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CHAPTER 3 Lifting the Dark Cloud
Eliminating the Depression and Anxiety Caused by Inadequate Serotonin

Serotonin deficiency is far and away the most common mood problem we see at our clinic. Serotonin starvation is a virtual epidemic in the United States, inflicting its unique brand of dark cloud misery on people of all ages, sexes, and walks of life. One researcher estimates that more than 80 percent of adults in the United States suffer from this deficiency.¹

The reason that serotonin is so emotionally vital is that it is our primary defense against both depression and anxiety. Serotonin deficiency is a factor in many seemingly unrelated psychological and physical symptoms, ranging from panic and irritability to insomnia, PMS, and muscle pain. Some “dark cloud” types have only a few of the possible deficiency symptoms, but many have almost all of them. Yet they tend to function well, typically getting more done, because of their tendency toward perfectionism, than other, less mood-impaired people. As a result, they often assume that they’re just stuck with some unfortunate but indelible personality quirks and try to work around them. Some try serotonin-boosting drugs, like Prozac, with mixed results, and resign themselves to a somewhat better, but still limited emotional life.

Let’s take a close look at the mechanics of this mood type. You already know from the questionnaire in chapter 1 that your brain contains four different emotional zones. Its serotonin quadrant needs to be brimming with molecules at all times. When it is, your brain 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. 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 as half-full, you see it as half-empty. Instead of feeling proud of your accomplishments, all you can think of is what you haven’t accomplished. Instead of a sound sleep, you get insomnia. Instead of enjoying your 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 and even have thoughts of suicide.

Precious serotonin is synthesized in your body from tryptophan, an amino acid (protein building block) found in foods like turkey, beef, and cheese. Tryptophan first converts into a substance called 5-HTP (5-hydroxytryptophan), which then converts directly into serotonin. This crucial three-step process can be short-circuited by a number of things. For example, if there isn’t enough tryptophan in your diet—a problem for many of us—your body can’t manufacture enough 5-HTP or serotonin to keep you happy. Or your natural production of serotonin may be inhibited by chemicals in your food such as caffeine, alcohol, or the artificial sweetener aspartame. Your serotonin production can even be disrupted if you are pregnant or not getting enough sunlight or exercise. Bouts of extreme stress can also dry up your pool of this emotionally vital brain chemical. Finally, you may have inherited a genetic tendency to underproduce serotonin, one that can be aggravated by all of the above.

No matter what the cause of your drop in serotonin, it does not mean that you are doomed to languish in this particular mood pit for the rest of your life. Even the saggiest serotonin levels can be quickly elevated, allowing you to experience the full range of emotion that nature intended for you. Later in the chapter I’ll be telling you all about the nutrient repair strategies that can lift your dark cloud and bring out your emotional sun in less than a day. First, though, I’d like to tell you more about why your cloud is dark and about how it feels to live under the influence of serotonin deficiency.

WHY ARE YOU SEROTONIN STARVED?
Are You Eating a Pro-Serotonin Diet?

Serotonin, like everything else in your body, is made out of the foods you eat. You really can’t feel “right” if you don’t provide your emotion-producing sites with plenty of the specific fuels they need. Low-calorie diets and skipped meals, for example, can quickly reduce vital serotonin-making supplies.

Where You Might Have Lost Your Serotonin

In your diet—if you’re not eating pro-serotonin foods like protein and healthy fat or if you are eating antiserotonin foods such as caffeinated sodas, coffee, or “diet sweetened” drinks or foods.

Under stress—as your brain struggles with overwhelming or chronic demands.

In your genes—if you inherited “false mood” brain programming.

In the evening or in winter—when there’s not enough bright light to signal your brain to make serotonin.

By lack of exercise—when you’ve underestimated the brain-enhancing effect of physical activity.

Few foods contain 5-HTP or serotonin themselves, so everything depends on your getting enough tryptophan from your diet. Where do we get tryptophan? From high-protein food. Unfortunately, tryptophan has been diminishing from our food supply for the past one hundred years, about as long as our rate of depression has been climbing!

Tryptophan is still found in foods like turkey, beef, pork, dairy products, chicken, and eggs; but, in proportion to the other twenty-one aminos that compose protein foods, it is the runt. These foods have three times more of many of the other amino acids than they do of tryptophan. But this wasn’t always so.

