so if you do notice suddenly that your nicotine is unusually powerful today or your alpha gpc is unusually powerful today it may be [Music] good afternoon friends in this video i'm going to tell you how i would go about supplementing nicotine to get better cognitive performance like for an exam or for studying but before i do please subscribe to the channel if you're not already like the video and comment on the video to help the channel's growth now let's get started first of all i hope you saw the last video from this morning which introduced nicotine to you in this video we're going to talk about how to go about supplementing nicotine we're going to go across the considerations that you should make and then consider some uh supplements that i take and what i do specifically myself first of all the considerations there are three considerations i want to bring up the first is the u-shaped curve effect of nicotine as we learned from the previous video nicotine has cognitive enhancing effects that have a u-shaped curve even among drug naive people and nicotine naive people that means in someone who's never used nicotine before one milligram in studies in humans will almost always improve cognitive performance so will two milligrams but on average four milligrams will worsen cognitive performance even compared to someone who doesn't use nicotine so what does this tell us this tells us there's an upper limit on the amount of nicotine acutely that can improve cognitive performance and let me tell you what does that feel when you reach that upper limit you feel too much silly too much activity of the salience network in the brain things in your surroundings are too salient for you you may be concentrating but you have a lot of energy you feel like oh i should go write maybe my to-do list on the board or maybe i should go clean something over there this is the salience network becoming overpowering in your brain that's one feeling another feeling may be of too much excitatory activity in your brain a feeling of like maybe some thinking pollution or brain fog slightly or a feeling of slight anxiety that's what will happen when you go too far you won't have to guess too much to be honest with you you'll notice when you've gone too far on the dose but let me point out another thing unlike many receptors in the human body the nicotinic cholinergic receptors both in humans and other mammals upregulates when it's bound to and agonized agonism is binding to and activating the receptor so the nicotinic cholinergic receptors are expressed more when you use nicotine what does this mean this may mean that you become more sensitive to higher doses of nicotine if you use it more often or it may mean that you have a higher threshold for tolerance of how nicotine may be helpful for you that means that you may be able to use four milligrams and get even better performance or you may be able to get the same performance that someone gets out of two milligrams from one milligram it depends on the situation we really don't know too much about this but what i'm trying to point out here is not only is there variance between people about what the upper limit of nicotine supplementation will be useful but even within a person according to how much nicotine they use over time second we have to consider the vitamin choline you see if many people i think are actually deficient to some degree in choline at least in regard to optimal function i think most people are and i think that's one of the reasons that so many people have such a boost from baseline cognition when they use nicotine so there's reason to think that people really need to raise the amount of choline supplementation that they're doing choline is a vitamin remember choline is what the neurotransmitter the hormone in our brains acetylcholine which nicotine acts like but acetylcholine is made out of choli and it's made out of dietary choline what i'm saying here is most people probably don't consume enough choline in their diet to have proper function in general but the most important element of supplement and choline other than brain health is the development of liver disease if you're choline deficient you will develop non-alcoholic fatty liver disease which will progress into non-alcoholic steatohepatitis nash on its own just from the choline deficiency so you can't be choline deficient the recommended daily allowance for men is about 500 milligrams of choline so say you wanted to take the minimal amount of choline required to not get liver disease like 500 milligrams or so if you did so you would still increase and by the way you have choline in your diet as well but what i'm saying is if you had to increase the amount of choline you're consuming you would increase also by definition and i've experienced this myself i know this is true in reality more acetylcholine synthesis in your brain what does that mean that means that the highest amount of nicotine that you can tolerate without reaching the other side of that u-shaped curve where the nicotine starts to harm your cognition the highest amount you can take may be lower now because you're supplementing with choline and you have more acetylcholine in the brain do you see what i mean so you need to have choline in your diet but that may lower the max amount of nicotine that's valuable for you also this will change something else which brings us to the third point here which is the circadian rhythms acetylcholine is transmitted in the body in a circadian fashion that means in the daytime in our daylight hours for humans we have more acetylcholine transmission in our brains than at night time in rodents it's about 33 percent more in their case in their night times so there's a circadian fluctuation in cholinergic signaling and this makes sense because acutely choline improves cognition quite a bit and you probably need less concentration cognition later in the day right but here's the important elements here that i want to point out first of all when you supplement choline in your diet remember now you had a lower maximum amount of nicotine you might benefit from acutely when you're trying to study well