I know this isn't how most people do it.
But I'm using some time each day to research the biology of alcohol metabolism. I figure the more I learn what it does, the better I'll know how I can approach my own particular issues.
I'm not intending any sort of agenda here, like being AF or Mod or whatever. I'm simply engaging an open inquiry into what factors are involved.
Yesterday I was researching serotonin, which apparently is the root of mood, depression and cravings. I wrote down my impressions earlier this afternoon:
Serotonin is a neural transmitter.
Neurotransmitter: Our bodies are not like Star-Trek's "Data" or a Robocop. We don?t run continuous wires from our fingers to our brains. What we have instead is a chain of nerve cells. Each cell can transmit an electrical impulse within itself, but not across cell walls. So between cells, the signal is converted to a liquid chemical called a neurotransmitter. This liquid (or more accurately chemical bit) seeps from one cell to another, causing the next cell to ?fire?.
If you poke a finger with a pin, your brain registers the pain. ?There?s a pin in my finger?, you say.
What happened was a nerve cell in your finger fired ?Ow?, and then sent a neurotransmitter to the next nerve cell, which fired. Each cell all the way up the line fired and then transmitted to the next. On reaching your brain, the signal was received and parsed in several areas of the brain. The hind brain probably activated one or more reflex mechanisms to move your finger away from the pin, and also your adrenalin system to give your muscles more ?snap?. Your mid brain came up with an emotional response. And your fore brain engaged in the task of reacting, and analyzing a response and giving a verbal response, probably training your eyes on the pin and arranging further logical responses..
Aspirin (and all NSAIDs) operate by shutting down some part of the neural transmitting chemicals. In the case of NSAIDs it is a chemical called cyclooxygenase and commonly abbreviated COX. By shutting down the production of COX, a nerve cell loses the chemical messenger needed to tell the next cell there is pain. So the nerves in your finger are still dutifully sending pain messages up to your brain, but along the way, for lack of COX chemicals, the next cell fails to get the message. Your brain goes on, blissfully unaware of the pain in your finger.
Our body uses at least 60 different neurotransmitters. Some you will recognize: dopamine, serotonin, histamine, insulin, epinephrine, glutamate, taurine, and GABA.
Serotonin is a neural transmitter.
It works primarily on the mid-brain.
The mid-brain is our root for moods, feelings, including anger and pleasure.
The mid-brain is our ?animal brain?. It handles only primitive concepts.
The mid-brain sits between the hind-brain, and the fore brain.
The hind brain governs autonomic response like breathing and heartbeat.
The fore brain handles logic, reasoning, language, and memory.
The fore brain is the "big part", the mid-brain is small, and the hind brain is really just the top of the spine.
The mid-brain has no memory, or logic, and can?t speak.
It operates on a subconscious level.
The mid-brain governs our mood.
It happy, or sad, or depressed or joyful, satisfied or unsatisfied.
I call my mid-brain my ?box of kittens? because you can?t talk to it, can?t reason with it. It just purrs or whines, depending on it?s own little perception of the world.
The mid-brain uses serotonin as a neural transmitter.
The forebrain uses dopamine as a neural transmitter.
It?s a bit funny, that even within our brains, different structures use different chemicals for essentially the same functions.
Alcohol increases serotonin in the brain.
When you take a drink, alcohol goes into the bloodstream almost immediately.
Within minutes, the serotonin in your mid-brain rises.
By increasing the main neurotransmitter, transmissions in the mid-brain become amplified.
But when a neural cell fires; suddenly it is ?heard? twice as loud by the receiving neural cell.
Like the ?Shot heard around the world?, but in this case, the ?shot heard twice? is twice as loud.
So good feelings feel better.
But bad feelings can also get amplified.
An angry drunk is just someone who gets a serotonin blast while his kittens are angry.
The mid-brain cannot ?think?, or ?reason? or even ?lie?.
It simply reacts to the sea of feelings and chemicals in which it lives.
Interpretation is done by the fore-brain, the cerebrum.
Alcohol has secondary effects on the serotonin system aside from just raising the ?volume?.
For one, it overloads the system.
Your natural body can?t make the amount of serotonin that is dumped in via alcohol.
