Huberman Lab - Essentials: Control Your Brain Chemistry for Focus, Motivation & Well-Being
Episode Date: August 6, 2026In this Huberman Lab Essentials episode, I explain how key neuromodulators shape motivation, energy, focus and mood throughout the day. I also describe a toolkit of science-supported behavioral, nutri...tional and supplement-based strategies to increase baseline levels for each neuromodulator, which can be modified to support your specific health and performance goals. Read the episode show notes at hubermanlab.com. Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman Eight Sleep: https://eightsleep.com/huberman ROKA: https://roka.com/huberman Timestamps (00:00:00) Optimize Neurochemicals for Health (00:00:27) Neuromodulator Levels & 3 Daily Phases (00:05:07) Hormones Modulate Neuromodulators (00:06:56) Sponsor: Eight Sleep (00:08:13) Effects of Key Neuromodulators (00:10:16) Increase Motivation & Dopamine, Tools: Morning Sunlight; Caffeine (00:13:30) Dopamine Supplements: Mucuna Pruriens, L-Tyrosine, Phenethylamine (PEA) (00:16:34) Increase Dopamine, Tool: Deliberate Cold Exposure (00:19:18) Sponsor: AG1 (00:20:31) Increase Epinephrine (Adrenaline) & Energy, Tools: Exercise, Cyclic Hyperventilation (00:24:56) Enhance Focus & Acetylcholine: Choline-Rich Foods, Nicotine (00:27:11) Acetylcholine Supplements: Alpha-GPC, Huperzine (00:28:05) Sponsor: ROKA (00:29:21) Serotonin & Mood, Tools: Gratitude, Tryptophan-Rich Foods (00:31:49) Serotonin Supplement: Myo-inositol (00:32:26) Using the Neurochemical Toolkit for Your Goals Disclaimer & Disclosures Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable
science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance.
I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.
Today we are going to discuss your brain chemistry and how to control and optimize your brain chemistry
for all aspects of mental health, physical health, and performance.
The important thing to know is that your brain and your space,
spinal cord and the rest of your so-called nervous system, control all the organs of your body
and that all the organs of your body feed back, meaning they communicate through chemicals
and other means to your nervous system. And vitally important is the fact that which neural
circuits are active and which neural circuits are likely to be less active at any given moment
depends on two major categories of chemicals.
It depends on hormones and it depends on so-called neuromodulators.
And the four neuromodulators that we're going to talk about today
that are of the utmost importance for your goals are dopamine,
epinephrine, also called adrenaline, serotonin, and acetylcholine.
There are many features of how neuromodulators work.
But for sake of today's discussion,
we only need to focus on two of those features,
and those are fast-acting features
and longer, slower features,
or what we call baseline features.
Now, perhaps surprisingly,
I'd like to focus on the slow actions
of the neuromodulators first
because those slow actions of the neuromodulators
are happening in you and in me and in everyone right now,
and they set the backdrop,
the context in which the various tools
to manipulate dopamine, epinephrine, serotonin,
or acetylcholine will work.
What do I mean by the context
or the backdrop or the baseline?
Well, it's fair to say that most people
are awake during the daytime and asleep at night.
So schedules of sleep and wakefulness will vary,
but in general, everybody,
regardless of whether or not you're nocturnal
or your so-called diurnal,
you're awake during the day,
pretty much everybody follows a schedule
in which from zero to nine hours after waking,
that is from the time you wake up until about nine hours later,
the neuromodulators dopamine and epinephrine
tend to be at their highest levels that they will be at any point
in the 24-hour period, in any period of the day.
So we can call this zero to nine hour period phase one of the day,
just for simplicity.
And I've referred to this before in a previous episode,
but not in this exact context.
from 9 to about 16 hours is what we will call phase two.
And that's when dopamine and epinephrine levels tend to subside a bit
compared to the earlier phase one part of the day.
And serotonin levels start to increase.
And then phase three of the 24 hour cycle,
which is from about, and again, about the zero approximates,
from about 17 hours after waking until about 24 hours after waking
is phase three of the day.
We're not going to focus too much on phase three today because phase three of the 24 hour cycle,
that 17 to 24 hour period is one in which you ought to be deeply asleep, whether or not
you're nocturnal or diurnal.
So we're mainly going to focus on what we're calling phase one and phase two, phase one being
this dopamine epinephrine dominated phase of our day and phase two being this more serotonergic
or serotonin dominated portion of the day.
And then you might say, well, what about acetylcholine?