also you now have a higher baseline acetylcholine level in your brain throughout the day now your body will control that in a circadian fashion but nonetheless it means that you're going to have a higher amount of acetylcholine at night than you did previously now why does that matter it matters because the change from a baseline state to whatever nootropic kind of thing you're using not technically nootropics but the difference in the baseline to going to higher cognition is important to get the most out of your studying sessions for example usually you want to study or do your cognitively demanding tasks earlier in the morning so that whatever drugs or supplements you use that affect your circadian rhythms they do so in the up part of the circadian rhythm in the morning so if you're doing something to like nicotine you would probably want it in the morning in a circadian way but now you know that you have more cholinergic signaling later in the day which makes the difference in the morning less significant for you so these are just things to consider now how do you go about doing this well to discuss that let's go into our sections next first with nutrition in regard to nutrition we want to and this is nutritional choline we're talking about choline specifically with your diet there are two aspects we want to think about here with supplementing coal you may actually want some supplemental calling actually for your cognition in the morning but we're going to get to that level quite easily the thing we have to consider when supplementing choline is the liver disease not non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and second dangers genetic issues with methylation so first of all to avoid non-alcoholic fatty liver disease you can do that taking 500 milligrams of choline a day or if you take enough choline in your diet already which many meat-eaters do already but some people like myself and like derek from more plates more dates have genetic polymorphisms that make them make it very difficult for them to methylate methionine remember methionine the dietary protein that turns on mtor they have difficulty methylating that across its cycle so they end up with higher homocysteine levels on their blood work for example these polymorphisms are exceptionally common and really well studied and certainly affect our health for people with those polymorphisms like polymorphisms at the mthfr gene these people may want to supplement with even more choline than is protective for their livers because that reduces the burden on their body to methylate and go through this cycle so these people may be like myself supplementing with more choline than 500 milligrams even though it raises their baseline choline level and may diminish the cognitive enhancing effects of raising cholinergic stimulation particularly when studying in the morning if you to find out if you're one of those people by the way chris masterjohn has a channel on youtube he has collected the snps associated with methylation issues from from academic papers and he has it somewhere on his website you can visit them there i have the same thing also for my genetic analysis but he's already published this there you can go visit them he also has on his website some nutritional recommendations for people who have this issue i differ from him in my opinion of some of the recommendations but only very slightly so you can really you can and he's a good resource of information in general i only disagree with him about some things so i would highly recommend checking him out uh and checking out that you're 23 and me or another uh genome analysis to find out whether you have these methylation issues and should potentially supplement with more than 500 milligrams of choline okay so check that out in case but if not then we're probably looking at supplementing around 500 milligrams now how would i supplement with choline personally i like to take a hydrophilic and a lipophilic source of choline because i've noticed not particularly with regard to research on choline but with regard to research of different kinds of supplements that lipophilic and hydrophilic forms sometimes get distributed differently in the body so to ensure that i get good distribution of choline because i have these methylation issues in particular i supplement with cdp choline also called city choline i will attach two links one to a cheaper supplement that i somewhat trust and one to a more expensive supplement that i trust in the video description below um so i supplement with cdp colon or city choline i usually try to take about half of my supplementation or a little bit less from that and then i supplement with phosphatidylcholine i'll also include a link to a source on phosphatidylcholine in the bio below so as someone with both of those you can supplement with one or the other you don't have to be as specific as me and you may not have to supplement with as much as i do because you may not have the methylation issues that i have so that's how i would go about dealing with the nutritional side of things and by the way if you don't have your genome sequenced yet and don't and want to know ahead of time whether you may have methylation issues check your blood tests your blood test may likely have tested your homocysteine if your homocysteine which is c-y-s-t-e-i-n-e at the end if that is let's say um 8. 