Well, Dr. Sherr, welcome to The Accrescent Podcast. I'm so excited to have you on.

It's good to be with you, Leigh Ann. Thank you for having me.

We were talking off air a little bit briefly, and I was saying you guys were so kind to send me some of your products. I've been sampling them and playing with them for the last couple of months. As we spoke, I work with so many cancer and chronic illness patients, and also individuals who are experiencing anxiety and different emotional places. To be able to have products that work quickly is so powerful because sometimes you're caught in a loop where it's like, I really want to do the breathwork, but I'm almost too depleted to even get myself to do it.

Yes, it can be hard if you don't even know what it feels like to calm your nervous system down anymore if it's been a while, right? So yeah.

Yes. And so all of the products I've tried, the many different ones, you've got a sleep one, you've got the focus. But the calm one is the one I was most jazzed on for my clients because of how quickly it works. I know we're going to get into all the specifics of some of the different products, but anyway, I'm just so excited to have you on. I've really been looking forward to this conversation for months now.

Well, it's my pleasure. I know we've had to reschedule a couple of times, so we're here, and I'm glad you had a chance to try some of the products and also use them on some of your patients and get a feel for what I really truly believe, which is that we need to help people right now while they're on the longer path. It can be difficult to get on that path or continue that path if it's so difficult in the beginning, or if there are bottlenecks along the way.

Yeah, absolutely. So like I said, I'm sure we'll get into a lot more of the specifics of what makes Troscriptions so different. I want to talk about the troche delivery method, all of that. But let's start with the origin story. What led you to want to co-found Troscriptions?

Yeah, troche, you said it right. Nice.

Well, it's a long story, but I'm going to keep it as short as possible. I'm trained as an internal medicine physician. I've been a clinician now for over a couple of decades. I decided to go into internal medicine as my specialty because it was my fastest way out of conventional training, actually. You do four years of medical school, three years of residency, after four years of college for those following at home. So it's a long road to become a medical practitioner.

But I always knew I wanted to do something more integrative. I wanted to do something more alternative, outside the conventional mainstream, because I grew up the son of a chiropractor. My dad was a chiropractor for over 40 years on Long Island in New York, where I grew up. I grew up in a very alternative mindset, with the idea that the body could heal itself if you gave it the tools to do it, and that diet, nutrition, and lifestyle were really the foundation of everything.

Health optimization medicine was founded by a mentor and friend of mine, Dr. Ted Achacoso, a very smart physician who had practices in Manila, D.C., and Europe when I met him. He was seeing the highest echelons of society and was looking for a way to change the conversation. Conventional medicine mostly puts on band-aids, and functional medicine is great because it looks at root causes, but what if you could look at how to optimize health? How do you look at the root causes of health, not just the root causes of disease?

Health optimization medicine became the framework I started using in my own clinical practice, which I still do now. I live just outside Boulder, Colorado, and I see people mostly virtually from my home. That became the foundation of what I do, and it still is today.

The challenge when you're working with patients, as you know Leigh Ann, is that they want to feel better immediately. They want to feel better now. When you're working with them, it can take three or six months, sometimes longer, depending on the person, the process, and what's going on. Of course, it's often not a linear progression to feel better.

So what are some solutions that we can give people right now to help with energy, focus, sleep, stress, and some of the major bottlenecks along the road to health optimization? If I tell my patients, “Sign up with me, we're going to do a health optimization program, and it's going to take six months for you to feel better,” people are going to say goodbye. They don't want to wait six months to feel better. They want to feel better now.

Troscriptions developed as a company out of Health Optimization Medicine, which is actually a nonprofit organization now that trains practitioners on how to optimize health. Troscriptions emerged as a way to help people right now along that path, in those contexts of bottlenecks along the way. Energy, stress, immune system function, sleep, and focus are ways you can start helping people feel better now.