So this causes the receptor cells turn numb from too much chemical.
(BTW - this is a gross oversimplification. There are in truth 4 different receptors and they act a bit differently under different circumstances.)
For two, it puts the body?s own serotonin system off-line.
Why should your serotonin production cells stay online if the brain is being flooded with way too much serotonin from an external source?
Once off-line, it may take hours, days or weeks of lower than normal levels for your natural serotonin producing cells to wake back up and begin producing enough natural serotonin for your kittens to be happy.
When the Alcohol intake ends, most commonly because you?ve gone to sleep, you have a number of problems with your serotonin system:
a) Your serotonin receptors are numb from being over stimulated.
b) Your body?s natural serotonin production is insufficient
c) Lack of serotonin is associated with feeling depressed, empty, guilty and sad. That?s how you feel when you wake up.
d) Serotonin is a melatonin precursor, melatonin is for sleeping. So without serotonin, your body can?t enter normal sleep patterns.
These problems will remain with you for hours, days or weeks until you do one of the following:
a) Stay sober long enough for your serotonin system to get back in balance.
b) Have another drink
Take a guess which approach your ?box of whining kittens? wants you to take? Heck, they have no memory, and no remorse. All they want is to get back to feeling good again.
So on Day 2, your serotonin levels are so low, you are clinically depressed. You got a whining box of kittens screaming for relief. And you are going to try to fight them using memory, logic and reason?
***
What would be nice, is to keep a constant serotonin high. Right? Feel good 24x7. Woowoo.
I think we?ve all tried it. Have a small drink every two hours for day after day.
Within a couple days, your whole serotonin sensing system ceases to function. You come to a point where no amount of more alcohol will increase serotonin in a way that satisfies your ?box of kittens?.
So then you are clinically depressed AND drunk. Oh boy!
***
What about balancing serotonin high against a level values, so it never goes low?
Apparently this is what we do when we are younger. Our system recovers faster, so the down time is not equal to the up time. For most adults, however, factors intervene to equalize the down time, and even to make it last longer or be more intense than the up time. For most a good approach is to manage their serotonin cycles to even out the up and down times, thereby avoiding times of depression.
There are a non-alcoholic ways to raise serotonin, although not all are very well understood. You?ll recognize this list:
Chocolate
Love (Falling in love, having sex, being infatuated).
Doing something passionate, or that has great feeling
Winning
Eating (good food that makes you happy)
Eating foods naturally high in 5-HT precursors, certain fruits.
Eating a snack of complex carbs with NO protein (serotonin power diet).
Unfortunately, none of these methods are as dependable as just taking in some alcohol, and they can?t raise serotonin to the high levels that alcohol can.
Drugs/Remedies that may help/impact your serotonin system.
Herbal 5-HTB a precursor to seratonin
(The chemical formula for serotonin is 5-HT)
L-Tryptophan: Basically the same as 5-HTB so don?t take together
St Johns Wort ? May be a natural SSRI
Topiramate ? MWO drug ? Topiramate effects on plasma serotonin levels in children with epilepsy.
All MAOI drugs, which reduce the breakdown of serotonin by chemical means
All SSRI drugs, which reduce the capability serotonin breakdown locations.
As with Topiramate and SSRI drugs, there is evidence that impacting your serotonin system may allow you to drink but feel less effect, or less long term effect. There are also papers demonstrating that for some individuals, SSRI drugs may INCREASE alcohol cravings, instead of decreasing them.
Some items for me to study tomorrow:
1) Are there sources of cravings that are NOT involved with serotonin? Most research indicate that ALL craving comes from serotonin imbalance.
2) For people long term AF, does 5-HTB or L-Tryptophan help reduce cravings?
And for tomorrow I?m going to be looking at Dopamine. Apparently at the same time as enabling your emotional inner box of kittens, alcohol simultaneously shuts down your capability to reason. I?m ?so- surprised!
Selected sources
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurotransmitter
Cyclooxygenase - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Serotonin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Monoamine oxidase inhibitor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
St John's wort - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://www.currentseparations.com/is...-1/cs18-1d.pdf
Now on Day 5 AF and I like my Lemon juice with MINT!
