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Insomnia & taurine, Kavinace, detox, caffeine

Aerowallah

Senior Member
Messages
131
Want to share my case--which touches on themes I read here--should it prove useful.

Had mild adrenal fatigue after a bad virus in spring 2012. Took about three months for symptoms to resolve.
More severe AF after another bad flu in spring of 2013. Coming up on two years and only now is fatigue and exercise tolerance resolving.

AF diagnosed in 2013 when saliva test showed moderately low cortisol, low GABA, epi, norepi, and serotonin. Was prescribed nightly Kavinace and the usual precursors/supps. Slept brilliantly with wonderful deep dreams for three months and then insomnia turned on like a switch.

Spent three more months journalling for causes and effect w/o success. Insomnia had its own relentless irregular pattern--3-6 days on, 3-10 days off, sometimes all night and sometimes from 3-4am on. Hard to recover from AF and anxiety when sleep is no longer something you take for granted.

A neuro retest in Dec. 2013 showed depressed histamine, elevated GABA/glutamate, and taurine at 100% of reference range (actual taurine drawn to scale took the bar graph some 18 inches to the right of the test booklet!) Naturopath said nothing to worry about and tried to give me cocktails all of the usual sleep aids one reads here as well as increased Kavinace. Like many I threw everything at insomnia w/o knowing its underlying cause or realizing I was simply giving my unbalanced brain more to rebalance. I was also getting acid indigestion after every meal from increased HCL due to taurine excess.

So no sleep aid or herb worked, though sometimes it seemed like something would work when it actually depended on where I was in my insomnia cycle. After a few days everything stopped working.

In frustration I stopped everything. Insomnia quietened down some 20-30%, and all-nighters became less frequent, but overall I still felt oppressed by insomnia. I read taurine was present in many formulations and can have a glutamergic reaction, but I refused to take NAC for glutamate or try to game my brain's attempt to rebalance itself with any more protocols. Also histamine drop (and the absence for the first time in 40 years of ragweed allergy) suggested some detox was going on, possibly copper. Also noticed (as my fatigue S L O W L Y improved despite irregular sleep) I paradoxically became more reactive to a growing list of foods--precisely, high glutamate foods, high histamine foods, high copper foods, and high sulphur foods.

As I recovered secondary symptoms increased--itchiness, brain fog, skin breakouts, tinnitus, aches and pains in hands and feet (which disappeared within minutes of drinking 4 or 5 glasses of water). It dawned on me that this may be the detox that recovering AF'ers talk about--as the metabolism improves so does energy for detox. And one may be detoxing a lifetime of toxins and metals thanks to improved diet and rest, not just the sequestration at the onset of AF when detox and other metabolic functions power down.

Then came my dramatic improvement. I had read many anecdotes about reducing detox symptoms with glutathione, but did not like the bad experiences of some who supplemented NAC. So after a lot of resistance I began daily coffee enemas. 18 months of insomnia suddenly switched off by the end of the first week as suddenly as it began. I am now having the best sleep in my life. (Although the dreams are not as good as on Kavinace!)

I follow Gerson and use the SA Wilson specially formulated blonde roast. For those who might try CEs, there is inexcusable confusion about the position for CEs--it is only on the right side, as I know direct from Gerson patients. Although sensitive to coffee I feel no stimulation or jitteriness. Some talk about crashing from loss of electrolytes or B12, but after three months I have experienced none of this and believe it to be a flare in cleansing as glutathione levels increase. Vegetarians or those after chemotherapy may need to be attentive to electrolytes. I simply drink some coconut water, lime and ionic minerals after and feel fine.

Check my thinking on this, but I believe a lot of my adrenal weakness was a lifetime of undermethylation and poor liver clearance, and my symptoms caused by pulling toxins and reversing the optimal order of cleanse, i.e. tissue cleansing before lymph and liver cleansing. Without adequate liver clearance toxins circulate the body every, what, 15 minutes? causing oxidative damage and the body's immune response--sleep-robbing histamine, adrenaline, cortisol and glutamate production until toxins and metals can be cleared or re-distributed in the tissues. After 18 months of sleeplessness I got so I could tell elevated adrenaline from glutamate. Today I fall asleep faster than I ever did as a kid. Will start exercising soon. The only lingering symptom is milder fatigue which I believe to be a part of detox, and comes and goes as the insomnia used to.

Regards

PS For completeness' sake, I should say the only exception to my approach to doing this w/o pills--just low and slow on targeted organic foods--is magnesium malate.
 
