A supplement that I take and comment about frequently is (Spirulina & Chorella), this is a study that shows the level of choline in Spirulina. Improving my diet and using a supplement like algae has had the most impact on my anxiety levels and focus.
Mindfulness meditation also helps with consistent action to understand where my mind and body are at each day.
Yeah for sure, this is what I buy on Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FAB10ZI) and the dosage depends on what you are experiencing. I was doubling my dosage, but have lowered it back to the recommended dosage on the package (10 pills, they are tiny). I have also taken the powered version but the umami taste is really strong, so I went back to the pill version.
I like to take it with Psyllium Husk Fiber / Metamucil to help increase the fiber in my diet since the higher dosage is like eating a lot of kale at one time, it can move through you super quickly.
Here are some studies that I commented before that I have read that has helped with learning more about the supplements and the dosages depending on what you are experiencing:
- High-dose supplementation of Chlorella and Spirulina increases beneficial gut Bacteria in healthy ICR mice: A 90-day feeding study (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jff.2025.106796)
- Beneficial Effects of Spirulina Consumption on Brain Health ( https://doi.org/10.3390/nu14030676) This is a new study that I found, that I'm going to read, but it shows the impact on neuroinflammation, and from experience the supplement has helped me with inflammation, and why I think it has helped with my ADHD/Anxiety.
On a meta note, I have a deep love and appreciation for people like yourself who share this kind of info. It's been quite helpful for me on my own health journey.
No problem! Thanks! It's something I have been researching for a while, and has really benefited me. It's different for everyone, but has had a impact on me, and then leads to other dietary changes that can lead to more change.
People have to stop trying to depend on supplements for what a diet should provide.
Neither spirulina nor chlorella are good sources of choline. For example if you had to take spirulina you'd need about 6 cups per day to reach RDI. Way to risk getting elevated uric acid, vitamin A overload or a slew of other intestinal issues.
Compare with 3-4 eggs... or 90g of beef liver I know what I would take.
In 2015, the U.S. Dietary Guidelines shifted from implying that one egg a day is “probably a bit much” to saying “one egg a day is fine if you don’t fry it.” This coincided with the removal of the quantitative cap of 300 mg/day on dietary cholesterol (a single egg basically maxes that out).
EDIT: The calorie count used to compute the portion of the comment below were incorrect. I'm leaving it unchanged for posterity, but want to clarify that an egg has about 80 cals.
Four eggs a day is almost 1,000 calories of egg, roughly half of many people’s total daily calorie intake.
Like most things I’m sure you can overdo it. But if you’re choosing between cereal and a bagel or a couple of eggs, I think most would be better off with the eggs.
Liver can be pretty good if you spice it up Jamaican style. I regularly make this for people who tell me they don't like liver and they just love it. Pretty easy - Fresh and whole tumeric, ginger, garlic, onions, thyme, oregano, and as much scotch bonnet as you can handle. Soak the liver in brined water or milk for a few hrs and it will draw out a lot of the strong taste as well (French technique). Stew in some water after sautéing the onions to your liking. Same recipe works for stewing heart meat if that's something more to your liking, and it also contains a lot of the same nutrients that a lot of people are lacking in modern westernized diets. Consider what other predators do when they get to their prey: They go straight for the liver and heart.
However if you don't like the idea of trying new things, and just want something in pill form, honestly lecithin or even better citicoline is the way to go in my opinion
Chicken liver has more iron and selenium in it per Oz than beef liver. Easier to eat a ton and not as harsh tasting. Make some dirty rice or just liver stew!
Spirulina is not really what is mean by a "green" in that context. You probably can't physically ingest enough spinach/kale/etc to do yourself any harm. Powdered algae is not necessarily such a sure thing
Spirulina is not a good source of choline. You'd need about 6 cups of it per day to get it. I think the person commenting is just interested in spirulina itself and is misguided about its benefits.
The studies listed as part of this thread show people taking 3-4 grams per day for 8 weeks... that's less than 1% of choline RDI. Not very relevant to our conversation.
Spirulina is a source of choline, I never stated it was a main source. I fully understand the benefits of the supplement, and have read many studies on it.
I agree, from what I have found in studies for anyone that have autoimmune diseases or are on heavy medications, it can make them worse. Thats been the main area that have been the negative impact of the supplement.
It's something that should be watched as you take it and/or discussed with a doctor if you are dealing with other health conditions.
A word of warning, while the issues of low choline tend to be what shows up in a search, too much can also have negative effects, such as inducing strong depression. Because choline touches so much in the brain/body, there are other things that can happen as well, such as subtle mental effects and changes in blood pressure. TMAO generation may also a concern.