Wild game, like the venison our forebears ate, was higher in tryptophan than the meat we eat today. The difference is largely the result of how the animals we eat now are fed themselves. Rather than the grasses and other plants that wild animals grazed on, our modern stockyard animals are fed low-tryptophan grains like corn. This fattens up the animals in record time, but as a result, the meat from these animals is much lower in tryptophan. To compound the problem, we humans have also increased our consumption of low-tryptophan, grain-based carbohydrates like bread, pasta, bagels, cookies, and so on, which has further diminished our access to tryptophan.

If you are a vegetarian, you’re at a greater risk of developing tryptophan malnutrition. Even if you never touch a piece of meat, you do get some tryptophan from foods like nutritional yeast, milk products, nuts, seeds, bananas, and pumpkin. But other than the milk products and yeast (which many vegetarians don’t eat), most vegetarian foods contain much less tryptophan than animal-derived foods do. And that’s important to remember, because decreases in the amount of tryptophan you consume can so easily prevent your brain’s serotonin stores from increasing.

Numerous studies have shown how easy it is to create a serotonin deficiency in depressed people within a few hours simply by feeding them protein shakes that contain the other amino acids but no tryptophan. That’s why skipping meals or eating meals without protein is almost guaranteed to reduce your serotonin-derived happiness. Our clinic recommends a minimum of 4 ounces of a protein food per meal (that is, at least a chicken-breast-size portion three times a day).

Unfortunately, though eating more protein will help, it is no guarantee that you’ll get enough tryptophan into your brain. That’s because of the blood-brain barrier, which protects your brain against the mayhem of nutrients in the bloodstream. It’s a selective filter that allows only so many amino acids to get into the brain at any given time. Because there’s so much less of it to begin with, tryptophan can easily get lost in the shuffle—no matter how badly it’s needed—leaving you serotonin deficient.

You may also have been put at risk of serotonin deficiency from the start by being fed infant formula that did not contain the high human breast milk ratio of tryptophan to other aminos. Breast milk has a higher proportion of tryptophan than either cow’s milk or soy milk. The net result is reduced serotonin in formula-fed babies. Were you one? One study, reported in a book that I recommend to you, The Crazy Makers: How the Food Industry Is Destroying Our Brains and Harming Our Children, focused on sleep and found that supplementing infant formula with tryptophan safely resulted in more and better sleep.

Believe it or not, getting too little healthy fat may be another way in which your diet has contributed to your low serotonin state. Increasing fat intake increases the availability of tryptophan in the brain.² Did you notice on the Mood-Type Questionnaire that anger and negativity are reliable symptoms of serotonin depletion? Both emotions increase on low-fat diets. A study comparing a 41 percent fat diet with a 25 percent fat diet found that subjects’ moods deteriorated with reduced-fat intake.³

Last, and certainly not least, our fast foods and skipped meals have depleted us of many of the vitamins and minerals that assist in the magical conversion of tryptophan to 5-HTP and then to serotonin. Without enough calcium, magnesium, vitamin D, and B vitamins, for example, the neurotransmitters can’t be made consistently. With so many of us eating far from enough fresh, whole vegetables, fruit, beans, and grains, we’ve become deficient in many mood-crucial nutrients, which is why it is important to eat good-mood foods and take the basic supplements laid out in the master plan in step three.

Serotonin’s Enemies

Don’t inadvertently sabotage your serotonin defense efforts. Here are some tips on how to avoid common anti-serotonin substances:

1. Stimulants like caffeine (also ephedra, diet pills, ma huang, cocaine, and the like)—They stimulate rather than relax, narrow rather than broaden focus, and inhibit rather than promote sleep. They are serotonin’s number one enemies. If the idea of doing without them appalls you, turn to chapter 4 for better natural ways to get more alert and energized.

2. Aspartame, alias NutraSweet, is enemy number two. One of its primary ingredients, the amino acid phenylalanine, converts to the stimulating substances tyrosine, dopamine, norepinephrine, and adrenaline. Aspartame also contains aspartic acid, one of the most “excitatory” of nutrients. Both aspartic acid and L-phenylalanine compete with and trounce tryptophan and serotonin. If you are low in serotonin, you will need help relaxing and, in the evening, drifting toward sleep, so you should avoid aspartame as well as caffeine, particularly any time after lunch, when serotonin levels always begin dropping for the day.

Is Stress Sapping Your Serotonin?

Chronic exposure to high-stress situations can sap your brain of serotonin as it quickly uses up your serotonin supplies trying to keep you calm and centered. Although all of the chemicals responsible for your sense of well-being are exhausted by too much stress, serotonin is often the first and most significant causality.⁴ And stress, these days, can be never-ending.