Energy and anxiety, or energy and stress, are always the two biggest things I see. I've talked to a lot of clinicians about this, Leigh Ann, and I'm sure you can relate. Patients either complain of anxiety first and low energy second, or low energy first and anxiety second. It always goes back to those two, and they're very much related. You need to have enough energy to not have anxiety, number one. And if you want to decrease your anxiety, you have to do it in a context that looks at it very holistically, which I know you're doing in your practice too.

Yeah, right. I mean, this is what I see so often with clients. Sometimes they get caught in this catch-22 of, I need more energy to be able to do some of the things that are going to make me less stressed, but to have more energy, I need to do the de-stressing things. And then we just get caught.

Right, right. Exactly.

I empathize with that so much. It's few and far between when I find a product or supplement that is going to be impactful as quickly as I have found Troscriptions products to be impactful, which gets me so excited about it. When clients are in a certain place, to be able to have something that works quickly is huge. There are amazing products out there that if you use consistently for a month or two months, they start to have powerful effects, like saffron at a certain dose being as effective as Prozac, but you've got to take it for a while. It doesn't give you this immediate effect. What I love, when we were talking about the calm supplement, is I really felt a significant shift in my anxiousness or turbulence within 15 minutes.

Yeah, that's beautiful. This is really what we were looking at, developing things that can help now. When you're looking at Tro Calm specifically, you're looking at the GABA system. GABA is our primary inhibitory neurotransmitter. It's the neurotransmitter in our brain that calms things down. It's not the fancy superstar neurotransmitter like dopamine, serotonin, or norepinephrine, but it's the one that rules them all from a brakes perspective.

The challenge with modern society is that we are GABA deficient and don't even know it. If you go to your doctor and say you have depression, they're going to give you an SSRI. We know these drugs can work, but they don't really work in the way we thought they used to work. When I was in medical school, I was taught that people with depression had low serotonin levels compared to people who don't. But we now know that is not the case at all, actually.

Artificially raising serotonin using an SSRI can be helpful, but it's not helpful immediately, just like saffron, as you mentioned. It can also be detrimental. It can have challenges like suicidality and other issues in people who take them. In fact, I know the woman who got the black box warning on SSRI medications because of her sister, who unfortunately died by suicide using these medications without knowing they could cause suicidality in younger people.

What's interesting is that there is much more data supporting that GABA deficiency is related to depression, anxiety, and insomnia than almost any other neurotransmitter out there. All the other neurotransmitters don't even come close to the research related to GABA, anxiety, depression, and insomnia. That's because GABA is the brakes of the brain.

Your brain is operating at a very high level all the time. It takes a huge amount of energy to do that, and it creates a huge amount of noise. By noise, I mean thoughts. On average, we have about 70,000 thoughts every day. If you believed everything you thought, we'd all go crazy. But a lot of us have perseverating thoughts, especially if you're depressed or anxious, where these thought loops just go and go and don't stop. You can get up to 120,000 thoughts every day, and it's your GABA system that's regulating all that.

If your GABA system isn't regulated well, and you're deficient, there are a lot of different reasons for that, but the number one reason is chronic stress. As a result of chronic stress, you're depleting GABA in the process. You can also have other nutrient and gut issues contributing, but chronic stress is really the biggest culprit.

GABA is always trying to be in balance with another neurotransmitter called glutamate. Glutamate is your primary excitatory neurotransmitter in the brain, and GABA is your primary inhibitory neurotransmitter. Together, glutamate and GABA make up about 80% of your brain's neurotransmission. GABA is about 20% of your brain on its own.

So if you're GABA deficient, then you take Tro Calm. What's nice about Tro Calm is that it's giving you GABA immediately, but it's not giving you GABA directly. This is important because you can take a GABA supplement from the store, but GABA as a supplement is too big of a molecule to get into the brain. If GABA works for you, it means your blood-brain barrier is probably not doing what it's supposed to be doing, meaning it's leaky. That's a leaky brain scenario, and that usually means you have a leaky gut that can be addressed. I've seen this in practice. Patients come in and say, “Doc, GABA supplements work great for me.” I'm like, “You probably have a leaky gut.” We test them, and they do.

