Posted by blueberry on January 1, 2006, at 15:23:40
Tyrosine...nice warm energizing feeling comes on very quickly, wears off quickly, but later in the day returns as uncomfortable anxiety. Creates fear when I wake up in the morning.
L-Phenylalanine. Milder than tyrosine, but the same overall effect. Not comfortable at all.
DL-Phenylalanine. A smoother warm mildly energizing feeling the comes on quickly, but later in the day turns into a loud heartbeat and an overall sense of fear...easily startled when the phone rings. Not cool.
D-Phenylalanine. A nice comfortable warmness for hours, but later turns into fear, loud heartbeat, easy to startle, big time insomnia.
Pynogenol. Real nice effect the first day. I thought this was the magic. But the second day, nothing. Third day, nothing. Still taking it though.
Ginkgo biloba. Real nice activating effect, feels noradrenergic, beginning in just about an hour and continuing most of the day. Almost too much, even though it was only 60mg. No idea if it will continue.
GABA. No effect of any kind.
GabaCalm (Gaba, taurine, glycine, tyrosine mixture). Mildly calming on the first dose, but a second dose is too much creating some mild depression. (this happened to me with magnesium glycinate too, so maybe it's the glycine)
Chromium picolinate. Feels adrenergic. Comfortably activating. Several trials at pubmed indicate that it modulates serotonin, tryptophan, and norepinephrine function and has led to significant improvement and remission in some people. Doses needed are 400mcg to 800mcg.
High dose B6 (not the regular kind, but the active P-5-P kind) and zinc. Can't feel anything. Up to 40% of alcoholics and mood disordered people though have some deficiency in metabolising B6 and zinc into neurotransmitters, and they need more.
5HTP. It has an overall numbing effect on depression, but doesn't at all fix my depression. It just numbs it out and in some ways makes it worse by squashing out norepinephrine.
Tryptophan...we'll see. Just switched from 5htp to tryptophan today.
High protein meals. To get more production of norepinephrine and dopamine. I haven't noticed anything in particular.
High dose fish oil. I haven't noticed anything in particular. Have taken it for years.
Most of the above trials involved low to medium doses and were stopped immediately if there were any bad effects.
If all else fails, I'm going back to St Johns Wort! Nothing every worked as good. But last time I tried it, it was with prozac and zyprexa. Next time it will be all by itself or mixed with a little 5htp...the combo worked wonderfully many years ago before my bossy psychiatrist got mad at me about it and put me on serzone instead. Stupid.
For now, I'm hoping the gingko will have a repeat performance going forward. In most trials, a common side effect is a general overall activating effect, and I like that. Just have to avoid getting overactivated into restlessness. Also, in one trial with healthy people, they reported better memory in addition to better mood on the single day of the trial.
Based on everything I've tried, and based on my 10 years on precription meds, I think for me it is not a matter of having more neurotransmitters, but rather getting them to fire, to release, to activate. They just seem to be sitting there not doing anything.
Just some odd notes here for anyone to ponder.
poster:blueberry
thread:594000
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/alter/20051208/msgs/594000.html