So be careful trying supplements, and monitor your mental/physical state.
Choline from normal food sources isn’t typically a problem, but supplements and additives like lecithin can push people over the edge.
A lot of things are going to be different in a brain in constant fight or flight mode. It isn't surprising that flooding your system daily with stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline has an effect on brain chemistry. But this doesn't mean causation, and especially doesn't mean causation with regards to dietary choline intake.
My first-hand experience of the healthcare system in the USA leads me to conclude we don’t have good data on pathological anxiety levels. Psychiatry is over-incentivized to positively diagnose.
You can get diagnosed with ‘anxiety’ when you’ve been in a hard circumstance for a while, since it’s simply a self-reporting questionnaire on levels of concern. That’s not a way to determine pathology - how do they tell when it’s appropriate behavior, eg when you’re actually in a dangerous situation.
This economy, since the financial crisis, has had weak employment (when you factor in not-in-workforce trends over the last 50 years), being under-employed for a long time is a threat to life. You can be in a location or situation where you’re blind to a loss of economic opportunity because there is so much misinformation. Anxiety is not maladaptive then.
This happened to me, and when my situation finally began to improve after a change in direction, my anxiety went down. Before I made that change, I found anti-anxiety meds put me in a dysfunctional ‘happy’ state, that made it harder to course correct or care about my reality. So I quickly stopped taking them last year, shortly after receiving them. And yet a diagnosis was made then, and looking at my medical report, this so called disease remains on my medical record. Ridiculous. All that self-reporting showed was normal human behavior.
Luckily, at the worst time, I also hedged by seeing separately a psychologist who helped me understand through a series of interviews that all my behavior was appropriate to my situation.
I went to a psychiatrist to be evaluated for ADHD. He diagnosed me with anxiety, saying that being anxious made it hard for me to focus.
Uh.
I went to another doc who diagnosed me with and started treating me for ADHD. Boom. Anxiety gone. Turns out I was just super anxious about having a hard time working on the un-shiny things I needed to be working on.
I'd say anxiety is a symptom of mental health problem like having a cough -- the underlying cause can be very different in people.
Since I was little I suffered from terrible schizotypal anxiety which somehow cleared up completely in middle age [1] I never got along with a person I knew who had panic disorder despite trying hard: some if it is that my anxiety makes me move towards dangerous things (I've been seen going into a building when the fire alarm was on) and his anxiety makes him want to banish every possible source of anxiety from his life but the more he does that the more fragile it gets.
[1] I don't know if it was Gabapentin, or a few years of attempting business developer, or meeting my "evil twin" or discovering my schizotypy or just getting old enough that I don't give a fuck.
It’s different for everyone, of course. In my case, it was almost entirely about me being stressed out that it was impossible to get starting on big, looming projects before they became emergencies. “If I don’t do this, I’ll probably get fired. I know I have to do this. Why can’t I just do this?” is quite anxiety producing.
Dude, that's wild. I can't imagine what you could do to get infected with so many different organisms. Are you sure there isn't some underlying unifying reason, like rare genetic disease that makes you more prone to infections or something?
It makes me uneasy how people with ADHD shopped around until they got a diagnosis like this. Surely you let the doctor tell YOU whats wrong with you, rather than you tell the doctor?
No way, no how. It’s called advocating for yourself, in the parlance of our times, and it’s not remotely limited to just this one aspect. Doctors are extremely busy and don’t have the time to go Dr. House on your specific case. If you go in with symptoms A, B, and C, and they stop listening at A and diagnose you with something that causes A, insist that they consider B and C, too.
Also, a good doctor won’t take issue with this, so long as you don’t insist that your 5 minutes on WebMD is right and they’re wrong.
Analogy: If someone at work says they can’t log in, and also that their already logged in password queries don’t work, it could mean that the login service is down and the database is down. It could also mean that AWS is down, and rebooting those other services isn’t going to fix the common root cause.
There are a lot of bad doctors out there. Like, dangerously bad.
If you think a doctor is wrong, they very well might be, particularly if you have already done your homework. This is not the old days, where medical knowledge is exclusively available to doctors. In fact, it is a huge risk to go in unprepared and ignorant of the possibilities, because misdiagnoses are not uncommon if critical symptoms get overlooked due to the patient not presenting them.
Ask yourself not how many doctors graduated with honors. Ask yourself how many barely graduated after cheating their way through the program and are now faking their way through life.
