The Mood Cure: Take Charge of Your Emotions in 24 Hours Using Food and Supplements. Julia Ross
mood problems result when levels of sex hormones, notably estrogen, which help program serotonin production in the brain, fall too low. One of our clients suddenly became suicidal and her periods stopped, though her life circumstances were at an all-time high. Neither our nutrients nor her MD’s antidepressants helped till she got a hormone level test and an estrogen patch. In males, depression and anger are common symptoms of andropause (male menopause). But they are tied to lowered testosterone levels and raised estrogen levels and the role of serotonin is unclear. (See the Sex Hormone Tool Kit for more.)
Are You Getting Enough Light, Especially in Winter?
Serotonin is one of the few body chemicals that is stimulated by light. And not just any light will do. How you feel may vary, depending on the type and amount of light available to you at each season of the year and even at each hour of the day. For lower-serotonin people, the late afternoon tends to be the beginning of the “unhappy hours.” Many of them hate the fall, the winter, the twilight, and the night, for good reason. More than 25 percent of Americans suffer from a special sensitivity to the natural decrease in sunlight that occurs during the fall and winter.6 Technically known as “seasonal affective disorder” (or, appropriately, SAD), this condition’s “dark cloud” symptoms significantly increase when the angle of the sun drops and serotonin levels drop along with it.
But don’t fret if you know or suspect that you suffer from winter depression. You can raise your serotonin levels any time of the year with the amino acids and other supplements I’ll be describing later. These nutrients are especially effective if you combine them with some bright light. At least half of SAD sufferers respond well to bright lamp therapy.7 And then there are supplements of vitamin D, the sunshine vitamin, which can be even more effective than bright light in helping relieve SAD.
Part of the problem is that even on a summer day, we may not get enough light. Natural sunlight ranges from 2,000 lux (a standard unit of illumination roughly equivalent to 125 watts) on a cloudy winter day to 100,000 lux on a clear summer day, but most of us spend our days indoors and get less than 100 lux a day! Being exposed to bright natural or artificial light during the day may raise your mood by raising your serotonin levels, but only if the light gets bright enough. That translates to at least thirty minutes a day within three feet of a light bulb burning 150–200 watts, which is equal to 2,500 lux (or lumens). There are stronger light boxes, but we’ve generally found 2,500-lux lamps very effective without the potential side effects of stronger lamps, including anxiety, nervousness, or even eye damage.8
If your spirits are not lifted by nutritional supplements alone, plan to spend a total of thirty to sixty minutes a day under your lamp without glasses or contacts on. Try to have your sessions before three P.M., as bright light later might suppress your sleep. Start with ten to fifteen minutes under your lamp and increase as needed.9 Make sure that the light can reach your pupils while you read, talk, or work on your computer. You should be able to feel the benefits right away.
We worked with a whole family, born in Mexico but living SADly in Northern California, who fell in love with the 2,500-lux Ott lamp in our office during their family education session. They each bought one to take home and extras to ship to other relatives also stranded too far north in the United States. The lamps, designed by John Ott, a pioneer in the study of the effect of light on behavior and health, contain full-spectrum fluorescent bulbs, providing natural as well as intense light.
Interestingly, exposure to bright light during the day not only improves your emotional outlook, it also helps your sleep. Bright light in the morning decreases your daytime levels of the hibernation-and-sleep-promoting brain chemical melatonin, but it will raise your nighttime levels, helping you to sleep well. In fact, poor sleepers with SAD respond best of all to light therapy.
In the “Resource Tool Kit,” you’ll find details on how and where to find anti-SAD lighting equipment.
Are You Getting Enough Exercise and Oxygen?
Ever notice that you feel better after you’ve been hiking, cycling, or working out? Exercise can definitely raise your serotonin levels. Even brief and moderate workouts will do it for most of us. You may already have developed exercise routines that you can count on to keep you going moodwise. You can probably feel the difference when you don’t get to the gym or out for a brisk walk or a swim, as your serotonin levels quickly sag again. Or are you one of those who don’t exercise much at all and miss out on this healthy, natural antidepressant activity? If so, see chapter 4 on how to increase your energy so you can get out there and enjoy it.
Here’s how exercise can increase your serotonin stores: When your muscles get to working, even during moderate exercise, they put in a routine call for amino acids for muscle repair. Your bloodstream always carries an assortment of amino acids for just such contingencies and delivers them quickly to the muscles in need. That’s true for all aminos except one—tryptophan—the only one that can be used by your brain to make serotonin. While the other aminos are being diverted, tryptophan gets a free ride right through the blood-brain barrier! Once through, it quickly converts into enough 5-HTP and then serotonin so that in half an hour or so you can go humming out of the gym, smiling out of the pool, or floating off the dance floor.
Exercise also helps raise serotonin by increasing your intake of oxygen, which is critical to the formation of serotonin from amino acids. All that huffing and puffing really pays off! (That’s probably one of the reasons why taking deep breaths when you’re angry or upset is so helpful, too.)
Exercise diminishes depression just as well as light therapy, so why not do both? Get outside and walk or jog in the sunlight whenever you can. On a clear day, even the winter outdoor light is often brighter than a therapeutic lamp and, combined with exercise, can really improve your mood. By the way, both exercise and light raise oxygen levels in the brain.10
Unfortunately, exercise-stimulated serotonin works only in the short term. (The same is true for light therapy.) You may have come to depend on exercise to keep your mood up, but you can lose this thin edge if you can’t exercise enough to keep your serotonin levels high—if you’re too tired, or too busy, or break your leg, or get sick. Fortunately, as you’ll soon see, there are other, even better ways to build and guard your serotonin stores. But if you can, get exercise outdoors during the day at least three times a week.
GETTING CLEAR ABOUT YOUR OWN DARK MOODS
Before we go into detail about how to use which nutrients to quickly optimize your serotonin levels, let’s look at how a lack of serotonin may be specifically affecting your mood, your behavior, and your life. A good baseline understanding of where you are mood-wise when you begin will give you an effective way to measure your progress. This is a good time to review the symptoms that you checked off in part 1 of the Mood-Type Questionnaire. Which symptoms did you really identify with? Which ones are you unclear about? Which ones are you unaffected by? Go through the following section and read more about the symptoms and how they do or might apply to you. You’ll come away with a clear picture of your own low-serotonin symptom state. You’ll also get a good idea of how your symptoms can change, based on the examples I’ll give you of how our clients felt and acted before, and after, they started their serotonin building programs.
Relieving Depression—How and When Do You Get Depressed?
All of the drugs, like Prozac, that stimulate serotonin activity are called “antidepressants,” so you may have wondered why I haven’t mentioned the word depression much so far. I haven’t because I’ve found the word depression to be much too vague to be very useful. If you think of yourself as depressed, what do you mean, exactly? Do you have the low energy slumps, or are you overly anxious