Have now gotten 30 days in a row of good sleep after 7 months averaging 2 or 3 all nighters a week.

Insomnia (which I rarely had before AF) kicked in after 3 months of precursors. I tried giving up EVERYTHING for a couple weeks but insomnia continued unabated so I reintroduced everything too soon. This second attempt took me 5-6 weeks on nothing but food to level out ("Let food be your medicine"). Another thing about food--it is "low and slow" by definition.

About that time a retest (which I should have done sooner, but I felt so lousy) showed improved inhibitory neuros, perhaps from the precursors, but moderately high evening cortisol, and very high glutamate, GABA and taurine. Taurine was at 100% and actually extended the bar chart 5 times until off the page of the report. Then I realized taurine, which everyone seems to love, was in a lot of proprietary blends and I couldn't piss it out fast enough. Some even say it builds up in tissues. I was probably only taking about 1000 mg a day, but for about 9 months. It is implicated in elevating GABA/Glutamate in some studies. Another tip off of an excess--I had developed mild acid indigestion after EVERY meal. Taurine increases HCL.

I noticed an odd energy pattern over the last 7 months--I felt much better after being up all night, and much worse after a good night's sleep. I suppose after an all-nighter my adrenals came back online to carry me, and after a night of good rest I was felt wrecked for a week because adrenals disengaged and went back into rest mode? Now post-insomnia I can feel energy coming back steadily in small increments. I have been following Sherpa's advice (which he repeats again a few threads down) to ride that recovery wave and rest into improving energy.

One other thing, as food allergies and sensitivities cause inflammation which can elevate glutamate and probably cortisol, too, I tested as sensitive to all dairy incl. eggs, yeasts, certain nuts, mushrooms etc. These are foods (some of which are high taurine and some high glutmate) that I have been eating a lot of daily during AF and developed sensitivities for lately (as opposed to true allergies), so cycle those foods as carefully as you would cycle adaptogens!

In retrospect, NOTHING popularly taken for insomnia worked for me. There are so many causes for it, yet I wasted a lot of time treating high cortisol when glutamate was the deciding factor, not that steepening the cortisol curve won't be welcome with further healing.

As I posted before, with all these supplement interventions, balancing the body's balancing mechanism is a bit of a mug's game. Ascribing cause and effect--good or bad--with certainty to anything with AF let alone supplements (unless you have an OUTSIZE reaction which I never did) was next to impossible for me with the layers of possible causes and their lag times. It seems like supplemental taurine (which with glutamate had been one of the few neuros normal on my baseline test) extended my recovery time by at least half a year. If you believe in low and slow, I would look to organic food sources of whatever you think you need to supplement healing adrenals. The money you save on supplements will be absorbed every penny by organics!!!! :(

Years ago I used to manage some holistic health clinics in metro Phoenix and noticed our NDs' biggest problem was dealing with patients' demands for something fast acting and therapeutic--after years of chronic abuse, which to me is the same mindset patients have with allopaths. I'm guilty of it, too. How much of our time recovering is due to the disease and how much to the "cure"?

Anyway, don't mean for this post to be an editorial. Every one is unique and everyone's experiences on this forum have been much food for thought.