gaba deficiency
Want to know your brain a little better? Here's an intro to one of your main inhibitory neurotransmitters - GABA.

Inhibitory sounds like a bad thing, but there's a balance between the excitatory and the inhibitory aspects of all function; just as there's light/dark, up/down, fast/slow and cold/hot. If we were to run on hot all the time, like most of us do in modern times, we'd get burnt out. Sick... Tired...

And often oddly wired at the same time.

"Tired and wired". That was me when my health fell apart around 2005 (for the third time). What I learned from my neurologist, Dr. Eric Bravernan, changed my life!

A special series of brain tests done over 4 hours showed I had only 15% of normal GABA function, low enough that I had probably been having low-grade seizures (for most of my life). Wow! "So, teach me about GABA", I said. And he did.

"The Edge Effect" is Dr. Braverman's highly readable book on neurotransmitters and health. It's hands down the best $12.95 I ever spent and has quizzes, charts and neuroscience made so simple anyone can follow it and get excited about it. It's fun to "diagnose" yourself and a relief to see that so may symptoms can be due to one cause!

Here's a list of some of the things GABA controls in your body. If this sounds like you, start on some Passion Flower today (we prefer this one in glycerin as it's sweet and can be taken without water). It works far better than taking the supplement GABA itself.

Symptoms of GABA deficiency.
  • Physical - Carbohydrate craving, skin flushing, butterflies in stomach, ringing in ear, muscle tension (especially in neck and back),trembling/twitching, numbness or tingling in fingers,hyperventilation (not the emergency kind, but the everyday breathing too fast and too shallow), blurred vision, allergies, night sweats, tachycardia, chest discomfort, reflux, pain - especially in nerves but elsewhere too
  • Psychological - Restlessness, feelings of dread, emotional immaturity, short temper, phobias, anxiety (panic too), obsessive thinking
  • Memory Function - Poor verbal memory
  • Attention Issues - Impulsivity, disorganization, ADD
Conditions/diseases of GABA deficiency: Tinnitus, anxiety, hypertension, chronic pain, irritable bowel syndrome and other gastro-intestinal disorders, PMS, seizures, stroke, bipolar disorder, insomnia (and therefore fatigue), Tourette's

Here's a short GABA True/False test, which is very basic.
  1. I feel shaky. T / F
  2. I have frequent back, neck and/or headaches. T / F
  3. I can be very irritable at the least cause. T / F
  4. I tend to have heart palpitations. T / F
  5. I tend to have cold hands. T / F
  6. I sometimes sweat too much. T / F
  7. I am sometimes dizzy. T / F
  8. I am often nervous. T / F
  9. I often feel fatigued even when I have had a good night's sleep. T / F
  10. I overeat. T / F
From a medicinal point of view, marijuana, alcohol and heroin all boost GABA in the brain and body. This is why a person severely deficient in GABA, which may be genetic or acquired from stress and trauma, will turn to alcohol and drugs. Truthfully, it's the only thing keeping them alive, in a weird way. This is not to recommend alcohol and drugs, but to help you understand why the brain WILL take them if it needs to. Passion Flower is extremely safe and even children can learn to dose it as needed.

For prescription GABA, Clonazepam, Valium, Xanax and the anti-seizure meds such as Depakote, Topamax and Gabapentin will handle the shortage of GABA but as with alcohol and drugs, they can be highly addictive to the GABA-deficient brain. In my case, a tiny dose of meds keeps me calmer and gives me much more energy than burning myself up with anxiety, diarrhea, obsessive thinking and more.

Is there a way to fix this without medications?

The best way to FIX the deficiency as much as you can is to stop-look-and-listen to what your life is telling you. For me, I was clearly overworked and was struggling with the deaths of my parents and my godchild, in menopause and more.

Since GABA acts as the brakes in our bodies, people deficient in GABA need plenty of sleep, fats, and protein to keep in balance. Sugars, starches, dieting, and lack of sleep will aggravate your brain and can cause the physical and emotional dominoes listed above to fall like clockwork It's much easier to treat a handful of problems at once than to wait and try to treat them as individual problems. The Edge Effect talks about this more, in easy to understand terms.