I would use memantine to stop excitotoxicity symptoms. By that I mean severe tinnitus, overactive brain etc. A real biggie is even meditation is too hard on my brain, it causes severe anxiety and depression 8 hours or so later like clockwork. It was not like this at all when this illness first started 2 years ago.
My worst symptom is really an overactive brain sort of depression.
The reason for the paradoxical meditation results could be related to the overall adrenal (hpaa) problem. I get the same thing, but with panic attacks 8 hours later - like you say, almost like clockwork. What I've found out about this that helps explain it is related to the entire subject of HPAA/stress, etc.
The body strives to maintain a homeostatic balance between sympathetic and parasympathetic systems. Normally, this balance has a certain set point, let's just call it ground zero. During a stressful event, the sympathetic system gets cranked up in the "fight or flight" (FOF) response in characteristic ways - increased heart rate and blood pressure, blood diverted away from digestion and to the muscles, etc. After the stress, the body then resets the sympathetic response back down to the baseline level to return to homeostasis.
With chronic stress, however, the basic set point of both systems gets raised. The system has been stressed so continuously that the parasympathetic starts rising to meet the sympathetic, and gradually creates a new, higher baseline. So for a moderately long-term stressor, the set point goes from "ground zero" to let's say arbitrarily 20. Now not only is the threshold for triggering FOF much lower, meaning it will take relatively less stimulus to crank you up into FOF, but you won't return all the way down to ground zero anymore after the stress, but will just go back to that new set point of 20, where your body now "lives."
What's happening with meditation is actually the reverse of that process. When triggering the relaxation response, it's now the *parasympathetic* system that's getting cranked up, which as the name Benson gave it indicates, has the effect of relaxing the body. During meditation, therefore, and for a while afterward, you feel great. But then what happens is that the brain/body perceives this condition as also being homeostatically imbalanced, and it will strive to regain balance, in this case by cranking up the *sympathetic* system in a kind of boomerang or rebound effect to match or balance out the elevated parasympathetic response. The brain doesn't really know (or care) about which way the imbalance is, all it knows is that it's out of balance and that it needs to be restored by any means necessary.
Apparently with these chronic stress/fatigue conditions, the HPAA is so much more delicate that it's easier to miss the mark and overshoot the response, so the sympathetic overdoes it and gets too elevated. The result is heightened anxiety or panic, elevated cortisol leading to depression, etc. Then eventually that calms down, and then you're back at square one, or in the earlier model, square 20. Except now you're probably cranked up to 25, lol.
The answer might just be to meditate for shorter sessions, so that you're getting only a milder increase in the parasympathetic that won't be enough to rebound the sympathetic past the mark and cause the excess symptoms. Then gradually as the set point of both gets lower, the sessions could probably be increased without provoking the negative effects of rebounding sympathetic response.
Regarding the klonopin, etc., the benzos are GABAergic, and there are a lot of anxiolytic herbs that have similar actions: passiflora, melissa, valerian, etc. One or more of those combined might possibly at least help extend the time between having to take the klonopin. It seems that your system is very sensitive to sympathetic arousal, and as that slowly rises over a few days back to the set point after taking the klonopin you're getting symptoms. Combining a "titrated" meditation approach with some of the GABA herbs might help you reset the system lower again and stay off the benzos for good.
