Tyrosine and Anxiety: Can L-Tyrosine help with anxiety?

Tyrosine is an excellent supplement for enhancing focus, promoting motivation, and reducing anxiety. Tyrosine is particularly effective at suppressing performance anxiety; the kind that cripples decision making and ruins learning capacity. This is why it has become one of the most popular nootropics among programmers, traders, students, and business executives over the last few years.

For example, Tyrosine has become a core ingredient in many of the best nootropics on the market right now. It is a central component of Vyvamind, Mind Lab Pro, and NooCube; in other words, it is in all of the most effective nootropic stacks around right now. The reason for this is Tyrosine’s known effect on anxiety levels.

But how does Tyrosine actually work?

Can Tyrosine help with chronic anxiety?

How much Tyrosine should you take for anxiety?

In this article, we’ll explain how Tyrosine affects stress and anxiety, how it works, and how to use it if you are under stress.

How Tyrosine helps with anxiety

Tyrosine is easily one of the best nootropics for anxiety in exietence.

Tyrosine is an amino acid. It is a building block of the neurotransmitter dopamine. Dopamine is your brain’s “reward” neurotransmitter. When you achieve a goal or complete a task, dopamine is released and you experience feelings of pleasure, satisfaction, and contentment.

Many cases of anxiety can be attributed to chronically low dopamine levels. This may be the result of issues producing enough dopamine, or issues with dopamine receptors. In either case, low dopamine can leave you feeling listless, dejected, demotivated, and constantly worried.

Consuming more Tyrosine can raise your dopamine levels, even if low dopamine isn’t caused by a lack of Tyrosine. This in turn can drastically reduce symptoms of stress and anxiety, and may even offer a long-term “cure” for anxiety caused by mild dopamine deficiencies.

Studies have found that Tyrosine supplementation can significantly improve stress resistance. Some clinical trials have found that Tyrosine supplementation can attenuate the symptoms of chronic stress and acute anxiety.

Is Tyrosine good for stress?

Tyrosine is one of the best supplements for stress you can take. Specifically, Tyrosine is excellent for maintaining good cognitive performance in people who are subjected to extreme stress.

Tyrosine supplementation has been shown to significantly diminish cognitive deficits observed in people in stressful situations. In one frequently cited study, researchers found that Tyrosine supplementation significantly improved cognitive performance in people subjected to various stressors, including sleep deprivation, extreme cold, and loud noises. In simple terms, it seems that Tyrosine helps you stay focused in typically distracting situations, and it helps maintain motivation and a positive mood when under acute stress.

Tyrosine therefore appears to be an ideal supplement to take if you’re suffering from chronic stress and you find that it is negatively impacting your mental performance. This is an extremely common scenario; an intensely stressful period at work is made worse by the decline in productivity that the stress causes. Tyrosine is not an immediate and total cure, but it can help break this vicious cycle!

For chronic stress, taking Tyrosine daily for long periods is the best approach. This will keep dopamine at optimal levels and make you robust to stress when it arises. For acute stress and anxiety, larger doses should be taken in the hours leading up to the stressful event. More on how much Tyrosine to take for anxiety below.

Can Tyrosine make anixety worse?

There is no reason to think that L-Tyrosine might make anxiety worse. There have been some cases of Tyrosine making anxiety worse on Reddit, Longecity, etc. However, in every case Tyrosine has been taken alongside other substances which are far better candidates as a cause of anxiety than Tyrosine.

There is no mention of anxiety as an adverse effect in any of the clinical trials looking at the use of Tyrosine as a supplement. Since Tyrosine’s main effect on the brain is the raising of dopamine levels, there is no clear mechanism by which Tyrosine might increase anxiety levels.

If you find that taking Tyrosine usually spikes your anxiety levels, stop taking it immediately and see if your anxiety levels subside. Carefully evaluate everything in your supplement stack to identify other possible causes of your anxiety spikes.

How much Tyrosine should I take for anxiety?

Highly bio-available Ajipure L-Tyrosine is the best form of the supplement. This form of Tyrosine has been observed having optimal effects when it’s taken in doses of 100-250mg. Importantly, greatest effects are seen when Tyrosine is taken 60 minutes before a stressful event.

So if you are experiencing chronic anxiety, taking about 250mg of high-quality L-Tyrosine per day should help.

For suppressing acute anxiety, such as that triggered by an interview, test or work deadline, 300mg or more 60 minutes before the event is likely to be highly effective for the vast majority of you.

If you are prone to panic attacks or a complete cognitive breakdown in intensely stressful situations, then even larger doses of Tyrosine can be taken shortly before the stressful event.

Of course, the best way to take L-Tyrosine for anxiety and stress is to combine it with other substances known to suppress stress and anxiety. You can get better results while using far lower doses of Tyrosine is you combine it with other anxiolytics, such as Theanine, Rhodiola rosea or Ashwagandha. For those of you using caffeine pills to help you study, we strongly recommend taking a sizeable dose of Tyrosine and Theanine alongside the caffeine to help keep motivation, drive and mood elevated while also suppressing side effects from the caffeine.

Brian Johnson, PhD

Brian Johnson is current Editor of Vagarights.com and a long-time writer for VAGA. A former psychologist, Brian is passionate about improving mental health and finding ways to stave off cognitive decline. He is an expert on nootropics, cognitive enhancement and biohacking more broadly. You can see his work on Google scholar.