You forgot about acetycholine.
Well, we didn't forget about acetylcholine.
Acetocoline is under control more in terms of what we happen to be doing at any given moment,
whether or not we're focusing or not focusing, whether not we're learning or not learning.
And here I'm referring to acetylcholine, specifically in the context of the brain and thinking,
because as some of you are probably shouting out there, right, if you're exercise for the zoologists
or you know anything about how the brain controls movement, acetylcholing is used at the
nerve to muscle synapse, right?
So neurons don't just control other neurons electrically.
The way you're able to move, in fact,
is because neurons are controlling the electric activity of muscles,
literally the contraction of muscle fibers,
and that control is exerted through the release of acetylcholine.
So acetylcholine is working at muscles as well,
but we're not focused on that today.
We're focused on what we can do during phase one of the day
and what we can do during phase two of the day
to control the specific,
neuromodulators, dopamine, epinephrine, serotonin, and acetylcholine toward particular end goals.
So again, it's really important to understand what the backdrop of these neuromodulators is,
the so-called baseline, and that they vary across the day, if you're going to be able to leverage
tools to optimize your brain chemistry. Before we dive into the more pointed, directed effects of
specific tools on neuromodulators, I'd like to just briefly mention hormones because they are also
important for understanding the background and the context and these baseline levels of neuromodulators.
Hormones have many different effects on the brain and body, and not unlike neuromodulators.
Some of those effects are very fast. Some of them are very slow. Today we want to think about hormones
as they relate to these neuromodulators, the dopamine, serotonin, epinephrine, and acetylcholine.
And in general, testosterone tends to collaborate with and increase the act.
of dopamine. That's not always the case, but in general, when testosterone goes up, dopamine
goes up. In general, when corticosterones like cortisol and some related steroid hormones increase,
epinephrine levels go up. And in general, when hormones like oxytocin or prolactin are increased,
levels of serotonin go up. And then we have poor, old, lonely acetylcholine off on its own. But it's not poor and
lonely, it actually has incredibly potent effects on its own. So it's really that it just doesn't
need much help from the hormone systems, or at least not the steroid hormone systems,
in order to have its tremendous effects. If you understand these four neuromodulators, and you
understand that while there are many tools ranging from pharmacologic to behavioral that can
tap into these neuromodulator systems that can kind of press on the gas of dopamine, pull back on
serotonin and so on, well, then you can create a sort of kit, a grab bag of things.
that you can use in any context,
or I should say that you can look to depending on the context you're in
and create the states of body and mind that you want.
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Now, once again, painting with a somewhat broad brush, but nonetheless an accurate brush,
we can say that dopamine, when elevated above baseline, tends to increase states of motivation,
both mental and physical motivation, drive and to some extent focus.
Epinephrine and a closely related molecule called norepinephrine.
And again, I want to emphasize that epinephrine is adrenaline.
and adrenaline is epinephrine,
norephyne is noradrenaline and noradrenaline is nor epinephrine.
But today we're going to just simply talk about epinephrine
and nor epinephrine.
That category of neuromodulator is mainly responsible
for generating our energy,
our level of fuel and baseline level of forward center of mass,
as I like to call it.
When epinephrine levels are high,
we tend to feel agitated,
we tend to feel like where you want to move,
We tend to feel like we can't shut down our thinking
and our anticipation of what's gonna happen next.
And when epinephrine levels are very, very low,
we actually have less physical energy.
We tend to have less mental energy
in terms of generating thoughts very quickly
and so on and so forth.
Now the neuromodulator serotonin creates a number
of different states in the brain and body,
but for sake of today's discussion,
we're going to think about the predominant states
that it creates, and those are states of contentness,
being happy, feeling fairly relaxed, feeling soothed,
and to some extent even some relief from pain
or lack of pain.
Serotonin is associated with a feeling of satiety
of having enough of what we already have.
An acetylcholine, we can say,
is mainly associated with states of focus.
And we can go a step further and say
that it's mainly associated with steps of focus
as they relate to learning and
encoding new information, so-called neuroplasticity.
So let's say you want to be more motivated.
You want to be more in pursuit of goals,
and you want to have more energy and to be more focused.
There are many ways to go about that.
In fact, there's a near-infinite cloud of opportunities,
everything from prescription drugs to illicit drugs,
which I certainly do not recommend.
Supplements nutrition, you can listen to particular music.