Right. It's almost a red flag if they're working.

Exactly. Then you optimize their gut, and the GABA supplements stop working, which is a sign. GABA itself getting into the brain isn't the big deal, but it's a harbinger. It's an ominous sign that other things are getting in there that shouldn't be as well. If you're under a lot of inflammation, have gut issues, are on chemo or radiation, or have a cancer diagnosis, there's a high likelihood the blood-brain barrier may not be doing what it's supposed to do.

So Tro Calm was developed as a way to get novel ingredients into the brain that work on the GABA system, naturally improve the capacity to make more GABA, and increase GABA tone without causing the issues associated with other GABAergic things like Ativan, benzodiazepines, sleep drugs, or alcohol. Those affect the GABA receptor, but they also deplete GABA in the process.

We remedied that with a novel way of formulating, where we combine things that enhance the GABA receptor in the brain by binding to where GABA binds and at a separate site, using a patented technology called the obligate pair. Maybe that's a little too much information, but that's the general idea.

No, we want it all. We want it all. In fact, I'll probably ask us to go even deeper there. But I think I'll pull us back for a second before we dive back in. Maybe what I want to start with is just the delivery method, because all of Troscriptions are that troche delivery method. I think that's a really good place to start. We could talk about the focus and methylene blue product, but I think I might keep us on Tro Calm and maybe even the sleep one, because those are so connected, and talk about that wired and tired loop that we get stuck in. So really spending a lot of time on this anxiety piece. Then maybe if we're lucky, we'll have you back on to dive deep into methylene blue and all of those things, because it's more than what we could cover in one session.

Sure, that sounds good. That's not a problem. We can certainly stick to the ideas around the GABA system. How would you specifically like to dive into it?

Let's start with the delivery method. Talk to me about the troche delivery method. What is it, first of all, for anyone who doesn't know what that means? How is it different from just taking a capsule?

Sure. The way we developed the company and the products at Troscriptions was in a pretty cool delivery or dosage form called a troche, or a buccal troche to be complete. A buccal troche is a dissolvable lozenge that goes between your upper cheek and gum, as far back in your mouth as possible.

What's nice about delivery up here is that the mucosa in your mouth is very vascular. If you've gotten punched in the face, which I have, and you've bled all over the place, that's because it's highly vascular. I don't recommend that. Funny side story, I got punched in the face when I was learning about the jaw during anatomy class in medical school. It was quite ironic.

The mucosa up here is very vascular. A buccal troche is able to deliver the ingredients of the troche directly into the mucosa, which is highly vascular. So it works very fast in the body. It doesn't have to go through digestion, your stomach, or your liver. The liver detoxifies, and it also makes things less available, less bioavailable, and less potent. By bypassing what's called first-pass metabolism in the liver, more of the ingredient is bioavailable.

So it's faster acting, the ingredients are more bioavailable, and the third thing that's nice about our troches is that they're scored, which means they have a line across the middle. You can take a quarter, a half, three quarters, or a full troche. You can really dial in your dose and find the right dose for you.

As physicians, Dr. Ted and I were using troches in clinical practice for other reasons. They're prescribed for things like ketamine and hormones. We knew about the delivery and thought, why don't we use this as a novel way to get novel ingredients into the body in a fast-acting, bioavailable, highly potent way? Once you start using the troches, you should start feeling the effects within about five to 15 minutes, depending on your metabolism. It doesn't matter so much if you have an empty stomach, because you're dissolving it in the mouth.

The difference from sublingual is that the mucosa in the upper cheek and gum is about eight layers thick, versus the sublingual mucosa, which is about one layer thick. That means the troche has more time to dissolve if you put it between the upper cheek and gum. Most of the ingredients dissolve inside the cheek itself and are not swallowed, as opposed to sublingual, where more is swallowed. Sublingual is good because it is vascular there, but it's not as optimal for something like a buccal troche when you want much of the dissolution to happen in the mouth itself. People have a lot of pill fatigue these days too, and this is a nice additional way to get an effect very quickly.