If the medical system was infallible, you'd have a solid point. In practice, medical professionals operate within their own biases, rather than being purely objective observers of your symptoms
Many cases of ADHD are allergic reactions. When I get a dose of something I'm allergic to (molds, perfumes...) I'll end up being scatter-brained for the day.
My child was the same way due to a wheat allergy (U.S. wheat is heavier than European wheat, and the flour comes out differently. It's actually tougher to digest for many).
As for letting the doctor tell you... The last few decades, I find I've been making the diagnosis first. Chronic fatigue, adult chicken pox, whooping cough... In each case, the medical history I gave was a reasonable path for ordering tests to get the correct diagnosis, but in each case the doctors missed it.
The whooping cough one was particularly annoying. I had traveled to Amsterdam, which had an outbreak a couple of years ago. I told the doctors this, and they still diagnosed me as having an ordinary sinus infection and gave me the wrong antibiotics. My wife looked up the medical alerts in Amsterdam, I messaged the doctor asking for the correct antibiotics (just in time).
Doctors in the U.S. follow protocols. When they don't they have to file extra paperwork. The entire system is designed to punish deviation from protocol, and the protocols don't get adjusted based on evidence or circumstance. They're handed down from a committee that the insurance companies take as law. Insurance companies in particular are geared to denying payment for deviation from protocol without prior approval. So doctors adjust their behavior to go with the flow... unless you find a great doctor, who knows better.
These days, you really do need to take your health in your own hands. Doctors become a path to confirmation and treatment, at least on the illness side of things. Injury tends to be a little more cut-and-dried, but even there you have to find the right experts. For example for sports injuries, you likely want doctors that see many patients that play that particular sport because they have experience with how things can go wrong.
Sorry for the rant. I've just seen the need for shopping a lot more in recent years.
I tried Focalin, and ended up on plain Adderall. For me, they didn’t create any anxiety at all, or any other noticeable side effects or adverse reactions. I count myself very lucky.
Of course! And everyone is different. In my specific case, only one was true. Treating the root cause fixed all the related symptoms. Others will have different experiences.
But also be careful about taking too much choline. There's lots of anecdotal reports of people taking too much choline supplements and becoming massively depressed.
> This suggests that chronically elevated arousal in AnxDs may increase neurometabolic demand for choline compounds without a proportionate increase in brain uptake, leading to reduced tCho levels. Reduced cortical NAA suggests compromised neuronal function in AnxDs. Future studies may clarify the clinical significance of reduced cortical tCho and the possibility that appropriate choline supplementation could have therapeutic benefit in anxiety disorders.
I am suffering from medium levels of general anxiety and fighting with severe anxiety (panic?) in situations that stress me out, e.g. conflict or interviews. If I know I have those 2 hours beforehand and I can tranquilize myself with the betablocker propranolol which makes the relevant adrenaline receptors in your body immune to all the adrenaline your gland secrete and turns me into a cool and smooth operator.
Choline gives me a severe stiff neck and makes me unable to sleep. I have experimented with many supplements and it was one of the most consistent and unfortunate effects I ever got from one.
Beta blockers can be dangerous in the sense they stop your natural adrenaline response when you or somebody else in your vicinity is doing something dangerous, and so you don’t acknowledge danger properly.
I have taken insane one time dosages up to 200mg and haven't noticed that effect. In my experience they never fully turn off the effects of adrenaline spikes at any dosage still bearable.
They aren't magic zombie pills, at worst they turn you mostly fearless and consequently slightly unhinged (and make you feel like shit due to the low blood pressure).
I encountered the same effect too, and just posted a warning about it. Unfortunately the effect is hard to come across in a search, unless you are specifically searching for it.
The most annoying thing about pieces like this is how easy it would be to actually test the hypothesis. They could just give people choline (double blind placebo including some participants who are not anxious). And test the effect on both choline levels and anxiety.
It’s also ready sold OTC.
Instead people just sit around and do meta studies on meta studies on correlation and publishing whatever statistical anomalies they can find.
I can understand why this may seem simple, but when it comes to the brain almost nothing is simple.
Choline a key component in Acetylcholine is the primary neurotransmitter used in your hippocampus. Its an excitatory neurotransmitter meaning it turns neurons on. The hippocampus is a massive parallel feedback circuit that when over stimulated can and will begin to seize. In fact many people who suffer from seizures have over active hippocampal circuitry. Simply "flooding" the brain with more choline could have very very bad effects.
