broken nervous system??

I have no experience with benzos, but I do know that my joint, eye, anxiety, and sleep issues—along with occasional dizziness, extreme fatigue, and other weird pain patterns—are absolutely correlated with each other and with my stress levels. I’ve learned in the past few years how huge a role the nervous system plays in these symptoms and patterns. There’s even long-Covid and ME/CFS research emerging on these connections and the vagus nerve.

The interactions of the nervous system, stress, and these symptoms (as well as inflammation more generally) are becoming more clear in the research, including in studies on pain reprocessing theory and neuroplasticity by Alan Gordon and others. It’s also trendy, and there are plenty of grifters on the Internet trying to make a fortune off the vagus nerve / brain retraining / etc, so you have to be a little careful looking into it. But I’ve found it really illuminating, trying to stick to the scientific studies.

All of which is to say: there could absolutely be a connection, given the interactions of benzos and the nervous system. But I suspect you’re not in any situation requiring panic—your doctor may or may not think there’s a correlation.

Also! For sleep, I’ve found l-theanine helpful.

My experience with Entyvio is that I felt more anxious and depressed on it than my usual. Significantly more so. And I felt these vague joint pains on it too. However, Entyvio never lowered my calprotectin to normal and I had it more in the 300s range. So perhaps that underlying inflammation was the cause of the anxiety/depression.

With sleep, that's the first thing for me that gets affected when my inflammation goes up. Not because of night trips to the loo, it gets affected even before that happens. Disrupted/nonrestful sleep for me is one of the first signs of an impending flare.

The times in my life when I felt full of energy and happy where the times that I had very low to normal calprotectin levels. This was mostly in the 3 years remission period post FMTs. It happened again briefly when I was on the 45 mg Rinvoq. It felt amazing and wonderful. If this was how normal people felt then wow, just wow!

So how is your stool calprotectin?

And, do make sure you get good quality sleep. Because that makes a world of difference. Try sleep herbals that use a mix of Zizyphus, passionflower, hops and Magnesium glycinate.

Oh and the joint pains and poor sleep you mentioned I find can also be helped by one or both of the following:
- doing a sinus rinse using pre-boiled water mixed with sinus rinse special saline in a Netti pot. Somehow, even if my nose doesn't feel blocked, I think pollen can get in and cause irritation which somehow manifests in poor sleep and joint pains
- taking an anti-histamine for a couple of days in a row.

Hope you feel better soon

One more thing — if your anxiety is getting worse ( and worrying/wondering about your health might be an understandable part of that — having UC gives us that tendency), you might consider if taking an antidepressant temporarily might help. In that National Geographic article on long covid there was this:
A new study shows that bits of virus that survive in the gut cause chronic inflammation, which reduces production of serotonin—a molecule critical for communication between nerve cells in the gut and brain.
“We’ve known that the gut is a reservoir for virus for a long time,” says Melanie Gareau, a microbiologist at University of California, Davis. What is exciting is that “we’re starting to identify messengers from the gut that signal to the brain.”

So if long covid might cause this, it makes sense to me that UC also could. There was thought that since ssri’s (antidepressants) increase serotonin in the brain, they might be helpful.

I took a short course (about a year) of an antidepressant about 6 months into my UC diagnosis and it was a great help.

Just a thought!