Are you one of the people who has tried every calming supplement and sleep aid there is but it had virtually no effect on your insomnia? These are often sold as “Here’s something that will help calm down your overreactive brain: Valerian, Skull Cap, L-Theanine, GABA, Magnessium, 5HTP, Glycine, Passionflower, Hops, Chamomile and many others. If you answered yes then your root cause hides elsewhere and this article will help you steer in the right direction.

The reason I often refer to Eastern medicine is because it believes that the whole is greater than the sum of all parts. If the body is not balanced, illnesses and disease can occur. In order to appreciate this better and improve my sleep I had to self-educate on a ton of things. Here are some key concepts that will help you understand why you might be experiencing lots of frustration with common sleep aids.

Homeostasis – The Great Balancing Act

Think of your body as a 24 hour balancing act. You are programmed to survive in an inner changing internal and external environment. For example, you eating and enjoying a movie but what is your body doing that very moment? It is performing a complex set of procedures to digest, regulate temperature, blood pressure, balance out PH and sugars, regenerate muscles, detox and hundreds of other functions all the same time! Meanwhile, oblivious to all the multiple processes taking place inside you are relaxing on your sofa.

All living organisms, from plants to hamsters to people, must regulate their internal environment to process energy in order to survive. This is what is called Homeostasis – the ability to maintain a balance. One of the components [continue reading…]

The year has whizzed by fast but improvements are rather shallow from my previous one year report. It seems like at least half of the year I was at the peak of the dump phase. At times I was not only struggling to cope with rounds but also felt like sliding backwards.  Even now I’m not sure the dump is over.

I’ve done 84 rounds in total by now. A year ago I was at these chelator doses:  12.5 DMPS/50 ALA. Now I’m at 12.5 DMPS (can handle more but with more symptoms) and 75 ALA.  25 mg seems like a miserable increase in one year. Also need to note that my overall tolerance of DMPS has not increased.

Another year of numerous supplement experiments and numerous failures. I think from now on I’m done with experimenting with new stuff. I’d rather have humble gains than setbacks due to my attempts to make things “go faster.”

Improvements

• Sleep is getting deeper and better. A number of nights of sleeping through the night are still rear but increasing.
• Energy levels are at a point where I’m able to do longer hikes and can manage moderate exercise without feeling the effects the next day.
• Alcohol tolerance. I’m not a big party guy but sometimes I’m unable to avoid booze because the nature of my work demands of me to be [continue reading…]

Not sure about you but I can not sleep while having sex. This seems to be true even with energy exchange with one’s hotel neighbor. This video was recorded during a stay at a hotel where I had insomnia. It is about human energy field and how we unawarely share it with others while we sleep.

In addition to what I share with you below I’d like to point out that according to the Heart Math Institute:

“The heart is the most powerful source of electromagnetic energy in the human body, producing the largest rhythmic electromagnetic field of any of the body’s organs. The heart’s electrical field is about 60 times greater in amplitude than the electrical activity generated by the brain. This field, measured in the form of an electrocardiogram (ECG), can be detected anywhere on the surface of the body. Furthermore, the magnetic field produced by the heart is more than 100 times greater in strength than the field generated by the brain and can be detected up to 3 feet away from the body, in all directions, using SQUID-based magnetometers.”

This is really fascinating and I wonder whether the quality of the sleep also depends on how congruent your heart’s frequency is either with your partner or even the neighbor across the wall. What I mean is if two people emitting different vibrations based on their emotions (for example sad vs. appreciation) whether this could cause such a dissonance that a more sensitive person would develop insomnia while sharing that energy field with another person.

Anyways, if you have some experiences of your own, I’d love for you to share in the comments below after you [continue reading…]

Amanita Muscaria (Fly Agaric) has always been one of those wonder mushrooms for me. I’ve been fascinated with its beauty ever since I was a kid growing up in Lithuania. While not considered to be an edible mushroom, I’ve heard plenty of stories of using it as medicine (joint inflamation) or people pickling them for winter after careful preparation like boiling and pouring out the “toxic” water. Personally, I was interested in one thing only – can this queen of the forest help me sleep better tonight.