Yeah, I hear you. So you could put it under the tongue and it will dissolve a lot quicker, but in some ways it's dissolving so quickly that you're going to end up swallowing saliva, which defeats the purpose. That's now going into the gut. We're losing bioavailability, and it's also going to take longer to take effect.

Yeah. When you dissolve it in the mouth as a buccal troche, you do swallow your saliva too, but most of the ingredients will get dissolved in the buccal mucosa if you dissolve it up there.

So now walk us through this patented technology that delivers GABA in these different ways and the other co-factors we're putting in with it. Let's dive deep into the Tro Calm product specifically. What's going on here? How is it different from other anxiety products on the market?

I always love a deep dive. Let's go back to the GABA receptor. The GABA receptor is interesting. It's a five-unit receptor, so it has five subunits and a channel in the middle where chloride goes in. It's a postsynaptic receptor, which means you have a presynaptic neuron that fires a signal, and the postsynaptic receptor receives that signal. In this case, when chloride goes through the channel, it stops the firing of the neuron. That's why GABA is the brakes of the brain.

On the receptor itself, there's a place where GABA binds. That's called an orthosteric ligand site of the GABA receptor. Then there are other sites where other things can bind, called allosteric sites. Those allosteric sites are commonly bound by some of the things we were talking about earlier: benzodiazepines, sleep drugs, alcohol, and natural compounds like valerian, kava, L-theanine, and even cannabinoids like CBD and CBG.

The difference with pharmaceuticals is that they bind so tightly to these allosteric sites that they create an extreme affinity for GABA to bind where it binds on the receptor. As a result, you get a lot of depletion of GABA in the process. When you deplete GABA, you have a higher risk of needing more over time, which is tolerance. If you stop it abruptly, you get withdrawal, and you can develop dependence too. That's why alcohol, benzodiazepines, and sleep drugs should not be used for anxiety unless you absolutely have to for a very short period of time.

Natural compounds can be very good, but the challenge is they may not work effectively because they're not giving a source of GABA at the same time. If you're taking an allosteric modulator like kava, valerian, L-theanine, CBD, or CBG, these bind to separate sites on the GABA receptor and increase the affinity for GABA to bind. But what if you don't have enough GABA in the first place?

Meaning these natural agents are making it more likely or easier for GABA to bind to this site, but they're only doing that if you have enough GABA to go around.

Exactly. That's why a lot of these compounds, even though they're natural, might stop working for you or may not work very well. With kava, for example, kava is well known to increase tolerance over time if you have too much of it because it works similarly to alcohol in terms of binding where alcohol binds on the receptor.

So what we did at Troscriptions was ask: what if you bound an allosteric modulator, like kava, CBD, and CBG, which are all in Tro Calm, and combined it with something that binds directly to where GABA binds on the receptor? Then there is a source of GABA while you're also increasing the affinity for GABA to bind.

In this case, we use something called B3-GABA, vitamin B3-GABA. It has vitamin B3 attached to GABA. B3 has a transporter that gets into the brain. We talked about how GABA supplements don't work because GABA is too big to get across, but with vitamin B3 attached, B3 has a transporter and brings GABA with it. Then in the brain, you get hydrolyzation, so the B3 and GABA break apart. B3 is mildly activating. It turns into niacin, which turns into NAD, and then you also have a direct source of GABA for the brain.

Now you have an endogenous ligand that binds where GABA binds. All of a sudden, you have this beautiful combination called an obligate pair: an allosteric modulator, which is kava, CBD, and CBG, binding to separate sites on the GABA receptor, and GABA itself from B3-GABA binding where GABA binds. As a result, you get beautiful GABAergic signaling. You stop the firing, and at the same time you're not depleting GABA because you're giving a source of it.

