Dynamic Brain Review

Our head nootropics tester James Dixon takes a look at this offering from Stonehenge Health in our full Dynamic Brain review. Find out how it stacks up below…

It’s hard to fire on all cylinders. Life wears us down, stress gets to us, fatigue hits us. In turn, it’s hard to shake off the challenges posed by burn out, stress, anxiety and tiredness.

There are solutions, of course. Be kind to yourself, don’t take on too much, unplug from media for at least a few hours every day, lead a healthy, active lifestyle, and get plenty of rest. However, there are also plenty of supplements that can help.

In particular, nootropics can help. They are so called smart-drugs, and they can improve cognition, ring-fence long term brain health, and help diminish the effects of stress and fatigue. The market is well supplied with a wide range of fantastic options. It also has plenty of pretenders to the throne.

But which is Dynamic Brain, the subject of today’s review? Let’s find out as I test this nootropic and compare it against the market leaders in this Dynamic Brain review.

About Dynamic Brain

Dynamic Brain is a nootropic supplement, a so-called ‘smart drug’. As such, it is designed to improve mental clarity, cognition, focus, alertness, learning ability, and mood, diminish the effects of stress and anxiety, alleviate depression, and give you more energy, all whilst enabling longer-term brain health.

It’s made by Stonehenge Health, an FDA-approved, US-based company, who market it as a great way to overcome low concentration levels and poor memory.

The high antioxidant content in its formula is there to recharge the brain with prostaglandin, which in turn should protect it from disease.

The formula should also boost amino acid levels in the body, which should optimize neurotransmitter function, whilst perhaps even improving your brain membrane structure and fighting free radical cellular damage.

You get a good selection of vitamins and some common nootropic ingredients, like choline, bacopa, and phosphatidylserine, plus everything is natural, gluten-free, non-GMO, and fully vegetarian.

However, as above, there are some rather major flaws with Dynamic Brain. It has a good selection of some of the more common, more potent nootropic compounds on the market.

The thing is, they are hidden behind a proprietary blend, which means that we can’t see all the doses of key ingredients. This is a big no-no: you should always be able to see exactly what your money is buying and exactly what you’re putting into your body.

It’s also a bit of a limited list in terms of nootropics – what is there is good, but there are some additional common nootropics which would make it far more effective and would come close to allowing Dynamic Brain to earn its price tag.

How Dynamic Brain works

To the extent to which Dynamic Brain works, it does so the same as any other mid-tier nootropic supplement would. Its ingredients list is packed full of common nootropic compounds. All told, these should do a few things.

Firstly, they should improve cognitive energy and clarity. This means no more brain fog and no more jittery, stimulant induced energy. Rather, you should experience a feeling of calm lucidity, unclouded by the numbing effects of fatigue.

The ingredients should also lead to improved memory and learning ability, alongside improving your mood and diminishing the effects of stress and anxiety. A lot of this will come from increased blood flow to the brain, which means far more oxygen and nutrients delivered to where they are most needed.

A good nootropic should also enable long-term brain health, keeping your brain’s structure stable and healthy.

Dynamic Brain Key Ingredients

As mentioned above, though we don’t know all the doses (which is a big deal), we can see that there are some good ingredients in Dynamic Brain’s formula.

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Choline

This begins with choline, which should make it into any good nootropic as a matter of course. You will see it in most formulas.

It’s a molecule that turns into the key neurotransmitter acetylcholine after absorption. It should aid learning, memory, and cognitive function, whilst also having some additional handy benefits for your liver.

However, you generally want to see CDP-choline when looking to boost brain health and cognitive function. This isn’t what you get with Dynamic Brain, which is a bit of a shame and definitely an opportunity lost.

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DMAE Bitartrate

Then there is DMAE bitartrate. DMAE is another common ingredient in nootropics. Again, you will see it in plenty of the leading products. It is necessary for your body’s production of acetylcholine, which, as above, has some far-reaching benefits.

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Glutamine

As an amino acid, glutamine is one of the building blocks of protein, which your body needs for a range of functions from maintaining healthy mass and structure to enabling healthy hormonal balance. Glutamine in particular shows promise for aiding in maintaining healthy immune function. It may also be useful in stressful situations.

It is a bit of an odd choice in a nootropic. It really won’t make much of a difference to your cognitive health or performance.

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Green Tea

Green tea is a nice touch. Again, it brings about a range of benefits, from improving cholesterol and blood pressure levels to giving a bit of an energy boost. In this context, in a nootropic, we’re looking at it for its l-theanine content.

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L-Theanine

L-theanine is another amino acid. It can promote relaxation, mitigate symptoms of stress and anxiety, and even possibly slow down cognitive decline.

However, I would like to see l-theanine as its own ingredient. We don’t know how much of most of these key ingredients go into Dynamic Brain’s formula. However, just including green tea extract will pretty much guarantee a sub-par serving of l-theanine, which is a massive oversight.

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Bacopa Monnieri

I always like to see bacopa monnieri in a nootropic formula. Happily, it’s included in Dynamic Brain. It’s a major nootropic ingredient with proven benefits to memory, cognitive health, and cognitive performance.

It has been shown capable of reducing stress levels. It promotes the creation of important neurotransmitters like acetylcholine, serotonin, and GABA. If they include a good dose (somewhere around 300 mg per serving), you’re onto a good one here. It’s just a shame that we can’t know the dosage for sure.

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Inositol

Inositol is an odd choice. I can’t think that I’ve ever seen it in a nootropic before, and I’ve reviewed plenty of them. It’s a carbohydrate that may have an effect on serotonin. This in turn may help in anxiety and stress reduction.