There are stories of shamanic use in Siberia, stories of inner journeys and strange dreams, stories of finding peace and tranquility, healing insights, etc. Personally, I didn’t experience any of them. The mushroom didn’t speak to me, didn’t provide any insights, all it did was induce massive insomnia for several weeks afterwards.

Why I Felt Amanita Mushroom Can Help With Insomnia

Amanita has two active compouds: muscimol and ibutenic acid. Muscimol is a very strong GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid) receptor agonist. Simply put it help the brain to calm down and relax. This is how various “GABAergic” supplements like L-Theanine, valerian, passioflower, skullcap and many others work – they increase GABA and inhibit the stimulating effects of glutamate and stress.

So muscimol is what got me curious. Muscimol is what made me so hopeful. Muscimol is what got me experimenting. There’s only one problem: muscimol has to be converted by our liver and it has to be converted from ibutenic acid, which is that second psycho-active ingredient of the Amanitas. Ibutenic acid happens to be a very potent neuro stimulant. As wikipedia says “It is a conformationally-restricted analogue of the neurotransmitter glutamate, and due to its structural similarity to this neurotransmitter, acts as a non-selective glutamate receptor agonist. ” Ibutenic acid is the complete opposite of muscimol.

The idea is simple: treat the mushroom by drying it, store it in some cool place for three months and then make tea. This is supposed to help convert ibutenic acid into muscimol. A process, otherwise known as decarboxylation. I figured once the mushroom is decarboxylated I’ll have nothing but pure goodness of GABA rich muscimol and it should knock me out at night real good.

Who Benefits, Who Doesn’t

I’m guessing that one group of people who feel the benefits of the mushroom the most are the ones that have rather turbulent minds. When they first try Amanita they may report a great sense of tranquility. I am guessing this happens because of the stark contrast between their “normal” self and the Amanita induced calmness. However, if one is an avid meditator or QiGong practitioner (induces GABA states), Amanita may do nothing for you other than make you feel a bit sedated. 

The second group are the ones that brave high doses. These are the ones that report some wild trips but you don’t hear about the rest of the 90% that either had a sleepless night, felt very sick or ended up in a hospital with symptoms of acute poisoning. 

I have been chelating mercury for exactly one year now. If you are visiting this blog for the first time you need to know that it took me five years of hell and suffering to come to a conclusion that the root cause behind my debilitating insomnia and all the health issues is mercury toxicity.

Once I put all the dots together I researched for the best way to detox and learned that the Andrew Cutler method seems to be the safest and most reliable method up to date. So I had all my eight amalgam fillings removed December 2017 and started chelation on March 2018. You can learn about my initial symptoms and my chelation diary by following these links.

As of today I have done a total of 44 rounds. First five months was the honeymoon period, I mean it felt like a load of my shoulder and a naive thought crept in: “What if this was it? What if I won’t need to chelate because removing those mercury fillings was enough?” I was hardly visiting the ACC forum on Facebook, wondering what all the fuss was all about.

[continue reading…]

I did it again! I managed to aggravate my insomnia with another supplement. What seemed like a very beneficial and benign vitamin turned out to be a sneaky sleep killer. Worst part? I unknowingly suffered for almost a month until I figured out what the heck is going on with me – my vitamin D dose was too high and it was causing some serious sleep issues. Let me explain.

About six weeks ago I started feeling more down than usual. Figured this was the winter blues again – no sunshine here, cold, wet – nasty business. This was the time to listen to science and start supplementing with Vit D for better mood and sleep. And initially it helped – a gentle pick up in mood, less lethargy, more sense of wellness. Good to go!

Two weeks into it I felt like I was doing so good that I could try and quit melatonin altogether (you can read about my experiment here) but I couldn’t fall asleep and it was getting worse and worse. That sense of tiredness and sleepiness never came at 10pm as usual. The little sleep that I got was very fractured and the dreams were insane: violent, paranoid with deep plots, I mean Hollywood would pay big buks for this stuff.

