Talking wipes me out.

[Dysfunkion]

It's funny cause my actual personality under this nonsense is like yours though but I can't access and instead I'm stuck in that weird state your boyfriend is but with a lot more issues. I don't drink. Right now I'm kind of zoned out and aren't really able to get a big dopamine response to anything due to having too much citric acid in my diet this week. I probably through introducing too much of the krebs cycle medium accidentally caused some kind of inflammation loop in my already sensitive mitochondrial situation. It's really irritating. Imagine not being able to fully access yourself and that is what these kinds of crashes feel like. All you can really do is watch boring mental fast food like pool or poker. Sometimes I like driving videos (I also can't drive). It's not that I don't want anything more but my brain can't handle or do much else at the time. We'll see how long it takes for my body to climb out of this one. Under all of these weird energy problems I am pretty healthy myself but my brain can't seem to produce energy properly and inflammation gets out of hand very quickly if just one stupid thing is off and stuff like this happens. I like to joke that if the ordinary healthy person lived like me they'd be superhuman.

Yes I am always on the edge of some kind of crash and micromanaging to not let it go there because ordinary things like that push it closer to the edge very quickly. I drink cistus and green tea every day. I'm also a daily coffee drinker and take propolis every morning along with high dose vitamin C. The whole antioxidant maxing thing for me is something I'm pretty responsive too but I made need more that target something specifically. On astaxanthin I respond really well to salmon, whenever I eat a lot of salmon I always feel much better. In fact I was gonna have some tomorrow or the night after to see if having a bunch would help me rebound out of this. I haven't tried supplementing melatonin and being from the PFS sphere (post-finasteride syndrome) I'm afraid of doing anything that might tank functioning "down there" even further because it's now because of this citric acid reaction bad enough right now. Last time I tried it a long time ago though it made me pretty dull and groggy the next day, I did sleep a bit better but normally I don't have insomnia either.

 

[triffid113]

So, I want to report this: my bf cannot talk and do something (even get out of the car when I drop him off) at the same time, nor can he listen and do something at the same time, no can he think and talk or listen at the same time. I priorly thought this was just an annoying habit of his that he could potentially be retrained out of. So this thread has helped him and our relationship tremendously in that regard. Can't retrain someone out of a medical problem!

Now I have to think differently about this problem because I want to report that he eats blueberries in a morning shake at least 5 days out of 7 and he drinks tea... but maybe only 1 cup a day 5 days a week (may not be enough and that's my fault because I am a coffee drinker and he joins me in that whereas he used to drink mostly tea). Those things both induce autophagy. Blueberries are noted for "helping regrow brain cells". So... I have to look at doses and also address antioxidants because I took high dose antioxidants all my life but he's only started a few years ago because of me and... he still doesn't take as much as I do.

idk how to judge how much antioxidant someone else needs. Anything that invokes the immune system requires antioxidants because the immune system fires off H2O2, an oxidant, to kill invading pathogens (or dead and dying muscle cells from too much exercise -- (too much for YOU?) and that H2O2 will ricochet around killing healthy tissue also w/o enough antioxidants to quench it. If you have any cuts or places bacteria can enter your blood, including periodontal issues, your immune system will be called into play. If you do not make enough HCL to sanitize what comes in your mouth, you will need more antioxidants.

But normal body processes generate free radicals (oxidants) too. The only ones I know of are: your thyroid makes free radicals when it creates thyroid hormones (and the antioxidant needed for that is selenium) and the electron transport chain makes free radicals in the process of creating ATP, the universal unit of energy in the body. I am not sure science even knows all the bodily processes that create free radicals but I sure don't. All this affects how much antioxidants are needed. So if you had a thyroidectomy, and took preformed thyroid hormone, it may lessen how much selenium you need (I say may, because selenium has now been shown important to a healthy gut lining, and not sure what else). Also, if you eat more than average, so running the electron transport chain more, maybe you need more antioxidant... or maybe if you are low in ATP, you might not run the electron transport chain (ETC) very much at all if you have ATP issues and idk where methylation issues appear in ATP generation - before or after the ETC (idk).

I read a book on sports nutrition by Dr. Michael Colgan when I was younger and he said that if you didn't give olympic athletes a hugh dose of antioxidants after their gruelling training, they would get sick (colds, infections...). So at that time I was absolutely sure my body had to mount an olympic-sized immune system effort against my allergens (my allergist said my allergies were the worst he'd ever seen in 25 years of practice, and my allergies rendered me completely nonfunctional). So I started taking 2g C and 1g E every day of my life thereafter. As I got older, I added olive leaf extract 1g, initially to kill gut germs because I do not make enough HCL, but after trying it, I kept it up forever because it lowered my blood pressure 11 points. And recently I started taking astaxanthin... whatever the standard dose is - I use NOW brand, because it has much more antioxidant power than C + E. I am old enough now to have to drink 40 oz. of water when I get up every morning, before breakfast, to wash out uric acid crystals and other irritating things from my blood as they bother my joints. (Ok, I only do this in winter. so far...and I can't yet differentiate if it's winter dehydration or the fact that I eat things in winter, like chocolate and cheese, that I don't in summer and chocolate comes with a lot of sugar). At any rate, uric acid crystals damage your blood vessels and joints and this calls into play your immune system - raises your need for antioxidants. (I have gout, but really never experienced it until these past few years, and then only mildly).

Everybody has different things going on which affects how much antioxidants you need. I take a base level I've taken all my life and just add on for illness or if I have a cut that stings (such sting goes away with enough antioxidants). I raise my base level of antioxidants when new chronic conditions develop like gout/arthritis. Thing is that if you take too much, antioxidants turn into free radicals. I don't think science knows any better than me how to tell if you have the right amount. But... I was young when I started this regime and I survived it, so I think my dose is right for me.

 

[Dysfunkion]

I have that issue with not being able to balance 2 things like that to varying degrees, it's actually one of the main reasons why I can't drive. The less antioxidants I have in me and worse my diet has been the worse that is. As I get more exhausted throughout the week from work 5 days a week for example I tend to simply lose the ability to speak a lot and be more on my feet socially in general. Though it doesn't really induce the extreme mental disorganization and tank my ability to concentrate, what usually does that for me is actual reactions to things that can snowball. It's definitely not something I can reprogram, as it's happening it's a hard barrier because the information just won't be processing or be relayed correctly despite me internally knowing what I want to say and how I want to react to a situation.

When it comes to vitamin C my body can't really seem to get enough of it, I mega dose it every day now because my body simply does better when my blood is almost entirely vitamin C. A lot of my other antioxidant sources are very immune stimulating so that's probably why I need such a high load from vitamin C but I'm also worse when I keep my immune system less stimulated and my everything tanks so I tend to need to keep everything working on high gear. It was a real pain getting here though my body fought tooth and nail during the middle of the summer as I was trying to integrate more things to make it stronger. The only thing that really helped then was increasing antioxidants but since my system was so trashed it often backfired because I couldn't handle the high doses of vitamin C back then that I could and do better on now. I'm not sure what is going on there entirely but that's what it seems to be from the outside. I think one of my main problems is a collection of chronic infections that no matter what my body can't seem to actually get rid of.