Likewise, taking choline might not work as the brain actively controls and regulates the contents of the cerebral spinal fluid. Unlike the rest of your body, the capillaries in the brain are not leaky, but instead are enshrouded in the blood-brain barrier and there are active transport proteins for anything that isn't lipid soluble.
Choline is actively transported into the brain and the brain has additional internal mechanisms to regulate the levels of choline.
Lastly, neurotransmitters aren't just floating around in the soup of your brain. They are released by specific neurons which are integrated into specific circuits. Parkinson's disease is a perfect example here. There is tiny region of the brain involved in regulating voluntary movements that is rich in dopamine neurons. For Parkinson's these neurons die off while the rest of the brain remains relatively strong. Simply putting dopamine into the brain doesn't fix the issue you need to up the dopamine released by these specific neurons.
The treatment here is l-dopa which is a precursor to dopamine which does this, but once those neurons are gone they're gone and there is little we can do to stop the disease.
So if this works for l-dopa why won't it work for choline? My guess is because of the tight regulation the brain has around choline levels as its needed to prevent the hippocampus from seizing up.
Trials are really different skill set compared to the scanning for these chemicals or in this case meta studying. Trials involve large numbers of people you have determined do and do not have the condition you are trying to treat and then having your treatment and having some way to measure if the treatment is impacting the thing you expect it to (brain choline levels) and whether that impacts the symptoms (anxiety).
Trials cost millions and in this case would require a number of different expertise, meta studies on the other hand is just reading and statistical analysis with knowledge of the biases of papers and assessing them critically and they don't cost millions.
This is how research works. Someone, somewhere, someday will see this study and do just that. Or it could be the next step for the researchers at UC Davis who published this.
Anecdotal, but I've had life long issues with anxiety. First time hearing about choline, but about a year ago I started taking omega 3 capsules on a whim, and its been a game changer. Eating salmon as they suggest has a similar positive effect. YMMV.
But yeah, our ancestors lived in constant danger of getting eaten by sabre tooth tigers, freezing in the snow, catching maalria, and, in general, watching terrible things happen to their tribe.
They had no therapy, no supplements, no self help section on the cave wall art.
They were forced into a continual outward focus with no time for navel-gazing.
They carried on through all exigencies, and succeeded mightily.
A supplement that I take and comment about frequently is (Spirulina & Chorella), this is a study that shows the level of choline in Spirulina. Improving my diet and using a supplement like algae has had the most impact on my anxiety levels and focus.
Mindfulness meditation also helps with consistent action to understand where my mind and body are at each day.
Research - Functional properties of bioactive compounds from Spirulina spp.: Current status and future trends (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9513730/)
Would you mind sharing the brand, and how much of it you take?
Yeah for sure, this is what I buy on Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FAB10ZI) and the dosage depends on what you are experiencing. I was doubling my dosage, but have lowered it back to the recommended dosage on the package (10 pills, they are tiny). I have also taken the powered version but the umami taste is really strong, so I went back to the pill version.
I like to take it with Psyllium Husk Fiber / Metamucil to help increase the fiber in my diet since the higher dosage is like eating a lot of kale at one time, it can move through you super quickly.
Here are some studies that I commented before that I have read that has helped with learning more about the supplements and the dosages depending on what you are experiencing:
- High-dose supplementation of Chlorella and Spirulina increases beneficial gut Bacteria in healthy ICR mice: A 90-day feeding study (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jff.2025.106796)
- Spirulina in Clinical Practice: Evidence-Based Human Applications (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3136577/)
- Effect of spirulina and chlorella alone and combined on the healing process of diabetic wounds: an experimental model of diabetic rats (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8212205/)
- Beneficial Effects of Spirulina Consumption on Brain Health ( https://doi.org/10.3390/nu14030676) This is a new study that I found, that I'm going to read, but it shows the impact on neuroinflammation, and from experience the supplement has helped me with inflammation, and why I think it has helped with my ADHD/Anxiety.
Amazingly helpful, thank you so much!
On a meta note, I have a deep love and appreciation for people like yourself who share this kind of info. It's been quite helpful for me on my own health journey.
No problem! Thanks! It's something I have been researching for a while, and has really benefited me. It's different for everyone, but has had a impact on me, and then leads to other dietary changes that can lead to more change.
I need pretty massive doses of algae, handfulls of pressed tablets per day, to see a difference. I'd recommend ramping that up gradually though.
People have to stop trying to depend on supplements for what a diet should provide.
Neither spirulina nor chlorella are good sources of choline. For example if you had to take spirulina you'd need about 6 cups per day to reach RDI. Way to risk getting elevated uric acid, vitamin A overload or a slew of other intestinal issues.