I waited two weeks to allow my body to adjust but things weren’t getting any better so I started back on melatonin but my sleep didn’t improve a bit! Something was wrong but I didn’t know where to look so I had to do what works best – think what new supplement I recently introduced. There were only two suspects – Vitamin D and K2.

[continue reading…]

Five years on melatonin is not a joke. I tried quitting it before and noticed that after a few nights of initial sleeplessness my body caught up with its natural rhythm and I was able to fall asleep without it. Not this time. I’ll share what happened and my speculations for the reasons that I failed so miserably.

My insomnia recovery is progressing steadily but slowly.  I finally hit a point where I feel that most nights I get enough rest and my sleep pattern was “normalizing.” There was only one thing that was bothering me: I still wake up briefly around 2 or 3am and I wake up too early before that sense of refreshing sleep takes place.

I know for a fact that melatonin not only forces on the body a circadian rhythm (often lauded as a benefit) but also messes with it. Think about it, our body has a circadian rhythm of its own but by taking melatonin we tweak that clock and tell it to go in the direction it is not naturally set to go.

Additionally, I read that melatonin disrupts our cortisol rhythms. While we fall asleep easier we can wake up too early because we supply our body with an unnaturally high amount of the hormone and the body needs to compensate for it somehow. Since cortisol is very related to blood melatonin levels (cortisol levels fall in the evening and rise in the morning, while melatonin does the opposite) it is quite possible that a drop in high melatonin levels can give rise to high cortisol in the AM.

I figured it was enough messing with this melatonin/cortisol rhythm so I  decided to turn things loose and see where the cards fall. It was time to allow the ‘natural’ circadian rhythm to take over and re-calibrate itself. I was hoping that [continue reading…]

I could bet a hundred buks that upon the onset of your insomnia the first idea that popped into your head was – glass of warm milk! I don’t blame you. Ever since our early years we’ve been told that nothing has a reputation for sending us into deep slumber quite like milk.

But is milk really that effective and are there cases where it can make insomnia worse? I listened to an Ayurveda practitioner and tried a glass of milk before bed but it backfired and sent me into a fiery hell of discomfort and sleeplessness. What I share with you here took me years to figure out.

Two Cases Where Milk is an Effective Sleep Aid:

First, is where drinking milk before bed is eliciting memories of your mother, childhood home, makes you comfy and relaxed and helps you to convince yourself to fall asleep.

Second case where milk would make you sleepy is if you’re a baby calf who’s sucking on the actual tit!

This is pretty much it because it only gets worse from here.

Science Does not Support It

According to an age old myth, milk’s effectiveness as sleep aid is due to a  sedative amino acid called L-tryptophan. It is the raw material for our ‘feel good’ hormone serotonin, which converts to our ‘sleep well’ hormone – melatonin.

Perhaps you’ve already heard about Tryptophan when others speak about getting real sleepy after stuffing themselves with roast turkey meat. It is believed that turkey too is rich in Tryptophan. According to this logic, [continue reading…]

Over the years I’ve experimented with a ton of supplements in order to find a solution to my persistent insomnia and fatigue. As a result of having no clue as to what I’m dealing with, I often made things much worse. It was a hellishly frustrating experience but every experiment pointed me in one direction or another and eventually towards piecing the puzzle together.

The advice below is for hardcore insomniacs so I’ll spare you from all the obvious suggestions you find online relating to melatonin, EMFs, pillows, mattresses, magic nightgowns, “happy thoughts” and the rest of the BS.

Setting the Ground

First things first: quit all of your current supplements unless you deem them to be life saving for you. If you don’t know what and why you’re taking it can be causing you more harm than good. Especially cut out all B vitamins and any stimulants, including all herbal formulas, before you try any of the tips below.

I invite you to do this because you need to have a baseline to measure your improvements. In addition, you might be already experiencing paradoxical reactions to supplements, resulting in decreased sleep quality. If you have any doubts [continue reading…]