In addition, it may reduce depression symptoms and increase blood flow. There is no evidence at all, however, that it will have any bearing on your cognitive performance or processing abilities.

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N-Acetyl L-Tyrosine

I always like to see l-theanine and l-tyrosine – two amino acids, my two Ls – in any nootropic. We’ve seen that l-theanine is there, in green tea, though severely under-dosed. We also get N-Acetyl L-Tyrosine or (NALT).

L-tyrosine synthesizes into catecholamines neurotransmitters (dopamine, adrenaline, epinephrine, and norepinephrine), which in turn may improve mental clarity and alertness, aid memory, and boost your mood. It may also improve your working memory under duress, when in stressful situations or when overly fatigued.

It’s good to see, here. Again, it’s just a shame that we don’t know how much there is.

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Other Inclusions

There are several more active ingredients in Dynamic Brain. Some are useless, like blueberry fruit extract and vanadium. Some are fantastic, like GABA, DHA, and huperzine A, which if dosed correctly will bring immense benefits to your cognition and overall mental wellbeing.

However, we simply don’t know enough about the formula to know what it will do for you, if anything. The fact that a lot of it is hidden by a proprietary blend makes Dynamic Brain pretty much untenable to me.

This is compounded by the few bits and pieces we do know – mostly that it’s very pricey for a month’s supply whilst having really quite a modest ingredients list, no matter the dosing.

I can’t see any reason for anybody to buy Dynamic Brain when you consider the alternatives on the market.

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Using Dynamic Brain

Dynamic Brain is at least easy to use and live with. However, so are all nootropics. You will rarely find one that has you continually micro-dosing throughout the day. Simply take two pills half an hour or so before breakfast and wait for the benefits to roll on in (if, indeed, they ever do).

I didn’t particularly feel much of a benefit. This isn’t to say there wasn’t one. But I typically take NooCube, a nootropic that pretty much dominates the market due in large part to both its high-quality and scientific rigour.

I can always feel the benefit when I take it. Dynamic Brain simply couldn’t compete. Compared to me on NooCube, I felt sluggish and foggy headed with no notable cognitive edge. Compared to me on nothing, this likely wouldn’t be the case.

However, I think this ably demonstrates my main issue with Dynamic Brain – why pay such a lot of money for something that cannot keep up with the rest of the market? Shop elsewhere for better results.

Using my own money, I would always go with something like NooCube, or perhaps Hunter Focus, another top-tier nootropic.

There are a few side effects to watch out for when taking this product. To be fair to Stonehenge Health, these aren’t unique to Dynamic Brain.

Rather, anything with huperzine A or DMAE may cause some side effects. In fact, any of the ingredients listed above can upset some people.

Huperzine A is just one example of an ingredient that’s laced with potential side effects, such as sweating, constipation, nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting. These side effects really do sting, made all the worse by their redundancy.

Given a bottle is fifty dollars from the manufacturer (or more elsewhere), this kind of slapdash formula simply isn’t viable. The cost/benefit balance simply isn’t good enough. The lack of overall quality simply isn’t good enough.

Alternatives

By this point, I hope I’ve talked you out of buying into Dynamic Brain. I feel a bit bad for this. It’s not a terrible product – it really isn’t! It’s just simply not good enough to compete at the kind of price point Stonehenge Health have set, especially when the competition is so keen.

Enter NooCube, whose praises I’ll sing to the heavens in any nootropic context. It has yet to be beaten (though a handful of supplements, like Mind Lab Pro and Hunter Focus, for example, come admirably close).

Dynamic Brain doesn’t come anywhere near it. It’s an incredibly potent formula, clinically backed and scientifically coherent, with about the strongest ingredients list I’ve ever seen for improved cognitive health and healthy functioning.

There are few supplements in the industry as a whole that are of such high quality and whose ingredients are so well-thought out and blended.

NooCube is manufactured and distributed by Wolfson Brands, who are titans of the supplements industry. If you’ve ever looked into their products, you’ll have seen what Wolfson Brands can put out there.

NooCube is up there with the best. It delivers on the hype using a wide, well-dosed range of some of the top ingredients going, all underpinned by good-quality research.

All told, NooCube seeks to give you benefits along five separate yet interlinking strands. Its ingredients are laser focused to this end. Taken collectively, these five strands should lead to an improvement in clarity and focus, an improvement in your working memory, and far greater mental wellbeing, with greatly diminished stress and anxiety.

It’s a little bit more expensive than Dynamic Brain. Buy it from their own website and you’ll spend an extra ten to fifteen dollars or so. However, it’s far more reasonable in relation to what you get.

Dynamic Brain is a lot of money wasted. NooCube earns every penny it asks from you and you can bring the price down with some of their impressive bundle deals.

Verdict

I’ll say it again, Dynamic Brain isn’t a bad product. It’s good. If it existed in isolation, it may well be worth looking at.

If it charged you fifteen dollars less per bottle, it would be a real contender.

However, it charges premium rates for a sub-par product in a busy, competitive market place. This means that, ultimately, there isn’t the room for it.

This largely comes down to the formula’s oblique nature. You don’t know how much of any given ingredient you are getting, which means you don’t know what you’re putting into your body or spending your money on. It also comes down to a few of the ingredient choices, which are bizarre, and a few omissions, which seriously dent its potential.

All in all, it’s a poorly thought-out attempt to do something good, charged as if it was a well thought-out attempt to do something brilliant. Skip it. Go for any of the many better products out there.