Pure N-Acetyl L-Tyrosine (NALT)

Biohack Review: 800 milligrams a day keeps the sleep deprivation at bay

Recently I've reacquainted myself with Tyrosine in the N-Acetyl L-Tyrosine (NALT) form, from PureBulk.com. Here I'll tell you a little about its subjective effects and will summarize the recent science done on this well-established Nootropic.

Sleep deprived?

While I've long prioritized getting quality, rejuvenating sleep, lack of it is an inevitable side effect of leading an interesting life.

• I was a digital nomad pursuing novelty, beauty, and adventure for years. And while I implemented a wide array of lifehacks to sustain that lifestyle - it's awful for sleep quality.
• Being an entrepreneur is also not great for sleep; there are no days off, the tyranny of the urgent yet unimportant is always looming over me, and there's always some work left at the end of the day.
• In life, love, and business I'm naturally risk-seeking - I like to take chances that might yield fantastic results. I simply refuse to one day lie down on my deathbed regretting not having taken more measured risks in the life I was given. The trade-off is a domain of concerns that sometimes has me waking at 5:00 AM with racing thoughts and an urge to get up and get to work.

To counteract the inescapable resulting sleep deprivation, I would turn (too often) to an inferior pharmacological intervention - Modafinil. This powerful anti-narcolepsy drug can make you powerfully awake and alert but its downsides are myriad. To name just one, it's not great for creativity, you'll struggle to think holistically (or empathetically) - which is pretty important to me. Furthermore, Modafinil is not particularly reliable at combating sleep deprivation if you're not Narcoleptic. Sometimes on it, you'll crash badly 6 hours into your workday. And sometimes, its effect lingers entirely too long, making it difficult to get to sleep the following night.

Fortunately, there's a better Nootropic option, L-Tyrosine. As I mentioned in my meta-analysis of it, it's an intervention worth keeping in your Biohacker armamentarium for both moderate and severe sleep deprivation.

a smaller dosage of as little as 800 milligrams will give you an extra few hours of alert mindset. And according to a Naval Aerospace human study) to counteract even extreme sleep deprivation take 150 milligrams per kilogram of your body weight - I'm 63 kilos (138 pounds) so that would be north of 9 grams. A later American study noted improved performance on several tests and another military paper named it as a countermeasure to performance decrement in military sustained operations.

And that's how it has worked for me on multiple occasions, although NALT is a more potent form - I doubt that you would need more than a few grams of it.

I notice myself being a bit more energized, optimistic, and motivated after stacking about 800 milligrams of NALT with a few grams of Creatine in the mid-morning which enhanced the Nootropic effects and kept me alert on a few days when I was a little underslept. I did take a heart rate variability measurement with my Heartmath device on this stack and achieved a coherence score of 1.2 while working on my laptop - which is a little of an uptick over my baseline.

Scientific overview

Let's delve into some of the recent research on L-Tyrosine, in this young decade alone there have been 26 articles published on Pubmed (including several human clinical trials).

An American-Dutch study on the performance of working memory noted an unexpected inverted U-shaped pattern at 2 grams in 45 healthy young adults. From its abstract:

This indicates a pattern of results whereby low-performing subjects improved, whereas high-performing subjects were impaired on L-tyrosine.

Apparently, L-Tyrosine helped the working memory of those who were a bit deficient in the working memory department but it impaired those who were natural high-performers.

A German study of reinforcement learning and temporal discounting suggests that 2 grams decreases response times and an array of physiological reactions but without hurting task performance in something like a brain game.

On the physiological level, participants' pupil dilation was predictive of the individual degree of temporal discounting. Tyrosine supplementation reduced physiological arousal as revealed by increases in pupil dilation variability and reductions in heart rate... Despite this reduced speed-accuracy trade-off, tyrosine seemed to increase goal-directed control as evident in increased reliance on model-based computations during reinforcement learning and if anything reduced temporal discounting of rewards.

Temporal discounting is a well-established bias where we tend to prefer smaller but sooner instead of larger but later rewards; for example, choosing a Christmas bonus of $1000 over a $100/month pay raise - you get the idea. And Tyrosine reduced this bias, which might suggest that it is a good Nootropic for long-term thinking, especially in regard to economics. Making it an appealing Nootropic for investors, traders, Entrepreneurs, and negotiators.

The German study also suggests that Tyrosine might be more of an "in your head" Nootropic that's not great for tasks that require the sharpest physical reflexes - at least while dosed. So gamers playing twitch shooting and racing games, marksmen, and athletes may want to reach for a different Nootropic.

Finally, a smaller American study identified it as a cold shock biohack - it beat the placebo in helping core body temperature adaption (at least for elderly folks.)

Should you choose powdered or capsuled?

PureBulk.com offers both but I prefer the powdered stuff because it's more economical, the powder doesn't taste bad (think flour), and should I find myself badly sleep-deprived I'll have an ample reserve from which to scoop out 4-6 grams.

L-Tyrosine Dosage

As a dietary supplement, take 500mg of L-Tyrosine Powder once daily.

N-Acetyl L-Tyrosine (NALT) is an acetylated derivative of the amino acid L-tyrosine. N-acetyl L-tyrosine provides L-tyrosine, a biochemical precursor in the synthesis of the neurotransmitters,epinephrine, norepinephrine and dopamine, and the skin pigment melanin. It may also be converted in vivo into key physiological compounds including epinephrine, levodopa, Coenzyme Q10, melanin and various thyroid hormones.

from PureBulk.com