The Wellness Rebel Podcast

Demystifying Low Serotonin: Boost Your Levels Fast | Ep. 17

• Season 2 • Episode 17

Share episode

Curious about naturally boosting your serotonin levels to decrease depression and anxiety?

We have 2 incredible nutrients that can do just that- and within minutes to hours, not weeks or years!!

5-HTP and Tryptophan have both been used in the holistic mental health space for decades. These natural nutrients are the precursors to making serotonin, our body's feel-good, happy neurotransmitter. 


In this episode you'll learn:

  • What low serotonin looks and feels like
  • Why we might have low serotonin- the top 4 root causes in my practice
  • How to use either 5-HTP or Tryptophan to naturally rebuild your serotonin stores 
  • My experience using 5-HTP with clients and for my own low moods (which were connected to spike protein illness and it's documented affects on the nervous system)


Episode Links:

🌻 Mood Alchemy

🌻 Download the Free Mood Type Questionnaire HERE 

🌻 Take the Pyrrole Test HERE (low zinc + B6)

🌻 Fullscript Link to Buy 5-HTP and Tryptophan at a Discount



Book with Annika at: nourishedbynature.co
Instagram: @nourished_by_nature_wellness




This podcast episode is for educational and informational purposes only and solely as a self-help tool for your own use. I am not providing medical, psychological, or nutrition therapy advice. You should not use this information to diagnose or treat any health problems or illnesses without consulting your own medical practitioner. Always seek the advice of your own medical practitioner and/or mental health provider about your specific health situation. For my full Disclaimer, please go to https://www.nourishedbynature.co/disclaimer



SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to the Wellness Rebel Podcast, your cozy space for all things holistic mental wellness and alternative healing wisdom. I'm your host, Annika, from Nourished by Nature Wellness. Let's dive in. Hey guys, welcome back to the podcast. It is so good to be here. It's been a while since I recorded an episode, and I'm so, so excited about today's topic. Like you have no idea. I think this is a really, really important thing to talk about, which is how to raise our serotonin levels. Low serotonin is an epidemic. I don't know if you've noticed. There's so much depression, so much anxiety, and serotonin is linked to anxiety and depression directly. I think a lot of the time in mainstream medicine, we are told, like, oh yeah, you have symptoms of low serotonin. So we're gonna get you on an SSRI or a different type of mood medication to help with the low serotonin, but we're not really taught how to actually raise serotonin naturally, right? These mood medications can help what little serotonin we do have circulate in the system longer. Um, but I think if we all understood how to support our serotonin system, our nervous system, our brain, um, to actually make more serotonin, I just think that that is more practical for like our long-term health, right? It's it's a it's a big picture long-term solution. So we are gonna get into it. We are gonna talk all about like what does low serotonin look like and feel like? Why do we get low serotonin? Um, we're gonna talk about how to raise serotonin levels naturally, and then I'll share my own experience with 5HTP and how I use this with my clients. Now, what I want for you is to be able to come away at the end of this episode feeling like you have the tools, you have the information, and you can go support your own serotonin levels. So I'm actually gonna start off reading a little bit from the book called The Mood Cure, and this is by Julia Ross. She is the really the first pioneer who brought amino acid therapy to all of us. And this was written back in the early 2000s. Um, but she says when your brain has enough serotonin, it can cheerfully fire away with this ready fuel supply, transmitting positive feelings and thoughts. If not, these happy reactions are blocked. But that does not simply leave you feeling emotionally blank. Unfortunately, a decrease in serotonin can produce the reverse of every warm, happy feeling that adequate serotonin would normally allow you to experience. Instead of seeing your glass half full, you see it as half empty. Instead of feeling proud of your accomplishments, all you can think of is that of what you haven't accomplished. Instead of a sound sleep, you get insomnia. Instead of enjoying family members, you're irritated by them. Instead of peace, you have anxiety. Instead of looking forward to life, you may regard it with dread. Honestly, reading that, I just can't help but think of Harry Potter and the Dementors. I just can't help it because it's exactly describing, you know, when the Dementors are nearby, they just suck all the joy and happy thoughts out of you. And that is what it feels like to have low serotonin. Um, but the good news is we have solutions. So let's talk about what it might feel like, a few really common traits of low serotonin, and then we're gonna get into the rest of the episode. Why do we get low serotonin and how can we actually fix this? So, some symptoms of low serotonin are things like anxiety, panic, phobias, obsessive thoughts or behaviors like OCD, um, feeling really irritable, angry. Um, you might feel just really low, really low thoughts, really negative thoughts, really dark thoughts, feeling hopeless, feeling like, what's the point anymore? I'm just at the end of my rope. Um, there can be um excessive self-criticism, low self-esteem, PMS is common. There can be afternoon or evening cravings for carbs because when your serotonin's already low, and then the afternoon and evening comes, it starts to just naturally dip. You will end up having even lower serotonin, and so you're going to the refrigerator or to the pantry to, you know, eat something to make you feel better. And of course you are because your serotonin's low, and you know, that can help you feel a little bit more stable. So, why do we get low serotonin? There are a lot of different reasons, but there's only a few main reasons that I see over and over and over again when I'm working with clients, and I've seen it in myself, my friends, my family. So I'm gonna go over the top ones. So, number one would be our gut health. So things like SIBO, parasites, um you know, anything that's gonna disrupt our microbiome because our serotonin, they estimate around 90% of our serotonin is actually made in the gut. So we have to have a healthy balance of good probiotics and good bacteria in the gut to be able to be creating enough serotonin. And that's really, really important. So anything that's gonna throw that off, if it's um any type of gut issue, any inflammation in the body is going to impact our serotonin pathway. So, number two, and this might be something you're not expecting, is mold exposure. So, mold exposure can really impact our serotonin pathway and really put the body in that freeze response. The body senses that there's um toxins coming in, creating inflammation. It's doing the best it can to get rid of the toxins from the mold. These are really powerful neurotoxins. And it will inflame the brain, inflame the gut. And like I said, the body then senses we're in danger. We need to go into energy conservation, we need to shut down, and we can go into that freeze, overwhelm, shutdown response of the nervous system. And when we're there and there's a lot of brain inflammation, our serotonin can't be made in the robust way it's supposed to be manufactured in the body. And we can get really bad anxiety, we can get really bad depression from the neurotoxins in the mold. So that's something that I actually have had clients who had unexplained depression and were doing things like going to counselors and doing all the right things, right? Um, but this persistent, unexplained depression felt like there's just no joy in life, no motivation. Come to find out um with a few of these clients that there's actually mold. And then we test it. We find black mold in their body in the home, and then we have an explanation for these really low moods that just popped up out of nowhere. And so definitely want to address the mold, but sometimes that can take a little bit of time figuring out how to find where the mold is in the home. Um, sometimes you have to actually move out while it's getting taken care of. And so, in between all of that, you can support yourself, your serotonin system with 5 HTP or tryptophan, which we're gonna talk about. And that's worked really well for my clients who have mold issues and they're constantly exposed. But we need to take care of that, you know, low serotonin depression right then and there. So we'll use the 5 HTP or the tryptophan. Number three is one of my favorite things to talk about, which is pyral disorder. So I won't get super detailed because I have a whole podcast about pyral disorder, but pyral disorder is an inborn genetic um expression that happens in uh a large percentage of people with anxiety or depression. And what it means is that your body's producing too many cryptopyrs, which pulls out the zinc and B6 from your system. And without zinc and B6, you cannot make serotonin. So these people, and I have been one of them with really low zinc and B6, and this genetic expression where we're just automatically pulling out all the zinc and B6 all the time from the body, leaves you with low serotonin and just feeling really, really bad. Now, people with pyral disorder, you might actually get to the point where you have extreme mood swings, extreme, extreme depression, terrible anxiety and panic attacks. Um it's it's not a pretty picture, but it's so easily fixed. And I have helped so many people just in the last few years with pyral disorder and seen absolutely miraculous outcomes when we support their zinc and B6. But in the middle of all of that, again, as we're building up