Compare with 3-4 eggs... or 90g of beef liver I know what I would take.
3 or 4 eggs a day? 90g beef liver? Sign me up for those pills, Bill.
Like 120 eggs a month, 1400 eggs a years. That is what you envision as the healthier alternative?
Ahhh the old "eggs are bad for you" meme. Eggs are demonstrably healthy. Just don't fry them in a gallon of butter and you'll be fine.
Then demonstrate?
In 2015, the U.S. Dietary Guidelines shifted from implying that one egg a day is “probably a bit much” to saying “one egg a day is fine if you don’t fry it.” This coincided with the removal of the quantitative cap of 300 mg/day on dietary cholesterol (a single egg basically maxes that out).
EDIT: The calorie count used to compute the portion of the comment below were incorrect. I'm leaving it unchanged for posterity, but want to clarify that an egg has about 80 cals.
Four eggs a day is almost 1,000 calories of egg, roughly half of many people’s total daily calorie intake.
What? A jumbo egg is like 70-100 calories.
Like most things I’m sure you can overdo it. But if you’re choosing between cereal and a bagel or a couple of eggs, I think most would be better off with the eggs.
You're 100% right. In the back of my head I had egg at 200+ calories
Maybe they're eating goose eggs.
Fat and cholesterol don’t hurt you, or make you fat.
Sitting on ass does.
If you are looking to the landing page of any of those major bodies to figure out how to fuel your body, good luck.
Liver can be pretty good if you spice it up Jamaican style. I regularly make this for people who tell me they don't like liver and they just love it. Pretty easy - Fresh and whole tumeric, ginger, garlic, onions, thyme, oregano, and as much scotch bonnet as you can handle. Soak the liver in brined water or milk for a few hrs and it will draw out a lot of the strong taste as well (French technique). Stew in some water after sautéing the onions to your liking. Same recipe works for stewing heart meat if that's something more to your liking, and it also contains a lot of the same nutrients that a lot of people are lacking in modern westernized diets. Consider what other predators do when they get to their prey: They go straight for the liver and heart.
However if you don't like the idea of trying new things, and just want something in pill form, honestly lecithin or even better citicoline is the way to go in my opinion
Chicken liver has more iron and selenium in it per Oz than beef liver. Easier to eat a ton and not as harsh tasting. Make some dirty rice or just liver stew!
I prefer to turn that into patê personally. Always the goal is getting people to actually eat the stuff
I can eat a hard boiled egg on the way to the bathroom.
What’s up with you?
I stated the supplement has choline and has helped with my anxiety. I never stated it was a main source of choline.
> Way to risk getting elevated uric acid, vitamin A overload or a slew of other intestinal issues.
I thought vegatables = good? You can never eat too many greens I think youll find is the prevailing wisdom
Spirulina is not really what is mean by a "green" in that context. You probably can't physically ingest enough spinach/kale/etc to do yourself any harm. Powdered algae is not necessarily such a sure thing
Eggs are gross and I'd need a much better reason than "someone said it was better than supplements" to take a life.
What’s your detailed position on human abortion, out of (genuine) curiosity?
I think I can't take Spirulina due to Hashimoto.
Spirulina is not a good source of choline. You'd need about 6 cups of it per day to get it. I think the person commenting is just interested in spirulina itself and is misguided about its benefits.
The studies listed as part of this thread show people taking 3-4 grams per day for 8 weeks... that's less than 1% of choline RDI. Not very relevant to our conversation.
Spirulina is a source of choline, I never stated it was a main source. I fully understand the benefits of the supplement, and have read many studies on it.
I agree, from what I have found in studies for anyone that have autoimmune diseases or are on heavy medications, it can make them worse. Thats been the main area that have been the negative impact of the supplement.
It's something that should be watched as you take it and/or discussed with a doctor if you are dealing with other health conditions.
A word of warning, while the issues of low choline tend to be what shows up in a search, too much can also have negative effects, such as inducing strong depression. Because choline touches so much in the brain/body, there are other things that can happen as well, such as subtle mental effects and changes in blood pressure. TMAO generation may also a concern.
So be careful trying supplements, and monitor your mental/physical state.
Choline from normal food sources isn’t typically a problem, but supplements and additives like lecithin can push people over the edge.
