It is overall important to remember that, evolutionarily, it is very hard to continue to change habits, especially ones surrounding danger, fear, anxiety, as we get older like a child can. Fears, anxieties, habits, addictions, even subconscious ones, specifically get engrained in our brains through the purposeful strengthening of neural pathways to protect us from danger over time, and studies on HDAC inhibition and PTSD show that there are some forms of fear and anxiety that can persist through any amount of clinical or exposure therapy. For some fears, they are so engrained that they will always resurface and there will be a relapse no matter what. This is why the most common "cure" for a lot of these issues is medicine that blunts emotions (propranolol), especially negative ones, or pushes neurotransmission associated with positive thought (increase serotonin). One can often times even see that this fear or anxiety doesn't make sense, but the feeling and memory persist nevertheless. This is where HDAC inhibition comes in. It is an actual cure, due to it strengthening the memories being formed in the present, allowing us to finally overcome past fears and reach new horizons mentally. This happens, from the point of view of our consciousness, instantaneously and in the background. It feels as though the anxiety has just disappeared, but what really happened was the present moment was put in priority, giving you a "blank slate" to work with. It does not dull any emotions, it simply puts priority on the present. Thought and action that was previously blocked by the built up fears/anxieties in us are now recorded stronger than the fear memories and are open to us to see, use, and grow from. Feelings of calm, happiness, intrigue, etcetera are no longer thwarted by the old fear that had built up, and can be felt again. When you read the studies and see how the mechanism of action works, you see that when neuralis says the anxiety was all of a sudden gone and he could actually think about the problem, learn and grow by himself, that he is literally describing the way in which HDAC inhibition's mechanism works. It works not through blunting, or changing, but through enhancing memory in a unique way, which levels the playing field. Please read the links above in my last post to delve more into this.
To change the subject a bit, HDAC inhibitors have been shown to affect memory and fear to different degrees depending on their combination of HDAC protein inhibition. As in, depending on how vorinostat specifically inhibits HDAC1, 2, 3, etc. it will affect long-term memory more, or addiction more, or fear extinction more, while having at least a small affect on all of these things, as they are all connected. In my few experiences I didn't get a grasp on this, mainly because I didn't know as much as I know now about HDAC inhibitors, but has anyone that has taken vorinostat noticed its memory-enhancing effects? They have been studied. This is something I wish to explore more with my next batch, because HDAC 1, 2, 3, and 6, the HDACs vorinostat mainly targets, are highly implicated not just in fear extinction but in memory formation and learning, allowing us to theoretically learn a language or instrument as a child could!
Concerning butyrate, I looked this up when I was exploring all the different HDAC inhibitors and making sure vorinostat was the one I wanted to go with, butyrate is an HDAC inhibitor, but a weaker one, and it also has many other effects other than HDAC inhibition, making it hard to take a high enough dose to get the effects we're exactly looking for without its other effects giving us weird side-effects. It would be beneficial to supplement, as it is used by our gut and body (it is actually produced by our gut bacteria), but we won't be able to get the clinical effects seen in the studies as easily from butyrate, especially the fear extinction. There are a good bit of studies on butyrate and learning, however, and since it is a weaker HDAC inhibitor you can take it daily, so I'd definitely recommend supplementing it or supplementing resistant starch to increase butyrate day-to-day or for when you need to get a little boost while studying. Metformin also increases butyrate by affecting our gut bacteria if anyone is interested in that. I've been taking metformin for a couple weeks now and notice a sort of clarity of mind, similar to what I saw with intranasal insulin but more subtle yet more wholesome. I should start a metformin thread, actually, because there's a lot of interesting studies with it... don't want to clog this thread with it lol.
