Welcome back to the So Method podcast where physiology gets simplified and root causes get solved. In the last episode, we talked about something foundational. The idea that most chronic symptoms do not begin where they show up. They begin quietly, biochemically long before anything becomes diagnosable or earns a label. Today we're going to take that framework and apply it to one specific nutrient, not because it is trendy or obscure, but because it sits at the very front end of how the body produces energy and regulates the nervous system. That nutrient is thiamine B one more commonly known. And before we go any further, I want to be very clear about what this episode is and what it is not. This episode is not about a rare deficiency. It's not about extreme cases. It's not about alcoholism, starvation, or advanced disease. This episode is about a common under-recognized, functionally significant insufficiency that quietly drive some of the most common symptoms people struggle with today. Symptoms that are often labeled as anxiety, panic, stress intolerance, gut dysfunction, or idiopathic palpitations. If you've ever been told your symptoms are stress related, psychosomatic, anxiety driven, or nothing to worry about yet your body continues to feel unstable, reactive, or unpredictable. This conversation matters because thymine insufficiency does not announce itself politely. It doesn't show up with clear red flags on Standard Labs. It doesn't present as a neat textbook picture. It doesn't always look like fatigue in the way people expect. Instead it masquerades. It hides behind anxiety diagnosis. It hides behind reassurance. It hides behind normal lab tests. It hides behind the idea that this is just how your body is now, and yet when you understand what thymine actually does inside the body, the symptom patterns it creates suddenly makes sense in a way that feels grounding instead of frightening. My goal today is not to convince you of anything. It is not to sell you on a simple nutrient and is not to oversimplify complex physiology. My goal is to help you understand what your body may be communicating because once you understand the pattern, fear often drops away. And when fear drops, the nervous system can finally exhale. So as you listen today, you do not need to take notes. You don't need to memorize pathways. You just need to listen for familiarity because many of you will recognize yourself and what we're about to discuss. Let's start simple because thymine is one of those nutrients that gets lost in technical explanations, and simplicity is what makes this click. Thymine is a nutrient almost no one is testing, almost no one is talking about, and yet it sits at the very front end of how your body produces energy. And when I say energy, I want to be very clear about what I mean. I don't mean motivation and I don't mean willpower. I don't mean how many calories you ate or how many hours you slept. I mean cellular energy. The kind of energy that allows your heart to beat steadily your nervous system to regulate itself, your gut, to move predictably and your brain to feel calm and clear. Without adequate thymine, your body cannot efficiently convert food into usable energy. You can be eating enough, you can be eating well, you can be doing everything right on paper and still feel like your body is struggling to keep up. Because thymine is not optional. It's foundational. It is required for the first steps that allow glucose to be process. Process through aerobic metabolism inside the mitochondria. Without it, that process becomes insufficient, stressful, and metabolically expensive. This is why thiamine insufficiency does not feel the way people expect. Most people assume that nutrient deficiencies make you feel slow, heavy, sedated, or unmotivated. But thiamine in insufficiency often does the opposite. It creates instability. People describe feeling tired, but wired. Exhausted, but restless, drained, yet internally activated. They notice they can't tolerate stress the way they used to. Noise feels louder. Lights feel harsher, exercise feels harder, and social situations feel just overwhelming. They feel fragile even if nothing obvious has changed. This is not a personality issue, it's not a mindset problem. This is not a character flaw. It's physiology. When mitochondria cannot generate enough energy efficiently, the nervous system compensates and compensation often looks like activation. The body doesn't slow down. When energy production falters, it speeds up heart rate increases to move oxygen faster. Breathing becomes shallower or more rapid. Muscle tone increases. Digestive process, slow and alertness increases. This is not a mistake. It's the body trying to protect you. When energy availability drops, the brain interprets that as vulnerability and vulnerability triggers vigilance. That vigilance state is what many people experience as anxiety, which is why people say things like, my anxiety came out of nowhere, or, I don't feel anxious about anything. My body just does this. What they're describing is not a sudden physiological shift. They're describing a metabolic shift. An energy system that lost efficiency and forced the nervous system into overdrive to compensate. This is why thiamine and sufficiency can present with many symptoms that feel alarming and confusing. Um, such as like heart palpitations, internal tremor, dizziness, nausea, digestive slowing, shortness of breath, or air hunger, sudden surges of panic. These symptoms do not mean the body is failing. They mean the body is working harder than it should have to. Here's something important. Thiamine insufficiency doesn't usually happen overnight. It develops gradually as demand slowly exceeds. Supply stress increases demand illness increases, demand pregnancy and postpartum increases demand. High carbohydrate intake increases demand, high coffee intake, skipping meals, and restrictive eating. Also, increased demand. So people often look back and say, I was fine until I wasn't. But the reality is the body was compensating quietly for a long time. This is why thiamine is so often missed because by the time symptoms become noticeable, the body has already been adapting for months or even years. And adaptions look messy when you don't understand what you're looking at. But once you do know what thymine does, the