Within five to 15 minutes of taking Tro Calm, you start feeling like your nervous system is downregulating. It starts to feel calmer because your nervous system is starting to get out of sympathetic dominance.

Yeah, I love that. I geek out on that stuff. It's so great to be able to explain because I love understanding the minutiae of how this is different from other supplements. How is this different from a bottle of GABA capsules you're going to get on the shelf? It's powerful to understand the science beneath it.

Yeah, this is very unique. There are companies that will give you L-theanine and other GABAergic things, CBD and CBG, and that's good. But what we've really done is make the most comprehensive compound combination. Now you have kava, CBD, CBG, and B3-GABA together. All of a sudden, you have this beautiful synergy that enhances the GABA system.

The nice thing about having a little B3 in the formula is that B3 is mildly activating. When you take Tro Calm, you feel more relaxed and less anxious, but you don't feel sedated. That's a big problem with a lot of anxiety medications and supplements. People feel sedated, like their brain isn't working as well. Their mind is slower, and they want to lie on the couch. That's not how most of us want to operate. We want to be vital and functional, but we don't want to be anxious through the process.

People don't realize you don't work your best when you're super stressed. You don't work at your optimal capacity. You work better when you're a little less stressed and have more capacity to be out of sympathetic dominance. When you're hyper-stressed, blood flow to the front of your brain goes down, and the front of the brain is where executive function happens. If your frontal lobe is getting more blood flow with less stress, you're going to perform better.

That's why we often call Tro Calm a supplement from the boardroom to the bedroom. The boardroom is so you can perform your best at work. The bedroom is so you can calm your mind down at night. If your mind is racing, it's very difficult to go to bed. Winding down in the evening with alcohol is how a lot of people do this, but it's not great for sleep. Something like Tro Calm can wind you down, quiet your mind, and help your brain get back toward baseline.

Can we talk about alcohol for a second and the downward spiral or cascade that it's creating? I would love for the audience to understand how it might give that initial sense of calm and make you feel like you're able to fall asleep faster, but what is actually going on? You mentioned sleep, and correct me if I'm wrong, but it depletes GABA as well.

Sure. Alcohol is a GABA receptor allosteric modulator, which means it binds to a separate site on the GABA receptor and significantly increases the affinity for GABA to bind. As a result, a lot of GABA binds very quickly. You feel more relaxed, but you deplete GABA very quickly.

There's always a balance between GABA and glutamate. Glutamate is your primary excitatory neurotransmitter, and GABA is your primary inhibitory neurotransmitter. If you vastly decrease your GABA levels quickly, then you create an imbalance where you have too much glutamate around. Glutamate is what makes you feel terrible a couple of hours later after you go to bed because glutamate levels are high. You have headaches, irritability, mood swings, and GI distress.

Another example of glutamate toxicity is going to a Chinese restaurant and having MSG in your food. That's monosodium glutamate. If you have a bunch of that, you're going to feel irritable, headachey, and your mood may be all over the place. That's what it can feel like after a couple hours of drinking for many people.

There are other aspects of a hangover related to alcohol, like dehydration and the compounds alcohol gets metabolized into that need to be detoxified in the liver, specifically aldehydes. But a big component is glutamate toxicity. If you're like me, I used to go to sleep fine after drinking, but then a couple hours later I would wake up feeling absolutely awful. Even if you don't fully wake up, if you measure your sleep, you'll see the rest of your sleep is poor because you need enough GABA around to sleep well. If you've depleted a lot of GABA because you drank alcohol, you're not going to sleep very well.

This is why modulating the GABA system for sleep can be so essential. We have another product called Tro Zzz at Troscriptions for that. In essence, you want your GABA system regulated throughout the day. Alcohol, even though it makes you feel better for a short period of time, can affect your GABA-glutamate balance while you're sleeping.