You can do all sorts of cognitive, behavioral,
nutritional supplementation tricks,
or you can just understand that what you're really after
are increases in dopamine above baseline that you control,
and there are ways to control them that are quite potent,
and science tells us which tools are going to be the most potent
and the most versatile for you.
So I'm going to share those tools with you now
with the caveat that each one of those tools
could be its own entire podcast episode
and that we've done near entire episodes on each of these tools or small collections of these
tools. So I'm going to cover these in somewhat superficial manner. Let's say you want to increase
dopamine for sake of increasing motivation. The first thing to do is to understand what the
natural behavioral tools are for increasing dopamine and to do those as consistently as possible.
Again, these are tools that you'll want to do nearly every day, if not every day. And I know I'm
sounding like a broken record on this one,
but here again, we come to sunlight and,
I should say not just the desire to,
but really the need for viewing the maximum amount
of sunlight that one can reasonably get,
given schedules and locations in the world, time of year, et cetera,
in the early part of the day.
Within the first hour of waking, ideally,
but certainly in the first three hours of your day,
you're going to want to maximize sunlight exposure
to your eyes.
Never look at the sun or any other light so bright that it's painful to look at.
And yes, of course, blinking is fine.
But no, take sunglasses off, go outside once the sun is out and get some natural light
in your eyes.
So if you get sunlight exposure to your eyes and it does have to be to your eyes in the early
part of the day, you increase the amount of dopamine receptor that you have, which allows
whatever circulating dopamine happens to be there to have a greater effect on a motivation
and I should say also on mood and feelings of being in pursuit and generally in craving
and pursuit of things in life.
Now there's another way to increase the effect of whatever dopamine happens to be circulating
in your brain and body.
And this again relates to increasing the number or the efficacy of the receptors for dopamine.
How do you do that?
Well, it turns out that regular ingestion of caffeine at safe and appropriate levels
of about 100 to 250 milligrams is going to increase the number of D2 and D3 dopamine receptors.
When you drink caffeine, it's going to increase your levels of adrenaline and so-called epinephrine,
which will increase your energy levels.
It's going to decrease levels of something called adenosine, which builds up while you're sleepy.
It's going to make you feel less sleepy, more alert, more energetic.
That's sort of obvious.
But what's less obvious is that it's increasing the number and efficacy of dopamine receptors
so that whatever dopamine happens to be around in your system is going to have more of a potent effect.
So these are ways of modulating, more or less the baseline of dopamine that you,
are able to produce and the ways that dopamine can have its action by way of binding to receptors
more potently. Now, there are other ways to increase dopamine in a more acute or directed way,
ways to spike your dopamine to enhance your state of motivation, mood, focus, and so on. If you're
somebody who has or is taking drugs for depression or mania, please be very cautious about
manipulating your dopamine in any case. I don't just say that to protect us. I say that to protect
you. But if we were to look at the supplement landscape and ask which supplements increase
dopamine, there are a vast number of them. But the three main ones, the most effective ones that
are readily available out there without a prescription, are macuna prurines. This is actually the
outside of a velvety bean that has been extracted and put into a supplement. Macunapurines is actual
el-dopa. It's 99% el-dopa, which is a prescription.
drug that is given for Parkinson's and for other purposes where increasing dopamine is important.
I don't recommend macuna prurines. I'm not saying that no one should take it, but I don't take it and I
don't recommend it because it tends to so potently and acutely increase dopamine that there's a
pretty substantial crash afterwards. The other two supplements that can increase dopamine
in a short-term way, but in a significant way, are L-tyrosine. So you can buy that as a
a supplemented amino acid. People vary tremendously in their sensitivity to supplementing
L-tyrosine. I know people that can take two grams. I know people that can barely take 100
milligrams. I know people that the best dose for them is zero milligrams. So there's a lot of
variation there depending on sensitivity and their natural baseline levels of dopamine and whether
or not they're doing a lot of other things to support dopamine. But nonetheless, taking L-tyrosine
will lead to fairly substantial increases in dopamine within about 15 to 45 minutes. And it lasts for
about 30 minutes to two hours and then there's kind of a tapering off. Some people experience a
little bit of an emotional and or, I should say, energetic crash. Some people don't. And then the
other supplement that I certainly use and that I know a number of other people use is more fast
acting but more potent, which is phenylethylalanine. This relates to the so-called P-E-A molecule,
P-P-E-A. And phenylethylethylane increases dopamine and some metabolites related to dopamine in ways that
really increase energy and feelings of well-being and motivation. And again, it's fast acting.