picture becomes much clearer. You stop asking, why is my body acting like this? And you start asking. What is my body trying to compensate for that shift alone can change how people relate to their symptoms. Fear drops, confusion drops, and the nervous system often calms simply from understanding what's happening. This is why thiamine matters, not because it's obscure, not because it's exotic, but because it sits at the foundation of calm, stable energy production in the body. And when that foundation is strained, everything built on top of it feels unstable too. Now, with that foundation in place, let's go deeper. When people talk about vitamins, the conversations often stay superficial. They'll say things like B vitamins help with energy, or B vitamins, support, stress, and then the discussion ends. But if we're going to read symptoms like a clinical detective, we have to be more precise than that. Thymine supports energy. That's true, but it's in. Thiamine sits at a critical junction point in metabolism. It helps determine whether the body can take fuel from food and convert it into stable cellular energy through oxygen based pathways, or whether it gets pushed into more stressful, less efficient pathways. This matters because your nervous system is constantly evaluating energy availability. It doesn't wait for lab reports. It doesn't wait for diagnosis. It responds in real time. When energy production is smooth and adequate, the nervous system can stay regulated. When energy production becomes strained, the nervous system shifts towards survival physiology. This is why thiamine so often presents as autonomic dysfunction because the autonomic nervous system is the bridge between metabolism and symptoms. It regulates heart rate. It regulates digestion. It regulates breathing patterns. It regulates temperature, it regulates stress response. So if you've ever wondered why your symptoms bounce between anxiety, heart symptoms, digestive symptoms, and dizziness, it's because these are not separate categories in the body. They are all autonomic outputs. Now let's translate the biochemistry into lived experiences. If thymine is insufficient, a person may eat a meal and instead of feeling nourished and steady, they feel activated. They may feel a surge of symptoms after eating, especially after carbohydrates. They may feel shaky, lightheaded, or suddenly anxious. They may feel their heart speed up. They may feel nauseous, or their stomach feels heavy and slow. They may feel like they can't take a deep breath, and if this happens repeatedly, their brain starts to interpret normal life as unsafe because the body keeps creating internal emergency signals. This is why thiamine insufficiency is so often mislabeled. The symptoms are real, the physiology is real, but the interpretation is wrong. If the clinician assumes that these symptoms are psychological, the person gets a psychological label. If the clinician understands metabolic physiology, the person gets a coherent explanation. Now, I want to pause here and make something clear. This does not mean emotions don't matter. This does not mean trauma doesn't matter. This doesn't mean life. Stress doesn't matter. It means that biology and life interact and sometimes what looks like emotional fragility is actually energetic strain. When the nervous system is under fueled is becomes less resilient. That's not weakness. That is the expected result of an undersupported system. Now let's talk about the pattern itself. When thymine is insufficient, the symptoms tend to cluster in a very recognizable way. You'll often see combinations like palpitations or heart racing, dizziness, lightheadedness, and feeling faint nausea, appetite changes, digestive slowing, panic surges, or a sense of internal alarm, air hunger, feeling like you can't get a satisfying breath. Tingling, neuropathy, internal vibration, restless leg sensations, fatigue but not calm, fatigue, more like a weird exhaustion, sensitivity to light and sound. Poor stress tolerance, feeling overwhelmed easily. What's important is not any single symptom. What's important is the cluster, because any one of those symptoms can have multiple causes. Palpitations can be thyroid related, dehydration related, anemia related or medication related. Dizziness can be blood pressure, blood sugar, vestibular hydration, or positional. Nausea can be reflux, motility, gallbladder anxiety or infection. But when these symptoms appear together in a particular pattern, and especially when they appear in response to stress illness, diet changes, or postpartum shifts, thymine becomes a major suspect. This is what I mean by clinical detective work. We're not guessing. We're noticing pattern consistency. Now, there is another important component. Thymine related symptoms often fluctuate. People will say things like, some days I'm fine and some days I'm a mess. This variability is often what causes people to doubt themselves. They think if it was real, it would be consistent, but physiology doesn't work that way. When a system is compensating, it has better days and worse days, depending on demand. High demand days amplify symptoms. Low demand days feel easier. Stressful weeks amplify sys symptoms and restful weeks feel easier. Illness amplifies symptoms and recovery periods feel easier. That variability is actually a clue. It suggests that a system is functioning at the edge of capacity. Let's address the most common misinterpretation. Diamine insufficiency often looks exactly like anxiety, not metaphorically. Mechanically, the body experiences energy strain and the nervous system responds with sympathetic activation. That activation creates sensations that match anxiety, erasing heart, tight, chest, shallow breathing, restlessness, hypervigilance, sense of impending doom. Now, if someone feels those sensations and has no framework, they interpret them psychologically, they assume I must be anxious. Then they become anxious about the symptoms which amplifies them further. This creates a loop, but here's the key clinical distinction. Thymine related anxiety is often state dependent. It worsens with missed meals. It worsens with exertion. It worsens with. Times of illness, it worsens postpartum and it worsens after high carbohydrate intake. People often say, I get anxious when I'm hungry, or I get anxious when I'm