I’m revisiting this topic because I think my stressful lifestyle might have made things worse when I quit.
Here’s a link about stress causing epigenetic marks on the hippocampus (very interesting given that it looks like we underwent some sort of epigenetic change while on or immediately after fin):
newswire.rockefeller.edu/?id=1002&page=engine
'Richard Hunter, a postdoc in Rockefeller University’s Harold and Margaret Milliken Hatch Laboratory of Neuroendocrinology, found that a single 30-minute episode of acute stress causes a rapid chemical change in DNA packaging proteins called histones in the rat hippocampus, which is a brain region known to be especially susceptible to the effects of stress in both rodents and humans. The chemical change Hunter examined, called methylation, can either increase or decrease the expression of genes that are packaged by the histones, depending on the location of the methylation. He looked for methylation on three regions of histone H3 that have been shown to actively regulate gene expression.’
I took fin for a few years with at times bad sides but recovered when I quit. The final time I had problems at work, was living alone away from home in a small apartment and a week before quitting got beat up on the subway (too fogged to fight back in retrospect), and was near the end of a long dark winter. Could stress have made me more likely to crash and get very bad symptoms?