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Misfit Toy

Senior Member
Messages
4,178
Location
USA
This is interesting. I have been taking magnesium and taurine shots in my butt. I am not sleeping well. I have a lot of other things going on, too. But, i wonder just what this is doing to me because it's doing something. Is it causing me to detox? It's helping my pain, but could it be affecting my brain? This is what I wonder because I don't feel right. I sometimes feel more anxious.

@zzz -do you have any thoughts on this? I am hoping the taurine is not making my sleep worse.
 

Aerowallah

Senior Member
Messages
131
Cause and effect are a bitch. I didn't have the onslaught of detox symptoms or food sensitivities yet when my retest showed elevated glutamate. So I think the taurine led to insomnia. If taurine is inhibitory then glutamate (excitatory) may have elevated to balance taurine off as it accumulated beyond the point I could excrete. NCBI study shows a relatonship. Glutamate certainly is anxiety producing when its effects are untimely (3am!) or unwanted. I agree with Rand and think taurine's good and bad effects are cumulative. I suppose undermethylators are more prone to accumulating toxicities of all kinds. Hence my preference for food and patience over pills.

I would also guess people with good liver clearance can tolerate higher dosages of a lot of things without ill effects.

400 mgs of taurine a day within several months also gave me acid indigestion. After the Naturo suggested more taurine for bile flow (an additional 1000 mgs) I got wicked diuresis after the first pill.
 
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Rand56

Senior Member
Messages
675
Location
Myrtle Beach, SC
Cause and effect are a bitch. I didn't have the onslaught of detox symptoms or food sensitivities yet when my retest showed elevated glutamate. So I think the taurine led to insomnia. If taurine is inhibitory then glutamate (excitatory) may have elevated to balance taurine off as it accumulated beyond the point I could excrete. NCBI study shows a relatonship. Glutamate certainly is anxiety producing when its effects are untimely (3am!) or unwanted. I agree with Rand and think taurine's good and bad effects are cumulative. I suppose undermethylators are more prone to accumulating toxicities of all kinds. Hence my preference for food and patience over pills.

I would also guess people with good liver clearance can tolerate higher dosages without ill effects.

Interesting about the correlation between taurine and glutamate. If it's the glutamate causing the insomnia, atleast for me, a positive is I don't get the anxiety. I just get the wired brain keeping me from sleeping.
 

Aerowallah

Senior Member
Messages
131
The pure effect of glutamate for me was a quiet hyper-awareness or focus in which my brain would not switch off and sleep. Adrenaline was different with a manic anxiety and somewhat elevated heart rate. I think they sometimes occur together (as they did when our ancesters outran those sabre tooth tigers when cortisol was also produced). Either that or I react badly to being hyperaware at 3am and generated adrenaline as part of my stress response.
 

Rand56

Senior Member
Messages
675
Location
Myrtle Beach, SC
The pure effect of glutamate for me was a quiet hyper-awareness or focus in which my brain would not switch off and sleep. Adrenaline was different with a manic anxiety and somewhat elevated heart rate. I think they sometimes occur together (as they did when our ancesters outran those sabre tooth tigers when cortisol was also produced). Either that or I react badly to being hyperaware at 3am and generated adrenaline as part of my stress response.

Let me ask you something if you know, can sleep deprivation on it's own raise glutamate levels, even if one was not taking any taurine?
 

Aerowallah

Senior Member
Messages
131
Deprivation? You mean insomnia, or someone is preventing you from sleeping? In the first case insomnia is only a symptom--for many AFers I think from elevated stress hormones due to a stress response to underlying inflammation somewhere. Glutamate is part of that response. Just as histamines have their job to do, though we love to block histamines before understanding where the inflammation is coming from. Taurine or anything calming taken to excess (depending on the individual) will cause a rebalancing or production of something excitatory. The body under chronic stress of any kind figures we're in some kind of war zone and doesn't want us to get too relaxed, draining adrenals further.

Whatever your insomnia is symptomatic of may be part of some causal chain raising glutamate. People on this site love to wade in and rebalance the body's balancing mechanism but I just don't have the brains or the tolerances. So I helped the body clear toxins (respecting the order of cleanse that liver comes first!), and rebalance itself...slowly.
 

maryb

iherb code TAK122
Messages
3,602
Location
UK
@Aerowallah Interesting as I suffered from severe insomnia and was advised to take Zopiclone:( Now addicted but have every intention of stopping once I can get to feeling a bit better.
I'm one who couldn't tolerate CEs, made me feel so ill, wiped out. I have many food/supplement intolerances as well as MCS. I went very low and slow but still affected me negatively. I just think the electrolyte balance in my body is so fine I can't re-balance it after a CE. Despite taking ionic minerals (they just make me feel sick) I've just started Infra red saunas so hoping that may detox somewhat and then I will try the CE's again.
 