5 or above you are likely one of the people with the methylation issues that may have better health long term or may potentially live longer if they supplement with more choline and therefore have a better methylation cycle next let's talk about supplementation how can you supplement to get more out of using nicotine through the same system the cholinergic system first of all i want to point out a supplement called uridine monophosphate i'll attach a link to a supplement below because people have been telling me by the way that it's hard for them to know how to spell these words that i mentioned and some people are unfamiliar with the supplements uradine monophosphate up regulates cholinergic uh signaling and upregulates dopamine transmission through the cholinergic system you'll find that 300 to 600 milligrams of uradian monophosphate taken in the morning with your nicotine will significantly improve your concentration you will notice the effects acutely it has only acute effects they don't build over time which is one reason by the way i usually don't supplement with it daily i tried to take at least two days off from your d monophosphate so you'd supplement that with your nicotine in the morning say you wake up at six a. m you start working at around eight on whatever you're working that's cognitively demanding around 8 15 after you've started you take these supplements you take the nicotine or depending on how you take them you take the uridine monophosphate next we'll talk about alpha gpc and that would be with the nicotine so let's talk about alpha gpc alpha gpc is a kind of choline that basically for people who don't use nicotine it's the only way that's commonly available to significantly upregulate cholinergic signaling acutely by taking alpha gpc as a supplement you get the effects of nicotine plus some more effects that are something a little bit different but it's more comprehensive why alpha gpc is a form of choline that appears to have these acute effects unlike city choline or phosphatidylcholine because it causes reserve stores of choline in the body to be released into the bloodstream whereby they quickly go to the brain past the blood-brain barrier and and as acetylcholine become a neurotransmitter so taking off the gpc 15 minutes after you begin your studying will upregulate acetylcholine signaling in your brain acute for some people taking too much alpha gpc will cause them to develop anxiety because of that element that i just mentioned which is alpha gpc does more than what nicotine does as well so it's not just the anxiety of too much stimulation from the nicotinical energy receptors but the muscarinic cholinergic receptors that nicotine doesn't bind to and are less involved with cognition except for one of the receptors basically those receptors are involved in anxiety in the brain so too much after gpc for that reason and other reasons may cause you to develop anxiety acutely or also those other feelings of the salience and stuff like that now i've noticed a wide variance in people's ability to tolerate alpha gpc without developing that u-shaped curve effects without developing anxiety and feeling poorly um for me for example i can't tolerate 400 milligrams of alpha gpc i can almost never tolerate it unless i'm taking something that is what is called an anticholinergic something like uh amitriptyline or circle or something like that if i or wellbutrin although well but it's quite a bit weaker i don't think it'll do this to me so basically i can't tolerate 400 milligrams usually sometimes i can tolerate 300 milligrams in one dose um usually i do better with 200 milligrams or 100 milligrams i think for people that are supplementing with nicotine also which in my opinion is superior to alpha gpc for cognitive purposes i do think alpha gpc would be synergistic with it i've tried this a lot myself but i think at a very low dose something like 100 milligrams to 200 milligrams for most people maybe even 50 milligrams something like that so so far we've discussed in terms of nutrition we've discussed supplementing city choline or cdp choline and phosphatidylcholine we're splitting our choline requirement between them and supplementing them with food but not for acute effects these are just things you supplement with all the time and they won't have an immediate effect on you then for the acute effects we supplement uridine monophosphate and alpha gpc in the morning when we're working on our studying right next let's talk about the two drugs we may want to consider so we talk about two supplements well four supplements actually now two drugs the first drug is piracetam now paracetamol is probably the best studied of all the racetimes it's the only racetime that i trust because it's so well studied piracetam can be found from websites like nootropics depot but i think that they make theirs out of chinese sources theirs is certainly in my experience weaker than pharmaceutical parasites you can find pharmaceutical parasites in eastern europe for example a website cosmic nootropic which i have a link to on my on my on my website and a discount code it's leo cosmic nootropic carries several versions of pharmaceutical parasites including an injectable form and i actually use their oral form so there's there's a variance in the equality of piracetam first of all piracetam raises cholinergic signaling or improves cholinergic signaling thereby increasing dopamine transmission also somewhat similar to ud uh uridine monophosphate so poracetam is also a consideration what i would do a lot of people use much higher doses of this keep in mind we're using sort of polypharmacy here what i do personally is i use between 400 to 800 milligrams of poracetam orally once just the first i don't redose it during my time of study once by the way i sometimes redose alpha gpc and i sometimes do very rarely redos uridine monophosphate i don't think it's as useful and i read those obviously nicotine but perhaps the time i don't read those i take it once and i take a couple of days off a week i do notice diminishing marginal returns if you keep using it every day at this kind of tachyphylaxis with the drug i think it's quite safe and worthwhile taking the second drug i wanted to mention i mentioned in the first video too that's the main drug given to alzheimer's disease patients to deal with their symptoms it's not thought to slow down the progression of alzheimer's disease but honestly i think that's because when alzheimer's disease presents itself it's such an advanced disease that like it you know you can't really slow it down that easily there are studies that evidence that donapole may slow down the progression of neurodegenerative disease if it's taken early enough in some models so uh it anyway but the point is it certainly relieves symptoms of it by the way why may it prevent the degeneration of the brain the same way that smoking does for parkinson's