Sarcosine and side effects

What do you experience as side effects?

Additionally I’m curious how you experience its positive effect on the negative symptoms of sz.

Thanks!

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Awesomeness. At least at the proper dose. Once got somewhere between 10-20 grams in a glass of ice tea (my kid mistook it for sweetener) and the tight chest and hyper-vigilance were awful.

It helps some for negative effects, but more with cognition and awareness for me for some reason. It provides a wonderful mental boost. Read faster. Think faster. More aware when driving. It does for me what I’ve always figured that caffeine should, but doesn’t. I’m on 4g per day now and really starting to hit my stride. Love this stuff.

Pixel.

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Thanks for the quick reply. I tried recently going from 1g to 2g and then I noticed I’d get really dehydrated. Like I had to get up and drink it was so bad. I’nm not sure if this is a coincidence but it happened twice already.

What do you think, is it a common side effect? I haven’t found anything on that. Today I’ve cut back to 1.5g anyway to be sure… I read somewhere that you need to take 30mg for each kg of your weight so 1.5g is what it should be for me anyway.

Btw I’m not diagnosed with anything but I’m pretty schizoid by default (kinda a milder version of some of the negative symptoms of sz) so I wanted to see if it helps with that.

So far I’m thinking it might’ve done something real good to my mood to make it more stable and closer to normal. I’m not sure yet as I’ve been on it only for 2 weeks now.

What exactly does it do to your negative symptoms? Please say more on this. Btw for me it doesn’t do a thing for cognition, not sure about awareness, probably not much.

It didn’t do so much for cognition for the first week or two, it’s been just been in the last month that I’m really hitting my stride on the stuff. I have a horrible issue with remembering personal hygiene, except it’s not so horrible as of late. My new record is remembering to shower 13 days straight on my own without my wife or someone else having to remind me. Best I managed pre-sarcosine was probably a week and this record has been 20 years in the making. Sarcosine doesn’t remove motivation problems, but sure makes it easier to push past them.

Pixel.

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I don’t experience any side effects on 3 grams a day. But I am completely in love with sarcosine; I went from sleeping all day and pacing all night, failing all my classes, barely able to go to school, and the medication didn’t touch my symptoms. Over the past 6 months that I have been taking sarcosine I have been playing the piano, engaged in my hobbies, and when I miss my sarcosine dose I feel like I’m off my meds. That’s how helpful and stabilizing it is. I am now beginning to be much more engaged in my schoolwork after more consistently taking the sarcosine (I had a relapse and supplements were the last thing on my mind in the midst of psychosis).

It has drastically improved my quality of life.

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I noticed that too. I’ve been brushing my teeth. I used to be lucky if I brushed once ever 3 or 4 days now it’s like twice a day :blush:

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Time for an upgrade.

Or maybe something more traditional.

You’re drooling. I know you are.

Pixel.

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ive had a time of , this is something I know my head sweets at night, and I drowal and I cut t down to ever three days at 1 spoon in my pop and that what I do, the awearness bust you get off the stuff is a high in its self, but find it coming off uneasy. sorry but all thing have sideafacts somegood some bad. manybe some day it well help better. PS been on it three months.

That looks cool but also really hard to play.

OK how long have you been taking it?

Uh personal hygiene isn’t really a problem for me. How do you think you remember it easier now? Do you just pay more attention to the world instead of your own head or what?

HulGil - that’s pretty cool… did you change nothing else, just added the sarcosine?

I have the same question to you - do you feel more involved in the world? Or what is the change you experience like that leads to you engaging in real world activities now?

I bought a maschine Studio during one of my hypo manic phases.

Tried to learn it but man it is complicated!

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I did nothing else really, but I was just sick of being sick so it was also a change that came from within myself.

HulGil - I see, makes sense. I started taking it when I had enough, too. I don’t know if that has anything to do with anything :–)

Did my question make sense about feeling more involved in the real world?

Alright. So I’ve been taking it for 1.5 months now. It’s incredible. I jumped on it because of what I read about how it works on negative symptoms. May just be some sort of schizoid depression in my case but it works, slowly getting better there.

But what’s really incredible is how I haven’t had any bipolar-ish episodes since then. I was struggling with that for years, I never took meds tbh, I was able to deal with it initially, but it got really bad last year, I still didn’t take meds for it, now it’s all gone, wow.

The fun thing is, in the past I was full schizoid, hardly feeling anything, then I somehow got access to emotions but that’s what developed into the bipolar-ish episode thingy. A mix of schizoid detachment and emotions until it went through me and while it was going on, I didn’t focus on the daily tasks or even eating or sleeping.

Now the emotions are contained properly. Basically, I’m still able to get access to emotions, not fully schizoid like I used to be, but now if I feel emotions they just feel normal, they don’t spill over into overactive thinking and then into episodes like they used to. Incredible. I know I said that word already :slight_smile:

So… I don’t know what it does exactly to achieve this but it basically straightened out my “affective baseline”. As for the general effect, I do feel like I’m focusing more on the world instead of the schizoid crap.

The dehydration issue is gone it seems, since I reduced the dosage to 1.5g/day (taken in two parts). I have noted myself rage a bit for short times but only rarely. This rage thing I’m sure is due to the sarcosine because it felt different than plain irritation that I do have easily by default. Nothing serious though, and it’s rare so I don’t mind.

However, I skipped taking it for a full day recently (I didn’t forget, just didn’t take it with me when I went to another place for a day, thinking it didn’t matter) and I was launching into an episode by the end of that skipped day, it came on insidiously, my thinking increased first then I got the emotions too and then I noticed they weren’t working right. :frowning: When I finally took the sarcosine again, things were back to normal 2 hours later.

Does anyone have this withdrawal issue? I suspect this was that. It’s shocking how apparently my brain got addicted to its stabilizing effect. I’m not sure I like this…:?!?

Thoughts?

I only weigh 130 lbs. and after a couple of weeks of increasing the dose I find that it looks like 1 gram a day will do it for me. Above that I get edgy for an hour or two after taking it. Maybe after I’ve used it for a while a further increase will be called for.

It seems to be helping me to think and speak more clearly, to have more get-up-and-go, and to take more social risks than before.

Thanks for the reply. I read 30mg/kg/day is what you need to take, you seem to need less than that, for me 1.5g/day (which is the 30mg/kg/day is for me) is spot on.

Interesting how you have different effects from it than me. I see no effects on my thinking or speaking but I can think clearly anyway. I do have a bit more motivation to pay attention to the outside world, yes. For me it’s much more about that affective baseline.

Have you ever tried skipping it for 1-2 days? Did you experience any withdrawal symptoms?

OK, follow-up. I did notice an effect on my thinking as far as it involving more real world issues and leading me away from the schizoid thinking crap. So that’s the cognitive side of the effect of sarcosine for me.

A very mild version of the old episodes can come up every two months. The old episodes were about weekly and were highly disruptive to my daily life. This is not at all disruptive. So it allows for living much more normally. That’s an incredibly good result. Otherwise emotionally it’s still the same, as I reported earlier, it allows for a stable affective baseline.

So all in all, happy with it. I’m now going to try something else in addition since I still have other issues.

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