So my particular protocol, the one I use is I'll take phenylethylamine at dosages of about
300 to 600 milligrams along with some L-tyrosine, or I'll take it on its own with a molecule,
or I should say a compound that we'll talk about a little bit later as it relates to acetylcholine
alpha-GPC. But tyrosine and phenylethylatlamine taken alone or together will make you feel more
motivated and more alert, more willing and able to lean into particular motivated behaviors,
whether or not they're physical or cognitive. But leaving that aside, there are certain behavioral
protocols that are unrelated to your overall goals and motivations that can increase dopamine
in a very sustained way. And without question, the most potent behavioral tool for doing that
is going to be deliberate cold exposure. Deliberate cold exposure has been talked about a lot
here and elsewhere in terms of its ability to do things like reduce inflammation as a way
to test and improve resilience because uncomfortable cold provided it's applied safely
is a great way to learn to be more resilient because you're essentially staying or forcing
yourself to stay in a circumstance where your system is flooded with adrenaline.
As I mentioned before, dopamine tends to collaborate with epinephrine and vice versa.
Many people will ask which protocols to follow.
Please see the episode on the use of deliberate cold for health and performance.
You'll find that, Hubermanlap.com.
So the use of cold water for increasing dopamine is a real tool.
It's, I would say, a power tool.
I want to just briefly return to the fact, however, that all of that is riding on that phase
one, phase two background, meaning it's probably going to take less cold water exposure,
or I should say less time doing cold water exposure early in the day to get a big,
increase in dopamine than it would later in the day. Because later in the day, your baseline
levels of dopamine are lower and you've got more serotonin circulating. That should make sense to you
now as to why that's the case. And does that mean that you should really modify your protocols dramatically?
Probably not. But you might keep that in mind that if, for instance, you need to be in a highly
motivated focused state in the late part of the day for whatever reason, it might take a few or more
of these tools in combination in order to accomplish that. Whereas if you're somebody who feels pretty
good during the day, but you're kind of lacking motivation and you want to increase dopamine levels
and you don't yet need to or want to resort to prescription drugs or supplementation, well,
then you might layer in a couple behavioral protocols paying attention to, of course, the things
that you might be doing that would also potentially suppress dopamine. So again, that kit of tools
is designed for you to play with if you choose, if it's safe for you, to apply them, then do that.
Consider doing them individually, not trying to hit all the tools all at once, right? I mean,
why throw all those tools at your dopamine system at once?
Better would be to have those tools in your kit and be able to deploy them
depending on whether or not you're on travel,
whether not you're eating well or less well,
whether not you're sleeping well or less well.
That's highly individual.
And I like to think that in having those tools in hand,
you'll be able to adjust them and apply them in the ways that allow you to access
the dopamine increases that you're after.
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So next I'd like to talk about epinephrine,
also called adrenaline.
I want to point out that epinephrine
is released both in the brain and the body.
In fact, there's a barrier between brain and body
that prevents the epinephrine that's released
from your adrenal glands crossing the blood brain barrier.
So your brain has a separate site
called the Locus serulius.
This is a collection of,
of neurons in the back of the brain that kind of sprinkler the rest of the brain with epinephrine
and essentially wakes up whatever neural circuits happen to see, or I should say, wake up any
circuits where that epinephrine happens to arrive, right, and generally increase the excitability
of those networks. That's why we say epinephrine increases energy. I'm not talking about
caloric energy, although that's distantly related to this, but really energy and the desire to
moved. For many people, increasing adrenaline or epinephrine might seem like a crazy idea.
Most people probably associate this molecule with stress and then it would like to be less stressed.
But there are people, including me, that want to increase our levels of epinephrine, at least
early in the day. I'm somebody who wakes up rather slowly. In fact, I tend to be kind of thinking
about thinking about maybe being in action early in the day. But I try and push myself to get into action,
which itself can increase epinephrine.
I should mention that any physical activity,
any physical activity, walking, running, weightlifting, swimming,
even talking for that matter,
is going to increase levels of epinephrine.
Locus serulius is a brain structure
that is tightly coupled with behaviors
in a bidirectional way.
That is, when you are in action,
you increase the amount of epinephrine released from locus.
You wake up the brain.
And conversely, when Locus Cirulius is active, the brain wakes up.
So it's reciprocal.
It goes both directions.
So keep that in mind.
Exercise does indeed give you energy.
It burns caloric energy, but it gives you neural energy by way of increasing epinephrine
transmission from Locus serulius.