Ideally, if you're going to drink, try to drink at least three or four hours before bed. People ask me if I'm completely against alcohol, and the answer is I'm only against alcohol if you're drinking it all the time or drinking by yourself. If you're drinking a little wine with dinner with friends and family and having a great time, that's different than drinking a bottle of whiskey while watching Scarface. Small amounts can be fine intermittently, especially in a parasympathetic, communal context. But if you're using alcohol as a crutch to calm down your nervous system, then it's probably not the best. The bigger, longer-term plan is to ask why your nervous system is so dysregulated.

Tro Calm can support your biology and help you sleep better, but it is not the only solution. The other solution is to ask why you're so stressed and what else you can do to modulate your stress in a more long-term, sustainable way.

This came on my radar when a good friend of mine said she started taking GABA after she would drink, before bed, because she noticed that after a night of drinking, she'd wake up feeling anxious, depressed, and low mood. Now that you're saying this, she probably has some leaky gut issues because the supplements are working for her. But it put that on my radar, and I started paying attention to how I feel the day after drinking. I did start to notice that there's this depressive mood going on.

It's very much related to this imbalance you've created in your neurotransmitters. Once you understand this, it becomes freeing in some way. You can get a lot of empowerment and say, okay, this is what's happening and this is what I'm doing.

Addressing stress isn't just addressing it at the end of the day. It's addressing it throughout the day, taking breaks, and not powering through constantly. I have a hard time doing this too sometimes. But learning how to regulate your nervous system is a superpower. Learning how to balance sympathetic and parasympathetic is key. You need to be in that parasympathetic mode, the rest, digest, detoxify mode, not just before bed but throughout the day.

A lot of us are running in sympathetic mode all day long because that's what society rewards. Hustle culture, “I'll sleep when I'm dead,” powering through meetings, exercising and going directly to meetings, going until you drop. That also falls into sleep. A lot of people think they should fall asleep in less than a minute when their head hits the pillow, but that's usually a sign you're overtired, didn't get enough rest throughout the day, or are going to bed too late.

There's something called sleep latency, which you probably know about, Leigh Ann. It should take about five to 15 minutes to fall asleep when you get in bed. That's more optimal because it means you aren't super tired by the time you hit the pillow. People who fall asleep immediately often wake up in the middle of the night and have a hard time going back to sleep because their system is dysregulated. Optimizing the GABA system in a natural way is a great way to get people started, which is why we have Tro Zzz, a sleep product that works not only on the GABA system but on five pathways of sleep.

Yes. We're going to pivot to Tro Zzz because I think that's super relevant. The last thing I wanted to say is I'm glad we talked about the alcohol piece because people might be experiencing this but not connecting the dots. The alcohol is calming them down in the evening, so they think, great, that calmed me down and helped me get to bed. But they might not realize it's making anxiety or depression worse the next day. So we're getting ourselves caught in this nasty spiral that can be really hard to get out of.

The other thing I wanted to say is, and we talked about this at the start, so many of my clients, cancer patients, chronic illness patients, might be in the thick of immense treatments, especially in the integrative oncology world with extra modalities, supplements, appointments, and such maxed-out capacity and physical depletion that doing the things they would love to do, like go on a slow long walk or do a 20-minute meditation, is just too much. To have something that is working quickly and doesn't take anything out of them can be game changing.

One hundred percent. I absolutely agree.

Okay, so let's pivot into Tro Zzz. Before we close, I do want to talk about how people can get started, especially with dosage. But let's talk about Tro Zzz and how that's different from other products on the market.

Right. Tro Zzz is built on the idea that we don't just sleep and nothing happens when we sleep. We have beautiful sleep architecture, which means deep sleep and REM sleep. You dream during REM, and you can dream during deep sleep too, though it's usually not as vivid. You want to navigate both deep sleep and REM sleep every evening in cycles. You don't just have one of each. You have multiple cycles of each. In the beginning of the night you have more deep sleep, and later toward morning you have more REM sleep.

