Do GABA or glycine supplements wake
you up when you're trying to go to sleep?
Hi. I'm Dr. Chris Masterjohn of
chrismasterjohnphd.com, and this is
Chris Masterjohn Lite, where the name of the game is
"Details? Shmeetails. Just tell me what works!"
And today we're going to talk about an
unusual reaction to glycine or GABA.
Meesch says, "Something about glycine is
excitatory for me. If I take it at night,
I don't sleep. I have tried plain glycine
and magnesium glycinate. I do consume
it during the day via gelatin. However, if I take
niacinamide at night, I sleep markedly better.
It somehow affects that 3 AM wakeup
that can happen, and instead I sleep
soundly all night. I'm an "overmethylator."
I have no idea if this has anything
to do with the effects of glycine or niacinamide."
Meesch, my suspicion is that this is not related to
methylation and it's actually related to
energy metabolism because remember,
although niacin in the form of niacinamide
or any other does sap up methyl
groups, niacin also is really important
to energy metabolism, and that's its primary
role is to support energy metabolism.
So, let's take what Meesch has said and look
at the more general principle. Glycine,
like GABA, are—these are the two
main inhibitory neurotransmitters. That
means in your nervous system, they will
tend to relax you. They will tend to help
you sleep. That's an oversimplification
because really inhibiting one nerve might
stimulate another process, but in general,
these are supposed to be inhibitory and
relaxing, whereas something like
glutamate, the main excitatory
neurotransmitter, is excitatory and
should be stimulating. So why would you
get something seemingly excitatory about
these inhibitory neurotransmitters? Why
would they give you anxiety or keep you
from sleeping when they should relax you
and help you sleep? Well, if you look at
the chemistry of this at the level of
what's happening at the neuron, yes, GABA
and glycine are inhibitory, but the way
they are inhibitory, the way that they're
relaxing, so to speak, just to oversimplify,
is that they help bring chloride into
the cell. And if they don't help bring
chloride into the cell, they do not
inhibit the neuron. In fact, if they let
chloride out of the cell, then they
excite the neuron. And whether they let
chloride in or out all depends on the
concentration of chloride. Usually
there's a lot of chloride outside the
cell, so they open a chloride channel, and
it all goes in, and the neuron gets
inhibited. But sometimes there's a lot of
chloride inside the cell, they open that
same chloride channel, the chloride comes
out, and the neuron gets excited.
So why might you not have
chloride accumulating outside the cell
like you're supposed to?
Well, one basic thing that you would
think of is energy metabolism. It takes a
lot of energy to pump all these ions,
chloride and the other ones, into the
right places. And if anything about your
energy metabolism fails, then that might
be a reason why these inhibitory
neurotransmitters are having the
opposite effect that they should. When
you think about energy metabolism, that
could mean something like fixing insulin
resistance and diabetes, or fixing a
thyroid disorder, two big things that can
lower your cellular energy production.
It could mean nutritional support for
anything involved in energy metabolism.
Meesch was talking about niacinamide.
Niacin is a major part of the energy
metabolism system, but so are another six
of the B vitamins, and so are many other
components, including minerals. I have a
whole section on the system of energy metabolism in
Testing Nutritional Status: The Ultimate Cheat Sheet.
It's a super complicated topic, but any nutritional
support for energy metabolism should
help correct this. Another thing would be
making sure that you're getting the
right ions because everything is about
the balance of chloride along with
sodium and potassium especially, but also
to some degree, magnesium and calcium,
so make sure that you have enough calcium
and magnesium in your diet. Magnesium again
being super important to ATP production
as well, as well as being an important
ion in the flux around the neuron, but
make sure that you're consuming enough
potassium and enough salt.
That means salting your food to taste,
and it means getting enough potassium.
I'll link in the description to the
previous episodes that I've made about
getting enough potassium. And it also
means making sure that you're eating
enough food. We do have the problem of
being overweight associated with insulin
resistance, and that can hurt your ATP
production, but not eating enough food,
starving yourself chronically, can also
lower your ATP production, and if you're
just not eating enough calories, that
might be a reason why things are going a
bit haywire inside your nervous system.
Now, finally I'll say that you could have
cellular damage to the neurons, that are
damaging the transporters, and that could
be a reason why things are working
backwards. I'm not a neurologist, and so I
can't pronounce about exactly how to
find neurological damage in this video,
but if you do have a neurological
disorder, that could be something that
you need to work directly with a
neurologist about, and that's something
that I can't address in this episode.
Nevertheless, focusing on energy
metabolism, on salt, potassium, calcium, and
magnesium are all very wise things to do
when thinking about why glycine or GABA
might have the opposite effects that
Signing off, this is Chris Masterjohn of
chrismasterjohnphd.com. This has been
Chris Masterjohn Lite.