This looks like a decent summary of why it may cause depression: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/6fdb/adf596271afea393659cbf... (World Nutrition 2019;10(1):54-62 “Too much of a good thing? Lecithin and mental health”)
A lot of things are going to be different in a brain in constant fight or flight mode. It isn't surprising that flooding your system daily with stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline has an effect on brain chemistry. But this doesn't mean causation, and especially doesn't mean causation with regards to dietary choline intake.
My first-hand experience of the healthcare system in the USA leads me to conclude we don’t have good data on pathological anxiety levels. Psychiatry is over-incentivized to positively diagnose.
You can get diagnosed with ‘anxiety’ when you’ve been in a hard circumstance for a while, since it’s simply a self-reporting questionnaire on levels of concern. That’s not a way to determine pathology - how do they tell when it’s appropriate behavior, eg when you’re actually in a dangerous situation.
This economy, since the financial crisis, has had weak employment (when you factor in not-in-workforce trends over the last 50 years), being under-employed for a long time is a threat to life. You can be in a location or situation where you’re blind to a loss of economic opportunity because there is so much misinformation. Anxiety is not maladaptive then.
This happened to me, and when my situation finally began to improve after a change in direction, my anxiety went down. Before I made that change, I found anti-anxiety meds put me in a dysfunctional ‘happy’ state, that made it harder to course correct or care about my reality. So I quickly stopped taking them last year, shortly after receiving them. And yet a diagnosis was made then, and looking at my medical report, this so called disease remains on my medical record. Ridiculous. All that self-reporting showed was normal human behavior.
Luckily, at the worst time, I also hedged by seeing separately a psychologist who helped me understand through a series of interviews that all my behavior was appropriate to my situation.
I went to a psychiatrist to be evaluated for ADHD. He diagnosed me with anxiety, saying that being anxious made it hard for me to focus.
Uh.
I went to another doc who diagnosed me with and started treating me for ADHD. Boom. Anxiety gone. Turns out I was just super anxious about having a hard time working on the un-shiny things I needed to be working on.
I'd kindly point out that anxiety is usually a side effect of ADHD and usually the link is not as obvious as the one you point out.
However, I'm glad things are working out for you :)
I'd say anxiety is a symptom of mental health problem like having a cough -- the underlying cause can be very different in people.
Since I was little I suffered from terrible schizotypal anxiety which somehow cleared up completely in middle age [1] I never got along with a person I knew who had panic disorder despite trying hard: some if it is that my anxiety makes me move towards dangerous things (I've been seen going into a building when the fire alarm was on) and his anxiety makes him want to banish every possible source of anxiety from his life but the more he does that the more fragile it gets.
[1] I don't know if it was Gabapentin, or a few years of attempting business developer, or meeting my "evil twin" or discovering my schizotypy or just getting old enough that I don't give a fuck.
It’s different for everyone, of course. In my case, it was almost entirely about me being stressed out that it was impossible to get starting on big, looming projects before they became emergencies. “If I don’t do this, I’ll probably get fired. I know I have to do this. Why can’t I just do this?” is quite anxiety producing.
It’s so nice when you finally feel okay.
I received both of these diagnoses,
and then ended up finding mold toxicity, Lyme, high levels of EBV, mycoplasma pneumoniae, and staph in some dental work.
Resolving all of those (a long process!) has left me cool as a cucumber, in comparison. Higher bandwidth, effective.
No easy feat - but it was better to work on that list than a permanent list of conditions like I was left with!
Wow, I definitely had the easier of our two ordeals! I'm glad you got that all sorted out.
Dude, that's wild. I can't imagine what you could do to get infected with so many different organisms. Are you sure there isn't some underlying unifying reason, like rare genetic disease that makes you more prone to infections or something?
It makes me uneasy how people with ADHD shopped around until they got a diagnosis like this. Surely you let the doctor tell YOU whats wrong with you, rather than you tell the doctor?
No way, no how. It’s called advocating for yourself, in the parlance of our times, and it’s not remotely limited to just this one aspect. Doctors are extremely busy and don’t have the time to go Dr. House on your specific case. If you go in with symptoms A, B, and C, and they stop listening at A and diagnose you with something that causes A, insist that they consider B and C, too.
Also, a good doctor won’t take issue with this, so long as you don’t insist that your 5 minutes on WebMD is right and they’re wrong.
Analogy: If someone at work says they can’t log in, and also that their already logged in password queries don’t work, it could mean that the login service is down and the database is down. It could also mean that AWS is down, and rebooting those other services isn’t going to fix the common root cause.
Have some confidence in your ability to learn.
If you trust a general doctor’s read of you in 11 minutes a year more than your own, it’s time to look within way more often.