It's important when optimizing sleep to think about it this way. A lot of compounds and products might help you fall asleep, but they're not going to give you all the sleep architecture you're looking for. Benzodiazepines, alcohol, and sleep drugs can get you to bed, but you're not going to get all those beautiful sleep stages. Over time, that catches up to you. You need deep sleep to consolidate memory and support the immune system. REM sleep is also important for mood and cognition.

When we developed Tro Zzz, we developed it as the most comprehensive sleep formula we could, looking at at least five different systems of sleep. Melatonin is in the product at a small amount. Melatonin helps with sleep timing and can help with sleep maintenance a little, but it primarily gives you a sense of the timing of your sleep, which is why it's great when traveling.

Then we also have 5-HTP. 5-HTP is important because serotonin helps regulate mood and also supports sleep and sleep maintenance. Then we have adenosine. Adenosine is a neurotransmitter in the brain that gives you sleep pressure. Everybody's favorite nootropic, caffeine, blocks adenosine receptors in the brain and makes you feel more wakeful. In this formula, we give you direct adenosine.

We also give another compound called cordycepin from the cordyceps mushroom. Cordycepin is an adenosine analog, so it works on deep sleep pathways and increases deep sleep. Then you have your GABA pathways. We have unique ingredients here too, including honokiol from magnolia bark, which binds to one of those allosteric sites on the GABA receptor.

We also have another compound called agarin. Agarin is working on the GABA side. It is a derivative from a mushroom called fly agaric, or Amanita muscaria. That mushroom is known as a psychedelic mushroom when dried, but this compound is not psychedelic at low doses. Low doses of agarin are long-acting and bind to the GABA receptor where GABA binds. That's the obligate pair again: honokiol binding to a separate site and agarin binding where GABA would bind.

In addition, we have CBN and CBD, non-psychoactive cannabinoids working on the GABA receptor at allosteric sites and also working on the endocannabinoid system, which is the body's internal homeostatic balancing system. So that's five systems: endocannabinoid, GABA, serotonin, melatonin, and adenosine. There are no other products really hitting all of those receptors and sleep signals at the same time. That's why Tro Zzz is so powerful.

I'm going to repeat that back in layman's terms, so tell me if I got it right. There are substances that help get you to sleep but don't keep you asleep. There are substances that help you stay asleep but don't necessarily help you fall asleep. So what you're saying is this product is helping hit all of those, so you fall asleep and stay asleep, but you're not knocked unconscious. You're getting deep sleep in a way that allows all that important sleep-time activity like detoxing and memory consolidation to actually happen.

Well said. Helping you fall asleep, stay asleep, and wake up feeling rested without feeling groggy in the morning. A lot of other supplements and drugs make you feel groggy when you wake up, and your brain feels foggy. That's not cool. The main thing is that if you're taking Tro Zzz, it's important to get at least six and a half to seven hours in bed. If you wake up earlier than that, you might feel groggy because it was designed for someone getting six and a half to seven hours of sleep a night, not less than that. In essence, yes, it's one of the most comprehensive sleep formulas on the planet, helping with all those stages of sleep and helping you fall asleep, stay asleep, and wake feeling rested.

I love it. Okay, let's talk about dosing. Someone gets a product and sees these little squares divided into four mini squares within a larger square. Walk us through how to start and find the dose that's right.

We talked about the buccal troche. That's exactly what you described, Leigh Ann. The buccal troche dissolves in the mouth, is fast acting, and has highly bioavailable ingredients. Start with a quarter and see how you feel. Usually within 15 to 30 minutes, you should start feeling the effect. If you don't feel the effect in 15 to 30 minutes, take another quarter and see how you feel. With Tro Zzz, I usually recommend going up to a half the first night if needed. If that doesn't work, try three quarters the next night, then a full one if you need to.

