop up the brain diarrhea.

I love that. Yeah, I've used Newcom before. I like it. And I'm a big fan of Sam Harris's waking up app as well. And so some of his longer meditations, and I've had a couple friends learn how to splice those things together with. With various other tracks like Newcom and other things. This is getting fancy, but it's. It's interesting to play around with. I think the body scans are great for the reasons you mentioned, Ben. It's like it's a way to get out of your head a little bit. And it's A way to just kind of let everything relax. And that's typically what you need, is you just need your. Your brain to shut off enough so you can start jumping into deep sleep, which is what all of us need to do in that early time when we get into bed.

Yeah. Yeah. Well. Well, Scott, this has been a wide ranging, valuable resource of information for all things GABA and sleep and beyond. So the troscription stuff, I know you gave me like a link and a discount code and all, all that kind of good stuff for people who want to try Trozy or Trocalm or you also have the methylene blue ones.

And the. What's it called? The Canadine. Yep.

Blue cannotine.

Yeah, bluecanatine. So I'm going to put all the show notes for everybody listening@bengreenfieldlife.com gabapodcast G A B A podcast. I'll include some links and discount codes to Dr. Scott's stuff. I'll link to the very interesting article he also wrote on hyperbaric therapy. Because if you have a hyperbaric chamber, I think it'd be incredible for you to learn some of the ways that Scott upgrades those. So, Scott, thank you so much, man, for coming on, sharing all this stuff with us and for sending me this Trocalm and Trozzi. I really like it.

You're my pleasure, man. It's. It's my pleasure to be with you today. And yeah, your code's easy for people, it's just code Ben at checkout for. For 10 off your order. It's so. It's easy. And I really appreciate the. The opportunity to speak about the forgotten neurotransmitter. And I hope that people listening here learned a little bit about GABA and as. As I wrote an article, there's a bunch of articles on our website on transcriptions on GABA as well as well as our other products.

Cool. All right, well, I'll link to all that.

Check it out.

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