their nutrients and their healing through pyral disorder, we can use amino acids to help them feel better right in the moment. So the last common cause of low serotonin is undermethylation. About 40% of people with depression in a decades-long study by the Walsh Research Institute had undermethylation. So that's a large percentage. So undermethylation, again, I won't get into the science of it too much, but it is related to the MTHFR gene. You've probably heard about that. You might have even gotten yourself or your kids tested for the MTHFR genetic SNP, which does impact, if it's expressing itself, does impact methylation. And so if we're not methylating properly, then our whole serotonin pathway can't function properly. So people with undermethylation typically have very low serotonin output. So we can give your body the nutrients it needs to start methylating again, methionine or SAM-E, and that's really important. But again, in between, we will give you 5 HGP or tryptophan to help you have enough serotonin in the moment and to help those moods to lift so you feel calm, clear, alive, and well while we're addressing those deeper root causes for low serotonin. Okay, so let's talk about how we can naturally raise our serotonin levels. So there are two incredible supplements to rebuild and to help boost our serotonin supply naturally in the body. 5HTP and tryptophan. These are two of the amino acids we use in amino acid therapy to raise and boost serotonin levels. We do not use both of them at the same time. It's one or the other. And the reason being is that everyone responds differently. Some people respond amazing to tryptophan and not so much to 5 HDP. Some people respond amazing to 5 HDP like I do and not so great to tryptophan. So with both of these incredible supplements, they help you because they're both the precursors to making serotonin in the body, they will help give you the raw materials instantly so that your brain and nervous system can make serotonin. So for 5 HTP, you can start at a lower dose of 50 milligrams and you can go up to 150 milligrams for a dose. We normally do that twice a day, mid-afternoon and at bedtime. And you can take it with meals. Um, taking it with meals won't interact with the way that it works in the body. So the a good low dose to start with for tryptophan, you could do 200 to 500 milligrams. 500 is typical, up to 1500 milligrams twice a day, mid-afternoon, and at bedtime. I should also mention that if you have any negative reactions to tryptophan or to 5HTP, you can just take a thousand milligrams of vitamin C. You can get like the vitamin C packets. If you're like me and you're very sensitive to supplements, just have that vitamin C with you when you trial these and you can put your mind at ease, knowing that that will pause any effects of the amino acids, good or bad. Um, and so I just tell people that because we're coming to this usually feeling stressed, anxious, depressed. And so it can be a little nerve-wracking try trying new supplements. And I don't want you to ever feel that way. So having the vitamin C is like really nice, just insurance to know like if I start to not feel good on this, I have this and it will just stop any of the effects. So the only cautions with these two supplements is take them away. If you are taking mood medications like SSRIs, um, please take them away from those mood medications so we don't have any, you know, excess serotonin. There have been studies done showing that Ltreptophan and 5 HTP actually increased the effectiveness of SSRIs, and in some countries, they use those alongside mood medications to make them work better. But here for our purposes, we want to be careful. We want to take these six hours away from mood medications, and we always want to get the okay from our doctor first. So, my story with 5 HTP, I actually started using it this year. So there's a few times that I needed it, but one of the times was I felt like I was coming down with a virus. Uh, you know the one, the one that's been around since 2020, and it works differently than normal colds and flus um because it's manufactured, it's created to do something in the body. And so what one of the things I noticed that it does is it creates a lot of nervous system inflammation. For me, I will get very depressed or feel very anxious when I feel my body is fighting that virus type thing that's going around. And so I'm gonna do a podcast all about how we can naturally um detox spike proteins because it's just practical information we have to have in this day and age. But I needed something to help my moods because suddenly here I am feeling so depressed, so low. And so I stopped and I noticed this is low serotonin. No matter what the cause is, whether it's, you know, a gut infection, if it's parasites, if it's mold, if it's a weird virus going around and flaming the nervous system, we still have the tools to support this low serotonin in the moment. So I went and I grabbed my bottle of 5 HTP. I opened a capsule onto my tongue. That way it gets into the bloodstream really fast. And then you guys won't even believe me because it sounds so ridiculous. But within a few seconds to maybe three minutes tops, I was feeling myself again and that deep depression was lifting. I felt like my mood was stable and I felt like, oh, everything's gonna be fine. To feel so, you know, safe and stable and normal again that fast was totally mind-blowing. I have used it many times since. Um, whether it's, you know, having low moods from like the gut infection and the parasites that I finally resolved over the summer, um, or anytime I start to get sick and feel that familiar low mood coming on, it has helped me every time. And so I'm just consistently taking it now just once or twice a day to help rebuild my serotonin because I had so many gut issues and I know that my serotonin stores are so low. And the nice thing is these supplements aren't meant to be taken forever. They're meant to be taken in the time of need to rebuild those stores, and then you don't have to take them for the rest of your lives. So you might be wondering, this sounds like it's really good for acute depression and anxiety, but what about long-term depression? What about what if I've had depression and anxiety for years and years? Can amino acids help me then? And the answer is absolutely 1000% yes, which is really exciting. Now, I've worked with people myself who after they got themselves on 5 HTTP and I guided them through that whole process, they do not have depressive symptoms anymore. Those symptoms are gone. Those symptoms were long term, and they had tried everything else that they could possibly think of. Um, and nothing was working. But the 5HTP worked for them. Um, there are so many examples too on Trudy Scott's website, everywomanover29.com. She has years worth of compiled evidence. She has case studies, she has wonderful people that have healed themselves at home with amino acids and they write in, and you can read all of their stories and all of their testimonials. That website, again, is everywomanover29.com. All right, you guys, I hope this was a really encouraging episode. I hope you feel inspired and just super, super excited to know that we can support low serotonin naturally. We don't only have medications to do that, we have amino acid therapy, and we can also get to the root cause of low serotonin with nutrient therapy. You guys, I saved the best for last on this episode. I'm so excited to announce my new program, Mood Alchemy. This program utilizes advanced nutrient therapy and labs to get your anxiety and depression unstuck in three months and keep it that way. If you don't feel a significant improvement after the program, I will give you another three months of coaching for free so you really don't have anything to lose. Go to nourishby nature.co to book your intro coaching call with me. And that will also save your spot in the program if you decide you'd like to move forward and actually join Mood Alchemy. I'm booking five people for mood alchemy in the months of November and December 2025. So book that call to save your spot and get ready to transform your mental and emotional health for good.