disease it's just not been as well studied and people haven't used it as early in life and so on but it certainly improves the symptoms of alzheimer's disease which is the memory deficits what does donopazil do it does what ginkgo biloba huperzine a bacopa moneri there's a berberine it does what they do it is an acetylcholine cholinesterase inhibitor acetylcholinesterase is an enzyme that breaks down an enzyme is something that modifies protease it's an enzyme that breaks down that neurotransmitter in our brains that nicotine was copying the remember uh acetylcholine so acetyl cholesterase breaks down acetylcholine so donaposil and gingko biloba berberine all these things inhibit acetylcholestrace so that acetylcholine can't be broken down as quickly so there's more acetylcholine in the brain that can bind to the nicotinic cholinergic receptors and activate them improving memory i've never heard of anyone taking to an apostle that wasn't above the age of 70 personally except myself i was the first person that i know or read of taking it i'm sure that other people have tried it before but i'm pretty sure i'm the first person who's definitely made videos about it or talked about online i think so at least i don't know anyway i've tried it extensively the reason why i'm saying this too is to point out that i have done i've done all of this myself i know this works this is not hypotheses donopazil improves cognition in people who don't have alzheimer's disease early in life also however i have noticed acetyl cholesterol's inhibition is less valuable the younger you are i think because younger people have better cholinergic systems like some of my 19 or 20 year old clients get less of a benefit from donapozil than somebody 25 or 30.
but donopazil certainly improves cognition and it does so so much better than supplemental versions of the acetyl cholesterol inhibitors like ginkgo biloba berberine and so on there is still reason to supplement with those supplements because they have other effects like for example ginkgo biloba is very very very healthy for the brain you would still want i still take it daily but donopazil is just incomparable to them the way you would want to use by the way you i used to get my donaposal from clearskypharmacy. biz what i used to do is i would well now i'm just used to the same dose that i take but initially i would take like a 10 milligram tablet and cut it into four pieces and i would take 2. 5 milligrams say for a week or so then raise it by 2.
5 so that i'm at 5 milligrams then i might stay at 5 milligrams for 2 weeks before i go to 7. 5 and then 10 milligrams i think most people can tolerate 10 milligrams and get the best function or better function out of 10 milligrams than five however i think many people do get worse function out of 15 milligrams or 20 milligrams those doses have been are used in alzheimer's these patients but for me what i notice is at those doses the cholinergic signaling throughout the day is so high that it harms the circadian function and also lessens the difference in my cognition that i want in the morning so i be careful with that you might do best at five milligrams or ten you will do better with five than none for sure almost everybody i can almost guarantee this so how do you get your cholinergic system signaling in beast mode for the studying that you want to do in the morning say you want to do really well on your exams or you're preparing for uh the cfa or or the lsat or something else what would you do in totality first of all your baseline cholinergic signaling would be driven by your supplementation of cdp choline and phosphatidylcholine as well as your use of the drug donopazil the more you do those two the more you'll have an even not so much with the nutrients but more with the donaposia but both of them so the more you raise nutritional cdp choline and phosphatidylcholine the more your circadian rhythms will have be hampered a little bit but less so than donapole being risen but generally you will have more higher baseline cholinergic levels no matter what when you release both of them so first of all your baseline cholegic signaling is driven by the dietary choline either dietary or the two supplement forms and donapole second acutely in the morning when you want to work what would you do five days a week i like to take two days off this to get everything fresh again and to have the basically to exaggerate the difference between the baseline night time signaling and the daytime signaling taking two or one day off does a similar thing these receptors don't down regulate like dopamine receptors but it still has increases the impact of the acute signaling in the morning so what would you do you would get prepared start working once you've been working for about 15 minutes you would then take your acute supplements so you take 300 to 600 milligrams of um uridine monophosphate you take uh 50 to 200 milligrams of alpha gpc you take 400 to 800 milligrams of pharmaceutical parasite and then once you take all of those you take your nicotine now how would you take the nicotine you don't want some kind of like well you certainly don't want a nicotine pill that doesn't localize the nicotine in your brain you want it really localized in your brain that's one thing but the second thing is you want the nicotine to be released sort of smoothly across the time that you're studying so cigarettes are really horrible cigarette would be a horrible option for most people because you can't smoke indoors while working in the 1940s and 1930s cigarette smokers were probably functioning better cognitively they probably aren't anymore because now they go outdoors to smoke get their nicotine signaling and then go back in and have a lower nicotine signaling while working than they do at other times you see what i mean so the ideal thing i think and personally i don't like nicotine gum it's very expensive huge rip-off way more expensive than nicotine pouches although i've heard some are affordable what i like is i don't personally like nicotine pouches but if you like them there's several brands of them i would check out chad from snubi.
