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I can't google anything useful about my issue and Claude is largely unhelpful, the doctors try to diagnose me with depression (I have a very well managed SAD, so I technically might qualify but this is not the main root cause), sports medicine physicians just don't exist where I am, so I want to dump the list of the symptoms I have and see whether you guys can help me come up with a direction to dig.
The main issue: when I do sports, whether it's cardio or weightlifting, I find it really hard to sleep. Fundamentally, my sleep is more fragile. I fall asleep easily all of the time, but when I work out it's easier for me to wake up during the night (for any reason, e.g. noise, wanting to go pee, being too hot, being too cold) and harder to fall back asleep after I wake up.
I desperately want to see a doctor, but they are trying to diagnose me with a mental health problem rather than a chemical imbalance. Feel free to ignore my complaints about doctors and suggest me to see a doctor, but I'd be grateful if you could spell out what I should say to him.
The simplest explanation is that exercise is depleting nutrients that you are currently borderline low in.
Have you tested your Iron and Ferritin levels recently? RLS is caused by not enough dopamine being processed by certain receptors. One of the co-factors for this process is iron. So low iron will by definition cause RLS. It could be something else causing low dopamine but since magnesium helps you temporarily, it seems worth trying.
Do not trust the doctors if they try to pin your problems on something psychological. They just default to that when they don't have a clue. I would also wager that your depression is a symptom of a underlying physical problem.
Solving nutrition / chronic illness problems is very complicated and very few people know what they are doing. Experimentation and sceptical but open-minded reading is sadly the best approach that I have found.
If I were you I'd try a basic multi-vitamin before and/or after exercise (just one with reasonalbe RDA, like 50-100%) and a high-quality (but low potency, iron poisoning is a thing and is very bad) iron supplement. Try it for maybe a week (or until you feel something), then re-evaluate. If something gets better try to figure out what. Since just spamming supplements without understanding them is bad long-term, but fine short-term, usually. So ordering some blood tests and researching the results is also recommended. Doctors will only react when the values are profoundly bad, especially if you are young.
Nutritional deficiency was more or less also my instinct when I read the description. The mechanism I had envisioned is:
I also agree that blood-work could be helpful here, but it would still be hard to interpret. Finding a physician who can properly interpret the results usually requires a specialist, and even that is hit-or-miss.
Even with a multi-vitamin, do you you think separate supplementation for each under covered nutrient with individual or a multi-mineral would also be advisable? My recollection is most common multi-vitamins still do not come close to even 50% RDA on several important minerals (including iron and potassium). Blanketing the spectrum does seem a lot easier than accurate tracking, but also makes it really hard to isolate variables.
Assuming, you do need supplements in addition to the multi, how important is nutrient timing in your opinion? For example if OP is supplementing vitamin D, calcium, and iron. How strong is the synergistic effect of D+calcium and how strong is the antagonistic effect of calcium+iron?
I was also thinking last night that perhaps the need to supplement magnesium in the first place is already mostly explanatory. OP didn't mention which type of magnesium supplement they was using. Of the zillion options which do you think is best for bio-availability, the ability to cross the blood-brain barrier, and sleep, Magnesium L-Threonate? Is it possible the version OP is using is just barely available enough to affect RLS, but not available enough at the brain? On timing, most recommendations are to take magnesium at night for sleep. In my personal experience if I take magnesium right before bed I end up with crazy dreams. With my last big meal of the day, or even at breakfast, tends to work better for me.
I take 400mg Magnesium Bisglycinate 1-1.5 hours before sleep. No weird dreams, no feeling in the legs either
Check the start of this video. https://youtube.com/watch?v=h5Hyhmxli54
I have not watched it completely so I'm not sure if he mentions gut inflammation later on, but I doubt it. But as said in the video, the main cause of RLS is iron deficiency inside the brain. Getting stuff into the brain is complicated, minerals especially. Gut inflammation can screw with this process. If you have gut problems you should probably try to fix it, since it tends to get worse over time otherwise.
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