But I'm using some time each day to research the biology of alcohol metabolism. I figure the more I learn what it does, the better I'll know how I can approach my own particular issues.
I'm not intending any sort of agenda here, like being AF or Mod or whatever. I'm simply engaging an open inquiry into what factors are involved.
Yesterday I was researching serotonin, which apparently is the root of mood, depression and cravings. I wrote down my impressions earlier this afternoon:
Serotonin is a neural transmitter.
Neurotransmitter: Our bodies are not like Star-Trek's "Data" or a Robocop. We don?t run continuous wires from our fingers to our brains. What we have instead is a chain of nerve cells. Each cell can transmit an electrical impulse within itself, but not across cell walls. So between cells, the signal is converted to a liquid chemical called a neurotransmitter. This liquid (or more accurately chemical bit) seeps from one cell to another, causing the next cell to ?fire?.
If you poke a finger with a pin, your brain registers the pain. ?There?s a pin in my finger?, you say.
What happened was a nerve cell in your finger fired ?Ow?, and then sent a neurotransmitter to the next nerve cell, which fired. Each cell all the way up the line fired and then transmitted to the next. On reaching your brain, the signal was received and parsed in several areas of the brain. The hind brain probably activated one or more reflex mechanisms to move your finger away from the pin, and also your adrenalin system to give your muscles more ?snap?. Your mid brain came up with an emotional response. And your fore brain engaged in the task of reacting, and analyzing a response and giving a verbal response, probably training your eyes on the pin and arranging further logical responses..
Aspirin (and all NSAIDs) operate by shutting down some part of the neural transmitting chemicals. In the case of NSAIDs it is a chemical called cyclooxygenase and commonly abbreviated COX. By shutting down the production of COX, a nerve cell loses the chemical messenger needed to tell the next cell there is pain. So the nerves in your finger are still dutifully sending pain messages up to your brain, but along the way, for lack of COX chemicals, the next cell fails to get the message. Your brain goes on, blissfully unaware of the pain in your finger.
Our body uses at least 60 different neurotransmitters. Some you will recognize: dopamine, serotonin, histamine, insulin, epinephrine, glutamate, taurine, and GABA.
Serotonin is a neural transmitter.
It works primarily on the mid-brain.
The mid-brain is our root for moods, feelings, including anger and pleasure.
The mid-brain is our ?animal brain?. It handles only primitive concepts.
The mid-brain sits between the hind-brain, and the fore brain.
The hind brain governs autonomic response like breathing and heartbeat.
The fore brain handles logic, reasoning, language, and memory.
The fore brain is the "big part", the mid-brain is small, and the hind brain is really just the top of the spine.
The mid-brain has no memory, or logic, and can?t speak.
It operates on a subconscious level.
The mid-brain governs our mood.
It happy, or sad, or depressed or joyful, satisfied or unsatisfied.
I call my mid-brain my ?box of kittens? because you can?t talk to it, can?t reason with it. It just purrs or whines, depending on it?s own little perception of the world.
The mid-brain uses serotonin as a neural transmitter.
The forebrain uses dopamine as a neural transmitter.
It?s a bit funny, that even within our brains, different structures use different chemicals for essentially the same functions.
Alcohol increases serotonin in the brain.
When you take a drink, alcohol goes into the bloodstream almost immediately.
Within minutes, the serotonin in your mid-brain rises.
By increasing the main neurotransmitter, transmissions in the mid-brain become amplified.
But when a neural cell fires; suddenly it is ?heard? twice as loud by the receiving neural cell.
Like the ?Shot heard around the world?, but in this case, the ?shot heard twice? is twice as loud.
So good feelings feel better.
But bad feelings can also get amplified.
An angry drunk is just someone who gets a serotonin blast while his kittens are angry.
The mid-brain cannot ?think?, or ?reason? or even ?lie?.
It simply reacts to the sea of feelings and chemicals in which it lives.
Interpretation is done by the fore-brain, the cerebrum.
Alcohol has secondary effects on the serotonin system aside from just raising the ?volume?.
For one, it overloads the system.
Your natural body can?t make the amount of serotonin that is dumped in via alcohol.
