I made this in-the-moment video in response to a reader’s question, which illustrates the pitfalls of over-activating the dopamine-adrenaline cycle. Transcript is below.
Transcript
Someone in the facebook hopeshortcut group asked a question and it is always good to ask a question because then I need to think about the answer and let me try this time to make a video and see what happens. So this person has been taking tyrosine for two days and she experienced that she got high and couldn't sleep for some days.
Why did that happen? I am not into talking a lot about medication but there are some simple things you need to know about medication. Number one is that a pill or medication is only working if it mimics something that is already in the body, a function, a signal molecule or something like that.
And that is exactly what tyrosine is doing. And we don't need all these chemical things, we need to dig into ourselves and find out why can't we produce it or why can't we keep it, why is it converted too fast. And as there is a lot of people here that has problems with their movements, movement disorders, they and all the world, all the doctors are very focused on dopamine.
So why is this person taking tyrosine? I am just guessing but now I can try to show you my notes. So tyrosine is a precursor to L-DOPA which is a precursor to dopamine. So this person is probably trying to get more dopamine and it indeed succeeded to the extent that she a whole night couldn't sleep because what is dopamine?
It's the alert state in our instinct cycle. So that's why you couldn't sleep. When we continue, dopamine is converted to noradrenaline or it's also called norepinephrine in some countries and it again is converted to adrenaline or epinephrine.
And what's that? That's fight, flight and freeze. It's our survival instincts and it pushes you into symptoms if it's too often or too much you are into these. So if you have a tremor, think of a dog on a leash that sees a bigger and scarier dog, it starts to have a tremor. Why does it do that? Because it cannot fulfil the instincts cycle.
Because it's on a leash, it cannot run away from this guy. So in my perspective, we have got for example Parkinson's where tremor is a symptom, it's because you are not running away when you feel something is fearful or you get anxiety. You are not fighting for yourself. I guess it's why boxing is so popular [with people with PD] because the guys that go into fight that has a little more, can you say, anger and aggression, their tremor is helped to a large extent by boxing.
And I guess some flight types as well. So we as humans have stopped our natural cycle of survival instincts. So we get it right here to dopamine. We get alert but. when dopamine is converted to noradrenaline and adrenaline, we don't allow ourselves to do what our instincts tell us.
We have conditioned ourselves so we stay, we sit if the teacher yells at us, we stay if our spouse is not nice to us, we stay if the boss is giving us too many tasks or is not friendly to us. So that's what gives you a lot of your symptoms. So what can you do instead? The problem is not dopamine. It's proved already in 2014 that dopamine is not the problem. You can find the study around that.
The problem in my perspective is that you too fast convert it to noradrenaline and or adrenaline and that gives you symptoms. So instead of putting more oil on a burning fire that gives you more symptoms, I think it was better to find out how can I stop dopamine degrading into noradrenaline. We cannot help that every now and then something happens, a bird fly into the windows and we react to that but we must stop getting anxious around it.
To be honest it's a long long story so you could join my community area where we take up the situations where people get fearful or angry or whatever and talk about that. So everyone has their own unique reasons for dopamine to be converted into noradrenaline and it's a long long story but it's very simple.
Stop what is triggering your dopamine and noradrenaline and adrenaline and it's not pushing in whatever comes from the top here [tyrosine or l-dopa] or whatever enzymes or nutrients are used here. It's to simply stop that circle. So you less and less get into this circle of survival instincts. As in most countries are calm and peaceful so you don't need to go into stress very often.
So think if you should join the community area. There's not a lot of people yet. That means you get a lot of time together with me. It means that we can take up the subjects that are interesting for you. And it's just to start to pick my brain,
's brain. We find out what we can do.Bye.
Over-activation of the Dopamine-Adrenaline Cycle