Rand56

Senior Member
Messages
675
Location
Myrtle Beach, SC
Deprivation? You mean insomnia, or someone is preventing you from sleeping?

Let me explain further. Years ago I was taking some DLPA, but in addition to that, I was taking some taurine at night. and I started getting insomnia, but I never made the connection at the time that the taurine, even more than the DLPA, could have been contributing more to the insomnia. Like I said, taurine has a buildup effect in me. I was seeing a Naturopath at the time and this was the regimen he put me on. What happened at that time, is the first night I maybe at best got 1 hour of sleep, and subsequent days after, my brain got even more wired <with no anxiety> which kept me from getting "any" sleep at all. I was continuing to take the DLPA and taurine. Bottom line was, for 4 straight nights at most, I got only 1 hour of sleep the whole time. The "positive" for me was, after that 4th night, my depression was completely abolished. It was like a light switch that turned on in my brain, and no I'm not bi-polar nor manic depressive, because that is the only time since then, that I felt that effect, nor did I ever experience that effect anytime prior in my whole life.

You mentioned the hyper-awareness/focus that you get from glutamate. It was only after my depression was abolished that I experienced that. So either I was in some hyper-reality state, or I was just experiencing reality because of the stark contrast of being in the fog of depression, to then being totally depression free. So then I was thinking "Ok I'm back", stopped taking the supps, started falling back into more regular sleeping patterns,, and consequently my depression returned. It is a known fact that sleep deprivation can "temporarily" relieve depression.

The reason I asked you if it's possible if glutamate can be raised just from sleep deprivation alone, maybe glutamate rose over and above the balancing act it has with taurine, and it was this help from the glutamate, along with some help with extra catecholamine production from the DLPA, that helped all this along to getting me to a depression free state.

What I have learned that it could be "possible" that I have some hypofunctioning going on with my NMDA receptors, but I'm not smart enough to put all the connections together. I do know, that I don't react negatively to either MSG or aspartic acid. I get no excitotoxic effects from them, nor do I get that with D-serine that I have been taking for a bit, which I feel "may" be contributing to helping my depression, along with another supp. Even though my current regimen is helping my depression, I'm not in this hyper-awareness/focus state that I experienced after my depression was completely abolished after my long sleep deprived state.
 

Aerowallah

Senior Member
Messages
131
Quite possible! Don't forget GABA also tries to balance with glutamate but I have never been able to find a definition of what ratio constitutes GABA/Glutamate balance. I got the impression on Benzo buddies that Glutamate was quick to elevate and slower to recede. Less is definitely more with these interventions.

Mary, saunas and baths pull from tissues and push me into detox immediately. CEs clear those toxins by opening the liver. I think skin clearance is not ideal under these conditions. Unless you have done hair analysis and know you are "four lows" or are a vegetarian I'm not sure electrolytes are the issue if you're doing only a few CEs a week. You would probably have to do more than one a day, which I don't. If the trace minerals bother you try juicing as Gerson does in their protocol. My hypothesis is that you are stimulating glutathione production which triggers detox and symptoms, but anything you can do not to push detox with food or herbs or heat helps with a gentler cleanse. Exercise also slows detox! I'm also assuming you followed the CE protocol correctly.

Use the right light blonde coffee, stay on your right side, try using less coffee to start and maybe retain for a shorter period. Drink LOTS afterwards and watch your blood sugar afterwards (it can drop). Maybe these will help.
 
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Messages
1
Want to share my case--which touches on themes I read here--should it prove useful.

As I recovered secondary symptoms increased--itchiness, brain fog, skin breakouts, tinnitus, aches and pains in hands and feet (which disappeared within minutes of drinking 4 or 5 glasses of water). It dawned on me that this may

Has your tinnitus also decreased or ceased since doing the enemas? Also do you find them sort of addictive? I'm wondering how good they are for one in the long run, though I know there are differing opinions on all this.
 

Aerowallah

Senior Member
Messages
131
Would add that like most under-methylators many supplements feel great to me for a few days or weeks until levels build due to slower liver clearance. Taurine is supposed to clear easily but didn't for me and was probably sequestered.

As for enemas, addictive is a loaded word. I would say the feeling of well being I get from their continual dialysis effect is welcome. I have had methylation problems and issues with allergies / high histamines for a lifetime. 2 enemas back-to-back for a couple years are probably anything but overkill in addressing a lifetime of toxicity and elevated stress hormones from poor clearance.

Tinnitus does not go up or down noticeably with enemas, for me. Tinnitus is an issue during strong detox. most particularly, I believe, when I have elevated histamines and a resulting drop in blood pressure. Enemas keep these within tolerable limits, but if I don't watch the high histamine foods during detox, tinnitus and other symptoms ramp up.