Episode 153: COMT - Why Some Nervous Systems Feel Everything More Intensely

That might include feeling very overwhelmed in busy environments.

It might feel like you have terrible caffeine tolerance.

You just cannot tolerate a cup of coffee.

You feel very mentally overstimulated over pr- under pressure, and that can cause difficulty thinking straight, or perhaps you can be quite emotionally reactive to stress.

And although there can be many reasons for someone to feel this way, one of those reasons might be something called a genetic SNP, which is basically a genetic variation of a particular gene known as COMT or COMT, um, or also the longer name is catechol O-methyltransferase.

And basically the COMT or COMT is an enzyme that breaks down certain neurotransmitters in the body, including dopamine, adrenaline, and noradrenaline.

And these chemicals are particularly important because they are part of the body's activation and alertness system.

And so many of you listening to this podcast may be familiar with the nervous system by now, and we know we have a sympathetic nervous system which increases activation in the system and mobilizes energy.

And one of the ways the sympathetic nervous system works is by increasing dopamine, increasing adrenaline, increasing noradrenaline, and then we experience the physiological consequences of that.

So these particular neurotransmitters are not all bad.

You know, we, we often think of the sympathetic activation as being a bad thing, but we need a certain amount of sympathetic activation in our life.

It plays roles in motivation, it plays ro-roles in focus and stress responses and decision-making and emotional processing.

And it is the COMT enzyme that helps regulate how long these signals might stay active for in the body.

And I guess herein lies this connection with chronic illness.

If COMT is influencing how long these signals stay active for, if we have a variation of COMT that perhaps makes it work a little bit slower, that can make us more prone to stuck-on physiology compared to some of our other counterparts.