Is It Your Genes, Gender, or Sex Hormones?

Like all the other mood chemistry deficiencies that I discuss in this book, a deficiency in serotonin function can be inherited. Through genes that under-program serotonin-producing activity, you can inherit a tendency to be shy, angry, depressed, obsessive, or sleepless. Look around at your family members and chances are you’ll see the same symptoms that you circled in part 1 of the Mood-Type Questionnaire. The good news is that these symptoms can all be eliminated using the nutritional suggestions in this chapter. We used to think of genes as immutable, but now we know that they are capable of changing their messages in response to changing circumstances, such as their nutritional environment.⁵ Regarding gender and sex hormones: Females simply produce less serotonin than males do, as much as a third less. This is a primary reason why women are almost twice as likely to have mood problems as men, though many men are now becoming serotonin deficient as well. In women, PMS and menopausal mood problems result when levels of sex hormones, notably estrogen, which help program serotonin production in the brain, fall too low. One of our clients suddenly became suicidal and her periods stopped, though her life circumstances were at an all-time high. Neither our nutrients nor her MD’s antidepressants helped till she got a hormone level test and an estrogen patch. In males, depression and anger are common symptoms of andropause (male menopause). But they are tied to lowered testosterone levels and raised estrogen levels and the role of serotonin is unclear. (See the Sex Hormone Tool Kit for more.)

Are You Getting Enough Light, Especially in Winter?

Serotonin is one of the few body chemicals that is stimulated by light. And not just any light will do. How you feel may vary, depending on the type and amount of light available to you at each season of the year and even at each hour of the day. For lower-serotonin people, the late afternoon tends to be the beginning of the “unhappy hours.” Many of them hate the fall, the winter, the twilight, and the night, for good reason. More than 25 percent of Americans suffer from a special sensitivity to the natural decrease in sunlight that occurs during the fall and winter.⁶ Technically known as “seasonal affective disorder” (or, appropriately, SAD), this condition’s “dark cloud” symptoms significantly increase when the angle of the sun drops and serotonin levels drop along with it.

But don’t fret if you know or suspect that you suffer from winter depression. You can raise your serotonin levels any time of the year with the amino acids and other supplements I’ll be describing later. These nutrients are especially effective if you combine them with some bright light. At least half of SAD sufferers respond well to bright lamp therapy.⁷ And then there are supplements of vitamin D, the sunshine vitamin, which can be even more effective than bright light in helping relieve SAD.

Part of the problem is that even on a summer day, we may not get enough light. Natural sunlight ranges from 2,000 lux (a standard unit of illumination roughly equivalent to 125 watts) on a cloudy winter day to 100,000 lux on a clear summer day, but most of us spend our days indoors and get less than 100 lux a day! Being exposed to bright natural or artificial light during the day may raise your mood by raising your serotonin levels, but only if the light gets bright enough. That translates to at least thirty minutes a day within three feet of a light bulb burning 150–200 watts, which is equal to 2,500 lux (or lumens). There are stronger light boxes, but we’ve generally found 2,500-lux lamps very effective without the potential side effects of stronger lamps, including anxiety, nervousness, or even eye damage.⁸

If your spirits are not lifted by nutritional supplements alone, plan to spend a total of thirty to sixty minutes a day under your lamp without glasses or contacts on. Try to have your sessions before three P.M., as bright light later might suppress your sleep. Start with ten to fifteen minutes under your lamp and increase as needed.⁹ Make sure that the light can reach your pupils while you read, talk, or work on your computer. You should be able to feel the benefits right away.

We worked with a whole family, born in Mexico but living SADly in Northern California, who fell in love with the 2,500-lux Ott lamp in our office during their family education session. They each bought one to take home and extras to ship to other relatives also stranded too far north in the United States. The lamps, designed by John Ott, a pioneer in the study of the effect of light on behavior and health, contain full-spectrum fluorescent bulbs, providing natural as well as intense light.

Interestingly, exposure to bright light during the day not only improves your emotional outlook, it also helps your sleep. Bright light in the morning decreases your daytime levels of the hibernation-and-sleep-promoting brain chemical melatonin, but it will raise your nighttime levels, helping you to sleep well. In fact, poor sleepers with SAD respond best of all to light therapy.

In the “Resource Tool Kit,” you’ll find details on how and where to find anti-SAD lighting equipment.