Funny you ask, I've been doing experimenting with methylation as well.
Any supplement with a methyldonor will increase neurotransmitter production (dopamine, epinepherine/adrenaline, norepinepherine). Methyl-b12, pc, methylfolate, etc. This is fine for most people, but for some people it freaks them out. This is because your brain cant handle that many neurotransmitters, and it causes anxiety and insomnia. Most likely either because you have naturally low levels of neurotransmitters, or becaues you have a COMT problem, or both. COMT methylates neurotransmitters to remove them, so if you have a COMT issue you have problems breaking neurotransmitters down, and they just sit there in your brain and amp you up.
The levels that drs use (and a lot of supplements have) for methylfolate are INSANE. Some recommend 5-15 mg. Neil nathan says he found that you only need 200 mcg, which is more in line w/ my experience. When I took a supplement w/ 1000mcg, i was literally climbing the walls. I wanted to jump out of my body for 3 days. 50mcg and i couldnt sleep. same w/ any methyldonor.
What I've done is to cut it back to 1 mcg/day. I started this week. Even that is giving me headaches, but i will stay at this level until i no longer notice it. You need to ramp up neurotransmitter production and get the mehtylcycle hardware going slowly if you cant handle it. The mistake i made in the past was to give up becasue of side effects, but i think if i can do it super slowly it will actually help me. adequate b12 b6 and methylation levels are necessary for nerve repair.
Finding supplements w/ low enough levels of b vitamins is hard for me. anything that has too many methyl donors or too high a dosage of any bvitamin will push the process along too quickly. This means that like every b complex out there is going to have too high a level of at least one b vitamin, so i end up having to buy them all individually which is a bit of a pain.
The other option is to use non-activated b-vitamins. This means using hydroxy b-12 instead of methyl b12, supplementing w/ b2,b6, and folic acid (sometimes folic acid, since its synethic, can actually slow down methylation as it takes a lot of cofactors to methylate, so maybe best to stay away) instead of methyfolate.
Bottom line, i've found that undrstanding methylation is not easy. Most drs and even many phds just do not understand it, and they make blanket recommendationst hat do more harm than good.
I learned this stuff by reading some of amy yasko's work and this cardiologist i follow who treats using these tools:
http://www.heartfixer.com/amri-nutrigenomics.htm#mthfr%20a1298c:%20%205,10-methylenetetrahydrofolate%20reductase%20(%c3%9e%20bh4)Post Edited (dcd2103) : 12/19/2020 3:36:41 PM (GMT-7)