Are you tired all day? Wired all night? Irritable? Snappy? Emotionally reactive? Can’t focus? Can’t sleep? Can’t figure out why every calming supplement you take barely makes a dent?
This wired-and-exhausted pattern has a biochemical explanation. And copper is sitting right in the middle of it. Copper is an excitotoxin. It stimulates the adrenal glands by raising sodium, which intensifies the stress response. Initially that gives people energy. They feel like they can keep going. But that constant stimulation eventually wears the adrenals down.
And here’s where it gets messy. Copper pushes dopamine into adrenaline. So dopamine drops. Motivation disappears. But adrenaline spikes. That’s the racing heart, the looping thoughts, the 2am wake-up where the brain won’t shut off. It’s not a sleep hygiene problem. It’s an adrenaline problem. At the same time, copper oxidizes serotonin and prevents it from working properly. So now your have tanked dopamine, tanked serotonin, and sky-high adrenaline. That’s depression and anxiety living in the same body. That’s when you cry at everything, snaps at your partner an hour later, and then your feel nothing for the rest of the day.
Copper also increases the burn rate of magnesium by five times. Magnesium is the mineral the body needs to calm down, relax muscles, and regulate the nervous system. When copper torches magnesium, there’s nothing left to buffer the stress response. Zinc drops too, which means even more copper accumulates, and the cycle tightens. Here’s the fatigue piece. Bio-available copper is essential for the electron transport chain, which is how the body makes energy at a cellular level. When copper is toxic, it’s bio-unavailable. The body can’t use it. So energy production tanks. Thyroid slows down because copper drives calcium up and potassium down. Metabolism grinds to a halt. Exhausted body. Wired brain. Same mineral.
Now think about the women coming off hormonal birth control with years of copper accumulation. The ones stacking copper across pregnancies. The ones whose prenatal (which shouldn’t be taken) added 2 mg of copper daily on top of a system that was already overloaded. This is what that copper load feels like on the inside. And most of them are being told it’s just stress, just hormones, just anxiety. Some are handed an SSRI. Nobody checks copper.
On an HTMA test, you can see what’s driving this. You can see the copper status, whether it’s overtly elevated or hidden. You can see sodium and potassium crashing. Calcium climbing into soft tissue. Magnesium depleted or building up in the hair because the body can’t use it. The panel tells you why you are wired and tired, not just that you are. This is one of those presentations where running an HTMA doesn’t just add information. It changes the entire direction of care.
Would you like to have an HTMA test ran on yourself? Dr. Cartwright can run these functional tests on anyone in the United States via postal mail. Find out more about an HTMA test by clicking here.