overtired, or I get anxious when I'm sick, or my anxiety started after a virus. Those are not random statements. Those are metabolic clues because the nervous system is responding to fuel and energy dynamics. Now, this does not mean primary anxiety disorders do not exist. They do. But if someone has panic symptoms plus digestive slowing, plus palpitations, plus dizziness, plus sensory sensitivities, and those symptoms change with physiological state, we must consider that this may not be purely psychological. We must consider that the nervous system is responding to an underlying biomechanical strain. This is why symptom reading matters because labels can be correct and still incomplete. Someone can have anxiety and also have a thiamine deficiency, making it worse. Someone can have trauma and also have thiamine insufficiency making regulation harder. Those are not either or categories. They are layered symptoms. Now let's talk about why thiamine insufficiency is so common. Not because people aren't eating, because demand exceeds supply. Thiamine demand rises dramatically under stress. That includes emotional stress, physical stress, inflammatory stress, and metabolic stress. High sugar intake increases thiamine requirements because carbohydrate metabolism requires thymine dependent enzymes. High caffeine intake can increase metabolic turnover and stress. Physiology increases demand for B vitamins and minerals, skipping meals, dieting and low calorie eating, create unstable fuel supply, and increase reliance on efficient energy metabolism. If thymine is low, that becomes a problem quickly. Postpartum is a high demand state, sleep deprivation, hormonal shifts, increased metabolic demand, and often reduced intake. All converge. Recovery from illness is another high demand state. The body uses nutrients aggressively for repair and immune regulation. Gut dysfunction is a major factor. If absorption is impaired, intake can be normal, and tissue availability can still be low. Certain medications can alter nutrient status. I'm not going to list specific prescriptions here as a protocol, but the principle is straightforward. Anything affecting digestion, absorption, metabolism, or excretion can influence nutrient status, and there is one more point left, often missed. If someone eats a balanced diet, modern food supply may not provide the density of micronutrients. A high demand physiology requires. So a person can be doing everything right and still be under-resourced. That's not failure. That's context. Now we need to address the part that makes people feel dismissed. The labs standard Lab ranges are designed to detect severe deficiency and overt disease, not functional insufficiency. They're populations based, ranges not individualized optimization ranges. Thiamine is largely intracellular, and blood values do not always reflect functional enzyme activity. So a person can have normal labs and still have symptoms consistent with inadequate thymine dependent metabolism. This is why clinical pattern recognition matters because symptoms are the body's direct report. When a clinician tells someone everything looks normal, what they often mean is nothing is diagnosable. But that is not the same as saying nothing is strained. The body can be strained for years before it becomes diagnosable. Is the entire premise of the Solinger method. We are not waiting for collapse. We're listening earlier. Now, I want to say this gently because it matters. If you have symptoms like palpitations, dizziness, fainting chest pain, severe shortness of breath, or neurological symptoms, you need an appropriate medical evaluation. This podcast is educational. It's not a substitute for medical care. The goal here is not to self-diagnose. The goal is to understand physiology and ask better questions. Now let's talk about what often changes when thymine availability improves. The first thing people often notice is not excitement, it's stability. Heart rate studies, digestive motility becomes more predictable, the body feels less reactive. Stress intolerance improves. Sleep becomes deeper, but not because the mind is forced into calm, but because the nervous system is no longer running on emergency signals. People often say things like, I feel more grounded. I feel like my body isn't panicking anymore. I feel like I can handle things again, that is the experience of a nervous system returning toward regulation. Now again, this is not a treatment claim. This is a physiological observation. When the body has adequate co-factors for energy production, it can stop compensating through stress circuits, and when compensation stops, symptoms often soften. Now, let's tie this together in a way that feels practical. If someone is experiencing anxiety, palpitations, digestive slowing, nausea, dizziness, and sensory sensitivity. And those symptoms fluctuate with stress, illness, missed meals, high carbohydrate intake, or postpartum changes. Diamine becomes a clea lens, not the only lens, but a key one because the cluster suggests an autonomic nervous system under energetic strain. And thiamine is foundational for metabolic efficiency. This is exactly how the Solinger method works. We don't chase the loudest symptom. We read the pattern, we trace it upstream. We ask what the body is missing, what demand has increased, and what system is compensating. That is how complexity becomes clarity. God designed your body with wisdom. When energy is scarce, it adapts. When support is restored, it responds. Sometimes the most compassionate thing you can do is stop judging your symptoms and as failures and start seeing them as communication. Faith and physiology are not at odds here. Learning how your body works is a form of stewardship, is learning to care for what you have been entrusted with. If you've been living in fear of your symptoms, my hope is that today gave you a calmer frame. Not to dismiss what you feel, but to understand it, clarity is calming. As always, this podcast is for educational purposes. While I am a doctor, I'm not your doctor. Please consult your own qualified healthcare professional before making personal health decisions. If this episode helped you see anxiety, palpitations, and digestive symptoms differently, share it with someone who needs that clarity. This is the Solinger Method podcast. I'll see you next time.