Double-check yourself with your practitioner, but don’t sleep at the wheel.
Because it is YOU at the wheel - regardless what anyone wants!
There are a lot of bad doctors out there. Like, dangerously bad.
If you think a doctor is wrong, they very well might be, particularly if you have already done your homework. This is not the old days, where medical knowledge is exclusively available to doctors. In fact, it is a huge risk to go in unprepared and ignorant of the possibilities, because misdiagnoses are not uncommon if critical symptoms get overlooked due to the patient not presenting them.
Ask yourself not how many doctors graduated with honors. Ask yourself how many barely graduated after cheating their way through the program and are now faking their way through life.
If the medical system was infallible, you'd have a solid point. In practice, medical professionals operate within their own biases, rather than being purely objective observers of your symptoms
Many cases of ADHD are allergic reactions. When I get a dose of something I'm allergic to (molds, perfumes...) I'll end up being scatter-brained for the day.
My child was the same way due to a wheat allergy (U.S. wheat is heavier than European wheat, and the flour comes out differently. It's actually tougher to digest for many).
As for letting the doctor tell you... The last few decades, I find I've been making the diagnosis first. Chronic fatigue, adult chicken pox, whooping cough... In each case, the medical history I gave was a reasonable path for ordering tests to get the correct diagnosis, but in each case the doctors missed it.
The whooping cough one was particularly annoying. I had traveled to Amsterdam, which had an outbreak a couple of years ago. I told the doctors this, and they still diagnosed me as having an ordinary sinus infection and gave me the wrong antibiotics. My wife looked up the medical alerts in Amsterdam, I messaged the doctor asking for the correct antibiotics (just in time).
Doctors in the U.S. follow protocols. When they don't they have to file extra paperwork. The entire system is designed to punish deviation from protocol, and the protocols don't get adjusted based on evidence or circumstance. They're handed down from a committee that the insurance companies take as law. Insurance companies in particular are geared to denying payment for deviation from protocol without prior approval. So doctors adjust their behavior to go with the flow... unless you find a great doctor, who knows better.
These days, you really do need to take your health in your own hands. Doctors become a path to confirmation and treatment, at least on the illness side of things. Injury tends to be a little more cut-and-dried, but even there you have to find the right experts. For example for sports injuries, you likely want doctors that see many patients that play that particular sport because they have experience with how things can go wrong.
Sorry for the rant. I've just seen the need for shopping a lot more in recent years.
What medication do you take? Stimulants seems to create more anxiety.
I tried Focalin, and ended up on plain Adderall. For me, they didn’t create any anxiety at all, or any other noticeable side effects or adverse reactions. I count myself very lucky.
Both can be true.
Of course! And everyone is different. In my specific case, only one was true. Treating the root cause fixed all the related symptoms. Others will have different experiences.
But also be careful about taking too much choline. There's lots of anecdotal reports of people taking too much choline supplements and becoming massively depressed.
Interestingly many antidepressants are anticholinergic (as are many nootropes, so you have to be super careful mixing to the two).
The other problem with supplementing with too much choline may be elevated TMAO:
"Dietary Choline Supplements, but Not Eggs, Raise Fasting TMAO Levels in Participants with Normal Renal Function: A Randomized Clinical Trial"
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8410632/
My takeaway: do please go ahead and add egg to your diet.
Big Egg paid you to say this, didn't they?
I do prefer a Big Egg.
Brown ones, too.
I haven’t looked, but I bet that tracks with nutritional value.
It helps to mention what TMAO is:
> Choline is a dietary precursor to the gut microbial generation of the pro-thrombotic and pro-atherogenic metabolite trimethylamine-N-oxide (TMAO).
Helped a little?
Misleading headline. This is more accurate:
"Meta-analysis finds people with anxiety disorders have lower levels of choline in their brains"
There's no evidence (yet) of anything being "tied to" anything else.
or is it low levels of choline tied to anxiety disorders?
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-025-03206-7
> This suggests that chronically elevated arousal in AnxDs may increase neurometabolic demand for choline compounds without a proportionate increase in brain uptake, leading to reduced tCho levels. Reduced cortical NAA suggests compromised neuronal function in AnxDs. Future studies may clarify the clinical significance of reduced cortical tCho and the possibility that appropriate choline supplementation could have therapeutic benefit in anxiety disorders.
"...choline levels were 8% lower in those with anxiety disorders" that's by no means clinically significant.
I feel like a lot of the studies coming out lately are trying really hard to corelate information and join the meta-studies wagon.
