The Mood Cure: Take Charge of Your Emotions in 24 Hours Using Food and Supplements. Julia Ross
to be experiencing feelings of impatience, edginess, and unreasonable irritability. For example, violent criminals have much lower serotonin than do nonviolent criminals. And while you may not be given to violent rages, were you prone to tantrums as a child? Is anger affecting your relationships now?
Most (but not all) people with subnormal brain serotonin do feel irritable too often. Whether they’re able to control the expression of their angry feelings is another matter that may relate to how low their serotonin levels have fallen. For example, some of our female clients become much more irritable, even violent, during PMS than at any other time of the month.
One of the worst aspects of sapped serotonin is how it can harm your relationships. I’ve had many clients whose marriages improved dramatically as they became less irritable and critical. Other relationships can heal as well. My client Clara was appalled by her outbursts at her young son, because she had been badly abused by her own father. She had never forgiven her father, though he had mellowed as he’d gotten older. She had always seen him as sadistic but felt that she was in an entirely different category, because she knew that she loved her son. I asked her to consider that her father’s behavior, like hers, might have been involuntary—the impersonal expression of a malfunctioning brain. This relieved her of some of the hurt and anger that she still harbored toward her father. Although he will probably never apologize to her and fully mend their relationship, her new perspective on his past behavior has helped.
If you have been harmed by a parent’s or sibling’s irrational anger, dealing with the same kinds of feelings in yourself can be a very bitter frustration. Understanding the brain chemistry of anger can be a powerful force for healing old family wounds and putting an end to the wounding pattern.
I’ve been intimidated by my own angry clients at times. A real standout was a 16-year-old giant brought in by his mother, who adored him but cowered in the corner of my office in our first session while I tried to figure him out. Since he sulked and snarled much of the first hour, it wasn’t easy. But I finally got enough information out of the two of them to confirm that his disposition included depression, insomnia, and low self-esteem, along with chronic irritability. He’d been in an outpatient counseling program for a year, because he’d been caught with marijuana at school. As a result, he’d tried to stop using marijuana, but he hadn’t been able to resist the mood boost that it gave him. His mom thought we might be able to help get him back on track. After gleaning this information, I consulted with one of our nutritionists and gave him 2 capsules of 5-HTP. About ten minutes later, he began to smile and actually volunteer information about himself. He wasn’t aware of the extent of the change (he usually felt that his anger was everyone else’s fault), but his mother was thrilled by it. She recognized that her true son was emerging from the hell that serotonin deficiency had created for them both. Note: There are certain kinds of extremely angry behavior that seem to have more to do with imbalances in the minerals copper, zinc, manganese, or other nutrients in the body than with serotonin levels. I recommend the book Depression-Free Naturally, by Joan Mathews-Larson, if your anger does not dissolve upon using the supplements recommended in this book.
Is Fear or Anxiety Ruining Your Life?
You may be experiencing a cluster of traits that all have to do with a single annoying or even tormenting symptom of low serotonin: false fear. Whether you experience it as shyness, anxiety, or panic, your fear quotient is a good gauge of how deficient in serotonin you are. You may have tried to accept your disorder as “just the way I am” if it’s mild or fought it with therapy, medication, and behavior modification if it’s crippling.
I always ask my clients what their moods were like when they were children. Many of them tell me that they’ve always been shy or a worrywart. But what is shyness? It’s just a way of describing chronic, low-level fear combined with another classic low-serotonin symptom: low self-esteem. And worry? It’s usually an unproductive mental reflex that is actually a combination trait in which three low-serotonin symptoms gang up together: fear, obsessiveness, and negativity.
Panic and phobia are obviously the most fearful symptoms of low serotonin. They can start early in life or develop later. Are you excessively afraid of heights, airplanes, spiders, or enclosed spaces? Has fear about exams, interviews, or public performance swelled into full-blown terror, complete with heart palpitations and difficulty breathing? Do you wake up with panic attacks in the middle of the night or have nightmares on a regular basis? (Remember that the night is the lowest serotonin production point of your twenty-four-hour cycle.) Even these extreme symptoms can usually be dissolved nutritionally by raising serotonin with a few key nutrient supplements.
A handsome 24-year-old actor came to see me because he’d been having unrelenting anxiety (including stage fright) and frequent panic attacks since he was 5 years old. He’d tried everything, including too much alcohol, to no avail. Yet a few weeks on his nutritherapy program and he was volunteering for cold script readings in his acting classes!
Serotonin deficiency is the most common cause of both anxiety and panic attacks in our experience, but thyroid or adrenal malfunctions can also be significant factors. If the nutritional supplements recommended in this chapter don’t eliminate your panic, see chapter 5’s suggestions for using calming amino acids like GABA. If no supplement helps, it’s time to consider testing your thyroid and adrenal functions: first look at the symptom list on pages 66 and 79 to see if either problem sounds like yours. If so, follow the testing and treatment suggestions in the “Thyroid Tool Kit” and the “Adrenal Tool Kit.”
Important Physical Clues That Your Serotonin Is Deficient
In addition to affecting your emotions, low serotonin can also affect your body. I want to alert you to these physical symptoms, because you may not realize that they have a connection with your mood states. The most common are (1) gut and heart problems, (2) sleep problems, (3) fibromyalgia and other pain conditions, and (4) cravings for carbohydrates, alcohol, and certain drugs.
Gut and Heart Problems
If you’ve lived with your stomach in knots because of low-serotonin worry or anxiety, it might help you to know that 90 percent of the serotonin in your body is not in your brain; it’s in your gut. When you raise your serotonin levels, your digestive tension (including constipation) can often dissolve along with your mental constriction. Your heart is also partly serotonin dependent; it’s well known that low-serotonin-style negative moods, including fear and anger, are closely associated with heart disease. Nourishing all three emotional centers—your brain, your gut, and your heart—with the right pro-serotonin supplements and diet can result in big improvements in your health as well as in your mood.
Sleep Problems
More than half of the low-serotonin clients we see at our clinic have some kind of trouble sleeping. Many of them obsess and worry instead of getting to sleep, while others wake up in the night or too early in the morning. If you, too, have sleep problems along with low-serotonin false mood symptoms, then those sleep problems can be easily solved, using the suggestions for supplements, food, light, and exercise made in this chapter. If not, turn to chapter 12 for several sleep solutions beyond those I described here.
Pain and Low Serotonin: Do You Have Fibromyalgia,TMJ, or Migraines?
Fibromyalgia is the name of a painful affliction that can cause mild to severe discomfort throughout the muscles of the body, with the worst areas of diffuse pain and stiffness usually concentrated in the upper and/or lower back. At least ten million Americans, mostly women, suffer from it.11 More and more people are also suffering from closely related TMJ (teeth grinding, painful tension in the jaw). If you are one of them, you can expect good or complete relief within a few weeks. These conditions are unquestionably associated with low serotonin. Fibromyalgia can have other causes, too, including low thyroid, but we’ve found that it usually responds very well to nutrient therapy, as does TMJ.
Raising