So this causes the receptor cells turn numb from too much chemical.
(BTW - this is a gross oversimplification. There are in truth 4 different receptors and they act a bit differently under different circumstances.)
For two, it puts the body?s own serotonin system off-line.
Why should your serotonin production cells stay online if the brain is being flooded with way too much serotonin from an external source?
Once off-line, it may take hours, days or weeks of lower than normal levels for your natural serotonin producing cells to wake back up and begin producing enough natural serotonin for your kittens to be happy.
When the Alcohol intake ends, most commonly because you?ve gone to sleep, you have a number of problems with your serotonin system:
a) Your serotonin receptors are numb from being over stimulated.
b) Your body?s natural serotonin production is insufficient
c) Lack of serotonin is associated with feeling depressed, empty, guilty and sad. That?s how you feel when you wake up.
d) Serotonin is a melatonin precursor, melatonin is for sleeping. So without serotonin, your body can?t enter normal sleep patterns.
These problems will remain with you for hours, days or weeks until you do one of the following:
a) Stay sober long enough for your serotonin system to get back in balance.
b) Have another drink
Take a guess which approach your ?box of whining kittens? wants you to take? Heck, they have no memory, and no remorse. All they want is to get back to feeling good again.
So on Day 2, your serotonin levels are so low, you are clinically depressed. You got a whining box of kittens screaming for relief. And you are going to try to fight them using memory, logic and reason?
***
What would be nice, is to keep a constant serotonin high. Right? Feel good 24x7. Woowoo.
I think we?ve all tried it. Have a small drink every two hours for day after day.
Within a couple days, your whole serotonin sensing system ceases to function. You come to a point where no amount of more alcohol will increase serotonin in a way that satisfies your ?box of kittens?.
So then you are clinically depressed AND drunk. Oh boy!
***
What about balancing serotonin high against a level values, so it never goes low?
Apparently this is what we do when we are younger. Our system recovers faster, so the down time is not equal to the up time. For most adults, however, factors intervene to equalize the down time, and even to make it last longer or be more intense than the up time. For most a good approach is to manage their serotonin cycles to even out the up and down times, thereby avoiding times of depression.
There are a non-alcoholic ways to raise serotonin, although not all are very well understood. You?ll recognize this list:
Chocolate
Love (Falling in love, having sex, being infatuated).
Doing something passionate, or that has great feeling
Winning
Eating (good food that makes you happy)
Eating foods naturally high in 5-HT precursors, certain fruits.
Eating a snack of complex carbs with NO protein (serotonin power diet).
Unfortunately, none of these methods are as dependable as just taking in some alcohol, and they can?t raise serotonin to the high levels that alcohol can.
Drugs/Remedies that may help/impact your serotonin system.
Herbal 5-HTB a precursor to seratonin
(The chemical formula for serotonin is 5-HT)
L-Tryptophan: Basically the same as 5-HTB so don?t take together
St Johns Wort ? May be a natural SSRI
Topiramate ? MWO drug ? Topiramate effects on plasma serotonin levels in children with epilepsy.
All MAOI drugs, which reduce the breakdown of serotonin by chemical means
All SSRI drugs, which reduce the capability serotonin breakdown locations.
As with Topiramate and SSRI drugs, there is evidence that impacting your serotonin system may allow you to drink but feel less effect, or less long term effect. There are also papers demonstrating that for some individuals, SSRI drugs may INCREASE alcohol cravings, instead of decreasing them.
Some items for me to study tomorrow:
1) Are there sources of cravings that are NOT involved with serotonin? Most research indicate that ALL craving comes from serotonin imbalance.
2) For people long term AF, does 5-HTB or L-Tryptophan help reduce cravings?
And for tomorrow I?m going to be looking at Dopamine. Apparently at the same time as enabling your emotional inner box of kittens, alcohol simultaneously shuts down your capability to reason. I?m ?so- surprised!
Selected sources
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurotransmitter
Cyclooxygenase - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Serotonin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Monoamine oxidase inhibitor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
St John's wort - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://www.currentseparations.com/is...-1/cs18-1d.pdf
Now on Day 5 AF and I like my Lemon juice with MINT!
Comment