Important Physical Clues That Your Serotonin Is Deficient

Excerpted from
The Mood Cure : The 4-Step Program to Take Charge of Your Emotions--Today
By Julia Ross, M.A.

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. 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 serotonin levels not only has a powerful muscle-relaxing effect, it can also powerfully stimulate our natural painkillers, the endorphins. That's part of why the serotonin-specific nutrients I'm about to reveal can be so effective with painful conditions like migraines and arthritic pain, particularly in combination with a good-mood diet, the basic supplements, and the elimination of allergy foods.

Do You Have Afternoon and Evening Cravings for Ice Cream, Candy, Cereal, and Other Artificial Serotonin Boosters-Especially in the Winter?

Do you find yourself eating high-carbohydrate snacks in the late afternoons and evenings when both the light and your serotonin production start to sink? Does this really get out of hand during the darker months between Halloween and Valentine's Day? Most of these SAD calories are nutritionally empty, or worse than empty, and they are as potent as drugs in the way they can manipulate your brain and body. They can set off bodywide stress, causing your pancreas to release insulin in order to remove the excess carbohydrates from your bloodstream and store them as fat. The insulin sweeps most of the amino acids out of your bloodstream, along with the carbs. Only one amino gets left behind tryptophan and it goes right into your brain, unimpeded by the other aminos that usually crowd it out.

Ice cream, cereal and milk, and hot chocolate are favorite nighttime fixes because they contain tryptophan (all milk products do) as well as sugar. Unfortunately, these sweet foods are also highly addictive and can quickly turn into unneeded pounds. More important, they also raise blood sugar levels too high and can put you at real risk of developing diabetes. Hundreds of our clients have inadvertently developed Type II diabetes, or come close to it, as a result of using sweets to raise their serotonin levels.

Whether you start to yearn for a Snickers bar at three P.M. or half a pint of ice cream at nine P.M., the real question here is: Are you craving carbs because your serotonin levels have dropped with the sun? If you're a regular afternoon or evening craver, I'd bet on it. If you wake up in the night and eat carbs, it's a dead certainty. Swallowing one or two pro-serotonin nutrients right before you'd ordinarily crave carbs will typically knock out these cravings on the spot and spare you the negative mood that may have directed you to the fridge in the first place.

Alcohol is another carbohydrate commonly used as compensation for low serotonin levels. Do you find yourself needing a beer, a glass of wine, or a cocktail before dinner, when serotonin levels start to drop rapidly? You won't need to when you've raised your serotonin levels naturally. (Ironically, alcohol and other drugs actually reduce serotonin levels in the long run.)

Marijuana can alter many brain functions, including serotonin levels, which is why so many people smoke pot in the evenings to relax and get to sleep. But marijuana, like alcohol, ends up inhibiting serotonin production and can become addictive. It also has negative effects on brain, lung, heart, and reproductive functions.

One of the extraordinary virtues of natural serotonin boosting is that it breeds neither dependence nor diabetes. You'll be pleased, as so many of our clients have been, to enjoy its safe, effective, and legal relaxation without any negative consequences. If you suspect that low serotonin has made you, like so many others, dependent on alcohol or pot, please also look into chapter 13.