Is Working from Home Affecting Your Mood and Sleep?
Magnesium supplementation can offer a range of potential benefits, but it's crucial to choose the right type to target your specific needs.
Highlights
How magnesium helps reduce stress and improve sleep, mood, and energy.
Different forms of magnesium and their specific benefits.
Advice on choosing the right supplement and dosage for your needs.
Feeling unusually fatigued, irritable, unable to sleep, or unable to focus? There are a tremendous number of reasons why ever higher numbers of us feel chronically stressed at the present time – perhaps it’s financial stress or difficulty absorbing noise from the world’s compounding polycrisis. Perhaps you're wrestling with persistent low-grade anxiety, depression, ADHD symptoms, or nagging memory problems? I hear about these problems so often that they sound like an epidemic of their own.
Featured writer for this post is James Johnston who runs the Substack, Brainhacking.
Stay tuned for an upcoming podcast with Mr. Johnston here on 24Hour Journal.
Could a simple mineral deficiency be to blame?
Magnesium, the fourth most abundant mineral in the body, plays a pivotal role in over 600 enzymatic reactions. It’s an essential mineral to help build health and resilience to stress. With dozens of people coming to me over the last number of months seeking advice about anything from sleep to memory issues, I always start here. And often it provides just enough support for people to level up a few notches.
Magnesium is vital for regulating muscle and nerve function, blood sugar control, energy production, sleep quality, mood, and much more. Sadly, many individuals unknowingly suffer from magnesium deficiency due to factors like diet and stress. Even certain medications can interfere with the way magnesium is regulated throughout the body. Unfortunately, even with a healthy diet, achieving optimal magnesium intake can be challenging because modern agricultural practices often result in food with lower mineral content, including magnesium. Processed food also strips away much of the naturally occurring magnesium in our food supply.
Your body and brain rely on magnesium for DNA and RNA synthesis, neurotransmitter regulation and brain cell communication, energy production, learning and memory, stress adaptation, and sleep regulation. It activates ATP, your body's primary energy source, and supports the brain's ability to adapt and form new connections. Magnesium helps suppress the release of stress hormones and helps to calm the brain by mimicking GABA – a common mechanism among sleeping medications.
Types of magnesium
Magnesium supplementation can offer a range of potential benefits, but it's crucial to choose the right type to target your specific needs. Different forms of magnesium offer varying levels of absorption, bioavailability, and targeted benefits. The key is to select a supplement with more than one bioavailable form of magnesium.
Here’s a run-down of some of the most important forms:
-Â Â magnesium glycinate, which promotes relaxation and deeper sleep
-Â Â magnesium taurate, which supports cardiovascular health and stress responses
-Â Â magnesium citrate is well-absorbed and has a positive impact on digestive regularity
-Â Â magnesium malate helps with energy production and potential to reduce fatigue and pain
-Â Â magnesium l-threonine readily crosses the blood-brain barrier, suggesting benefits for memory, cognitive function, and potentially brain disorders, too
Of course, the dosing will vary depending on your unique needs. 300-400mg daily is a general guideline, but many of us could double that amount safely. Forms like glycinate, citrate, taurate, and malate are generally well-absorbed, but you’ll also want to make sure that it doesn’t interact with any medications you might be on. Some people might also find themselves plagued with digestive issues or a bit of grogginess, so it's best to start low and go from there.
Some of these claims sound too good to be true, but I've experienced how important this mineral is for myself, and I've seen it help dozens of people very quickly.
Some of the work I’ve consulted and recommend include:
[i] Dean, Carolyn. The Magnesium Miracle. Ballantine Books, 2007. | Link
[ii] de Baaij, Jeroen HF, J. Guus Hoenderop, and René JM Bindels. "Magnesium in Man: Implications for Health and Disease." Physiological Reviews 95, no. 1 (January 2015): 1-46. | Link
[iii]Volpe, Stella Lucia. "Magnesium in Disease Prevention and Overall Health." Advances in Nutrition 4, no. 3 (May 2013): 378S-83S. | Link
[iv] Eby, George A., and Karen L. Eby. "Rapid Recovery from Major Depression Using Magnesium Treatment." Medical Hypotheses 67, no. 2 (2006): 362-70. | Link
[v] Poleszak, Ewa, Przemysław Szewczyk, and Ewelina Wlaź, Andrzej Słoczyńska, Katarzyna Piskorska-Jacyszyn,and Rafał Wlaź. "Magnesium Status and Exercise Performance." Magnesium and Physical Activity, 2015, 77-93.
Read more
 | A guest post by
|