So we have exercise and we have caffeine as potent tools for increasing epinephrine and thereby energy.
Another potent tool that's purely behavioral, but is known to work based on excellent studies
in humans is so-called cyclic hyperventilation. Some of you may be familiar with Wimhoff
breathing. There's also Tumo breathing, which is very similar, Kundalini breathing. All of those
styles of breathing involve cyclic hyperventilation. Deep inhales and either passive exhales or
active exhales, but repeating inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale in a very deep and repetitive way.
If you did that for 25 repetitions, 25 inhales and exhales, you would feel more alert. You'd also feel more
warm, why? Because you increased epinephrine adrenaline release in the brain and body. It works the first
time and it works every time to increase epinephrine and thereby energy. If you do that over and over,
you're going to be very alert. You're going to have more energy. You're going to feel like you want to
move around a lot more. In fact, you might even feel agitated. So people with a lot of anxiety or prone
to panic attack might want to be cautious in how they train and embark on that type of breathing,
might want to approach it a little more carefully or avoid it altogether. But for most people,
cyclic hyperventilation is simply going to get.
you more energized and feeling like you want to move, feeling like you can think more clearly
and you will be more wide-eyed and alert because you are releasing adrenaline. And the cold water
exposure protocol that I talked about earlier and that's covered in our episode on cold
and in the newsletter on cold, well, that as I mentioned earlier potently increases dopamine,
but also epinephrine. Now we can't really say that there are foods to increase epinephrine.
There are, of course, prescription drugs that will increase epinephrine. And of course,
There are all sorts of so-called beta blockers
that will block the receptors for epinephrine
to make you feel calm for public speaking
or for various heart conditions, et cetera.
That's really the domain of physicians
and should really be worked out
with your cardiologist, with a physician, et cetera.
I think the tools of exercise
and should you want very potent increases
in adrenaline, high intensity exercise,
as well as the tools of caffeine,
cyclic hyperventilation,
and deliberate cold exposure,
really combined to give you a nice little kit,
I would say a versatile kit of ways to increase epinephrine
for sake of having more physical and mental energy.
So next is the neuromodulator acetylcholine.
And as I mentioned earlier,
acetylcholine is associated with states of focus.
And those states of focus can be high energy states of focus,
so the ones that are accompanied by high levels of dopamine
and epinephrine,
and where we're really excited about
and really lasered in on something,
or they can be the calmer, more relaxed states of focus,
like reading a book or practicing music
or listening very carefully to somebody
in a way that's relaxed and calm.
Now, ways to increase acetylcholine in a potent way
include, again, nutrition and supplementation.
It is important to have baseline levels of acetylcholine
be sufficiently high as well.
And for that, the ideal situation is to regularly ingest foods,
that provide enough of the precursors for acetylcholine to be made.
Eggs contain a lot of chlorine, beef contains chlorine, soybeans contain chlorine.
So there are vegan or non-meat sources.
Chicken, fish, mushrooms, kidney beans, these sorts of things contain a lot of chlorine.
And there are other vegetables that contain chlorine.
So depending on your dietary preferences and needs,
you can select certain foods to ingest to get enough chlorine to synthesize enough
baseline acetylcholine.
In the realm of supplementation, there's some excellent
tools for increasing acetylcholine in the acute short term, meaning over the course of about
30 minutes out to about two hours or maybe even four hours. The most common of those molecules
is actually nicotine. Nicotinic acetylcholine receptors are abundant throughout the body and brain.
They're in various brain circuits. They are on muscle. And yes, smoking nicotine either by vaping or
cigarette will activate those nicotinic receptors. But, of course,
course, smoking is a terrible thing. It will also activate things like lung cancer. So I definitely
don't recommend that. It also activates addiction because of the ways that it triggers activation
of the dopamine circuits. However, some people will chew Nicorette or other nicotine-type gums.
Some people are very sensitive to ingested nicotine. Some people take it and feel absolutely
terrible. But some people do use them as cognitive enhancers. Supplements that I have used and do
use for increasing acetylcholine are things like alpha gPC or huperzine alpha gpc is in the
colonelene pathway such that more acetylcholine is synthesized after you ingest it that's the general
logic or framework of how it works whereas hoopersine is mainly in the enzymatic pathway it tends to
adjust how much acetylcholine is broken down and lead to net increases in acetylcholine i will often
take 300 milligrams of alpha GPC prior to workouts or prior to cognitive work bouts. I tend to take it
alongside caffeine and phenylethyl amine. So I take that in combination, either before workouts or
workbouts, really sharpens my focus. And again, I'm doing that three, maybe four times per week.