For Tro Calm, start with a quarter. If it doesn't work in about 30 minutes to an hour, take another quarter and see how you feel. You want to get a sense of what works best for you. Give it time. You can redose that way, or wait until the next night and try a higher amount. Tro Calm lasts about four hours. Some people take Tro Calm a couple times a day. Maybe a quarter in the morning, a half in the afternoon, or a full one after the kids are asleep and it's time to relax. That's totally okay. You can play with your dose and see what works, but go slow: start with a quarter, then increase to a half, three quarters, or a full troche.

Is it the kind of thing where, because it's helping replenish some of these systems like GABA, if you need to start with a higher dose, does that mean you're really deficient and your body needs a lot of it? And if you take it consistently, might you be able to start taking less over time?

The way I describe it is that Tro Zzz and Tro Calm are supporting the GABA system. They help you now. Over the long term, as you find ways to address your stress and look at vitamins, minerals, nutrients, and cofactors responsible for producing more GABA and balancing glutamate and GABA, you'll need less of it. But it's not something that by itself repletes GABA over the long term. It's a short-term solution for someone on a long-term health optimization journey, which we all are.

The goal over time is that you need less because your system is more optimized. Then you can use it occasionally when you have a stressful day, a stressful conversation, or a harder time falling asleep. My goal with patients is that sometimes they're using it every day to start, but over the long term, my goal is to wean them down and use less over time. If you take Tro Calm for three days and stop it, your symptoms may come back if you weren't doing anything else to look at the GABA system and sympathetic-parasympathetic balance.

Right. We need to be asking, why is my GABA depleted? Why is my nervous system so stuck in fight or flight? I get up on this soapbox all the time with vagus nerve exercises. You can do vagus nerve exercises till the cows come home, but if you never figure out what's going on deeper, and for me it's what's going on deeper in the psyche, you're just going to become as dependent on vagus nerve exercises as you were on benzos or whatever it might have been.

Right. It's about seeing how we can help now, and Tro Calm and Tro Zzz absolutely do that. But long term, it's about building resilience and capacity. That's a long-term game. Now that your system is a little more regulated, it can be easier to start doing those things, and that's what's important.

Exactly. I don't take Tro Calm or Tro Zzz every day, but when I've got something going on, or I'm traveling, or I know there's a big event, it's fantastic to have it on hand. There are a lot of products that are only effective if you use them consistently, and I end up in a place of, well, I don't need it consistently. I just need it every now and then. If I only need it every now and then, I want it to be really effective really quickly.

That's what we developed at Troscriptions: a way to help now. You don't have to take it all the time, especially with Tro Zzz and Tro Calm. Once you find the right dose, you'll know it and be able to use it as needed. That's a great tool in the tool belt and a superpower to have something that can help immediately.

Yeah, absolutely. I know we're right at time. Anything I didn't cover that you feel is really important for the audience to hear?

There are a lot of things we could have covered, but I think this is a great introduction to the GABA system. It's a great introduction to understanding that many of us are GABA deficient because of stress and depletion, and then having glutamate overload can cause symptoms like anxiety, insomnia, perseverating thoughts, depression, and thoughts that won't stop. Are these the only systems? Of course not. But if you can optimize and support the GABA system now using something like Tro Calm for anxiety and stress during the day, and Tro Zzz at night, it can be game changing. You start feeling better, and it becomes easier to do the other things you want to do to address longer-standing challenges.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, Dr. Sherr, thank you so much. I'm going to make sure the website is linked in the show notes so it's easy for people to find. I'm so excited. I honestly have half a mind to stock some of these in my office because I work with clients so much, and to be able to give them something immediately that's going to be effective can be really game changing. Thank you so much.

Yeah, we have a whole practitioner ecosystem that's separate from our direct-to-consumer business. If you're a practitioner, go to our website at Troscriptions.com, where you can find all of our products. There's also a link for practitioners where you can sign up and get access to an entirely different ecosystem of products. They're related to what we have available to everybody else, but also available specifically to practitioners.

Yeah. I'm all set up on the practitioner side, but you guys have some fantastic trainings that I want to do so I can understand better and support clients even better. Thank you so much.

We're here for you. Thank you, Leigh Ann.