I am suffering from medium levels of general anxiety and fighting with severe anxiety (panic?) in situations that stress me out, e.g. conflict or interviews. If I know I have those 2 hours beforehand and I can tranquilize myself with the betablocker propranolol which makes the relevant adrenaline receptors in your body immune to all the adrenaline your gland secrete and turns me into a cool and smooth operator.
Choline gives me a severe stiff neck and makes me unable to sleep. I have experimented with many supplements and it was one of the most consistent and unfortunate effects I ever got from one.
Beta blockers can be dangerous in the sense they stop your natural adrenaline response when you or somebody else in your vicinity is doing something dangerous, and so you don’t acknowledge danger properly.
I have taken insane one time dosages up to 200mg and haven't noticed that effect. In my experience they never fully turn off the effects of adrenaline spikes at any dosage still bearable.
They aren't magic zombie pills, at worst they turn you mostly fearless and consequently slightly unhinged (and make you feel like shit due to the low blood pressure).
choline supplements make me viciously depressed
I encountered the same effect too, and just posted a warning about it. Unfortunately the effect is hard to come across in a search, unless you are specifically searching for it.
The most annoying thing about pieces like this is how easy it would be to actually test the hypothesis. They could just give people choline (double blind placebo including some participants who are not anxious). And test the effect on both choline levels and anxiety.
It’s also ready sold OTC.
Instead people just sit around and do meta studies on meta studies on correlation and publishing whatever statistical anomalies they can find.
I can understand why this may seem simple, but when it comes to the brain almost nothing is simple.
Choline a key component in Acetylcholine is the primary neurotransmitter used in your hippocampus. Its an excitatory neurotransmitter meaning it turns neurons on. The hippocampus is a massive parallel feedback circuit that when over stimulated can and will begin to seize. In fact many people who suffer from seizures have over active hippocampal circuitry. Simply "flooding" the brain with more choline could have very very bad effects.
Likewise, taking choline might not work as the brain actively controls and regulates the contents of the cerebral spinal fluid. Unlike the rest of your body, the capillaries in the brain are not leaky, but instead are enshrouded in the blood-brain barrier and there are active transport proteins for anything that isn't lipid soluble.
Choline is actively transported into the brain and the brain has additional internal mechanisms to regulate the levels of choline.
Lastly, neurotransmitters aren't just floating around in the soup of your brain. They are released by specific neurons which are integrated into specific circuits. Parkinson's disease is a perfect example here. There is tiny region of the brain involved in regulating voluntary movements that is rich in dopamine neurons. For Parkinson's these neurons die off while the rest of the brain remains relatively strong. Simply putting dopamine into the brain doesn't fix the issue you need to up the dopamine released by these specific neurons.
The treatment here is l-dopa which is a precursor to dopamine which does this, but once those neurons are gone they're gone and there is little we can do to stop the disease.
So if this works for l-dopa why won't it work for choline? My guess is because of the tight regulation the brain has around choline levels as its needed to prevent the hippocampus from seizing up.
Trials are really different skill set compared to the scanning for these chemicals or in this case meta studying. Trials involve large numbers of people you have determined do and do not have the condition you are trying to treat and then having your treatment and having some way to measure if the treatment is impacting the thing you expect it to (brain choline levels) and whether that impacts the symptoms (anxiety).
Trials cost millions and in this case would require a number of different expertise, meta studies on the other hand is just reading and statistical analysis with knowledge of the biases of papers and assessing them critically and they don't cost millions.
This is how research works. Someone, somewhere, someday will see this study and do just that. Or it could be the next step for the researchers at UC Davis who published this.
Anecdotal, but I've had life long issues with anxiety. First time hearing about choline, but about a year ago I started taking omega 3 capsules on a whim, and its been a game changer. Eating salmon as they suggest has a similar positive effect. YMMV.
Is it because it costs a lot of money to do the study and can’t be patented?
some eggs, some steak, some vegetables, some human company, feeling valued & working on things that bring fulfillment
that's how most people never experience anxiety in most parts of the world.
no need for drugs, medicines etc.
I would add exercise and sunshine.
But yeah, our ancestors lived in constant danger of getting eaten by sabre tooth tigers, freezing in the snow, catching maalria, and, in general, watching terrible things happen to their tribe.
They had no therapy, no supplements, no self help section on the cave wall art.
They were forced into a continual outward focus with no time for navel-gazing.
They carried on through all exigencies, and succeeded mightily.
> most people never experience anxiety in most parts of the world
Citation needed? And how much is 'most'?