And I'm careful to do that in the early part of the day so that it does not disrupt my sleep.
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So let's discuss serotonin.
Serotonin, as I mentioned earlier, is associated with brain and body states of well-being,
of comfort, of satiety, and therefore it should come as no surprise that a lot of the
prescription drug treatments for things like depression involve increasing levels of serotonin
in the brain and body.
That said, anytime you talk about prescription drugs for serotonin,
We also want to acknowledge that there are often side effects associated with increasing serotonin.
In particular, if serotonin levels go too high, that is, if the dosages of those treatments go too
high, people will, for instance, feel reduced appetite, reduced libido, increased lethargy,
et cetera. And there's a so-called serotonergic syndrome. That said, there are behavioral tools,
nutritional tools, and supplementation tools that can tap into the serotonin system,
not to the same degree in potency, but nonetheless, in ways that can still instillers,
impact our feelings of well-being in positive ways.
What sorts of things?
Well, for instance, physical contact,
things like holding hands, believe it or not,
hugs, cuddling, et cetera,
can increase serotonin transmission
and they make people feel good.
This shouldn't really come as a surprise.
There's also gratitude,
and we did an entire episode about gratitude.
There's a lot of misunderstanding about gratitude.
Turns out, first of all,
that receiving, not giving gratitude
is what has the most potent
effects on increasing serotonin and activity of the brain circuits that involve serotonin
and that lead to increases in feelings of well-being. So it's interesting. Receiving much more
than giving gratitude is what activates those serotonergic pathways. The other thing about gratitude
that's somewhat counterintuitive is that observing others giving and receiving gratitude is immensely
powerful for evoking serotonin and the activity of serotonergic circuits in you, the observer. So
receiving and observing gratitude turns out to be the most potent way to increase serotonin in the brain
and body. Now, what about nutritional approaches to increasing serotonin? Well, just as we have
tyrosine as an amino acid precursor upstream of dopamine synthesis, we have the amino acid
tryptophan, which is upstream of serotonin synthesis. And one simply has to go online and put in
triptophan containing foods and you will discover that there are a lot of foods that are enriched
in triptophan that can lead to net increases in the amount of serotonin available in the brain and body.
Now, one molecule that I've found to be particularly interesting and useful, and this is one
that I haven't talked about yet on this podcast, is inocetol, in particular, myoinocetol.
Myoinocetol can have the effect of increasing serotonin and other neurochemicals, but primarily,
at least in terms of the neuromodulators discussed today, serotonin.
I've been taking 900 milligrams of myoinocetal every third night or so as a test of its ability
to improve sleep.
And I have to say the depth and quality of sleep that I've been obtaining on myoanositol
is pretty remarkable.
And of course, I should mention that no supplement, either added or withdrawn from your
protocol, should ever be used as a direct replacement for prescription drug treatments that
your physician has given you.
You should always talk to your physician anytime you remove or add something to your drug protocol
or prescription protocol, of course.
Again, this is a general theme of all four of these neuromodulators, dopamine, epinephrine,
acetyluconin, and serotonin.
You want to make sure that you have sufficient baseline levels of those things through things like diet,
regular behaviors, and then you have the opportunity to use supplementation.
And if it's appropriate for you, prescription drugs and certain behavioral protocols to try
and get these potent increases, these acute increases in whichever the neuromodulators you happen to want
to leverage for your particular goals. So that brings us to the end of at least this exploration of
the neuromodulators, dopamine, epinephrine, acetylcholine, and serotonin, whether or not you're using
nutritional tools or supplementation or prescription drugs or any other sort of protocol to try
and create a desired effect of focus or energy, motivation, relaxation, you're playing with
the same neurochemical ingredients. So what I'm hoping is that rather than decide that any one tool
is the most useful, or that any one neurochemical is most useful for that matter, that the
information that I've provided today allows you a kit of versatile tools that allows you
to figure out what levels of dopamine and augmentation of dopamine are appropriate and necessary
for you. What levels of acetylcholine and tools for manipulating acetylcholine are going to be
most useful for you and so on and so forth. So I'd like to thank you once again for joining me today
in our discussion about these incredibly powerful molecules we call neuromodulators and the things
we can do and take in order to control them so that we can enhance our mental health,
physical health and performance.
And last but certainly not least,
thank you for your interest in science.
