DNRS and increased anxiety

YES YES YES

It will pass.

The nervous system "fights back" against the rewiring. During week one I felt good, but by week two I had awful nerve pain and was really depressed and anxious. I was surprised how intense it was. But it's fascinating, right? Really showing you which symptoms are neurological, and showing you how much control you have over some of these awful symptoms being perpetuated ... or not!

DNRS is designed to work regardless of meds. I really doubt the benzos will prevent you from making progress.

Keep going! Even if you don't genuinely feel some of the things you say (like describing a good memory or trying to summon confidence) your brain still hears these things, and it works well enough until you do start feeling them more genuinely again. You can do the steps in a hollow way for this week and still make progress. Truly.

My LLMD was at a conference with Annie Hopper the week after my really bad week, and she said it's very normal to have a flare in neuro symptoms around that time.

Ha yes, I am a big fan of limbic system rewiring, and try to emphasize treatments that are not ingested, since many of us can't handle those well!

I actually sent Annie feedback about how focused her examples are on MCS and how helpful it would be if she used a wider variety of examples. I know she developed it years ago, for herself for MCS, and then branched out into CFS and fibromyalgia, but the success stories (at least in the online version of the program) involve a lot of Lyme, POTS, and other issues.

DNRS has been the single most helpful thing I have done for Lyme. No question. I didn't even practice as directed - often skipping the visualizations, often doing only one round per day, etc. The six months since I started DNRS have been the best since I got disabled by Lyme four years ago. I have been able to do so much more, and much more reliably. (I even packed up and moved my family to a new city!) Some of my symptoms have stopped but all have become milder.

I have two pieces of advice:

1) Make it your own. Change the language so that it feels comfortable to you. Some of the steps did not feel natural for me to say, and it felt much better when I rephrased everything.

2) This may seem odd, but I wrote down all of my notes on paper and taped them to the wall of my bedroom. Every day at least once I would go through them all and really reflect on them. "Think greater than how you feel," and "Recognize limbic dysfunction," and "No need to solve mysteries," and ideas for centering activities (like feeling the weight of my body against the chair or counting colors in my room) for when I felt anxious. Having the reminders there was helpful.

I look forward to hearing how it goes for you once this initial limbic system protest dissipates. Good luck!