What are some causes of neurotransmitter imbalance?
Those are very big words but we're here to talk about that today.
Im Dr. Carrie Lam. This is Dr. Michael Lam.
What exactly does neurotransmitter imbalance kind of look like?
Well, we are seeing so many people with adrenal issues that kind of come in with
I would not say mood imbalances,
but it's just something is not quite right.
Some days they are irritable, some days they feel calm.
Often times intertwined and sprinkled with anxieties
and sometimes panic attacks and unable to sleep.
When you put the whole picture together,
it's just as if a body is very irritable.
It's just not steady so it's like the wind blows and they kind of fall over.
A lot of it has to deal with the bridge between how we receive sensory signals
to how the body ultimately physiologically behave.
This bridge from sensory - let's say what you hear, what you see,
let's say you see a robbery in process,
then you can get excited, okay, and you start running away for example.
How does this get signal? This neurotransmitter is responsible for this.
Now, this imbalance is obviously when things are not quite right
and the body has it's own balancing system.
It's automatic but certain things can happen such as our dietary choices
and you can tell us about some of the common problems
Right. How does somebody become imbalanced in neurotransmitters?
Your gut is very important
in helping in neurotransmitters with the receptors and even processing it, okay.
When your gut is unhealthy, whether you're eating unhealthily or processed foods
or you're having a lot of diarrhea or loose bowels or constipation or like slow bowels,
that could all affect how your neurotransmitters are being
balanced or accepted into the body or transmitted.
Yeah, in fact, the gut is also called the second brain
because, you know, many, many of the brain's
neurotransmitter including popular ones and common such as serotonin,
the precursor are made primarily in the gut
and is then transported into the brain where it is made into the final product.
An obvious toxins, like alcohol. Drinking alcohol can really kill a lot of your gut cells
or even smoking.
We talked about the junk food and so it's so important to keep a healthy gut
in order to keep a healthy second brain, right?
I talked earlier about how sensory signals can affect our physiological well-being
and nowadays, if you are an adrenaline junkie or you are excited easily,
you are looking for excitation responses,
sensory overload can cause the body
to be firing the neurotransmitters all the time.
Now, we know that there are different kinds of neurotransmitters.
There's excitatory kind,
there's inhibitory kind and usually they are balanced by themselves.
but if you cause a bias where the body is always firing all the time of the excitatory neurotransmitters,
then you have the consequences.
Well, not only adrenaline junkies, but just light flickering,
so the TV, watching TV a lot can keep
throwing sensory overload to your eyes or using a computer or the phone
and that's what we are seeing more and more of.
You'd be surprised how frequent this is even though people may not realize,
and that's why it's always a good practice to cut down
sensory stimuli after late afternoon so your brain gets a chance to rest.
Yes, and other environmental toxins other than light can also affect your neurotransmitters,
whether it's toxin in your laundry detergent, the pesticides in the food that you're eating.
They can all interfere with the receptors and the neurotransmitter,
how they transmit themselves.
Living in this world is actually not too easy if you want to have good neurotransmitter function
and perhaps the most important contributor is stress
because stress causes the body to be in excitation mode all the time
because the body perceives stress as a threat to survival.
The only way it knows what to do is to keep firing
the neurotransmitter to get adrenaline up to get the norepinephrine up,
and when you have a body that's always on overdrive, eventually it burns out.
Right. That's all the causes of neurotransmitter imbalances that we've talked about today.
We hope that you enjoyed this video. We're here to empower you to take control of your health.