What a brilliant, thoughtful and informative post, i thoroughly enjoyed reading it!Tapering notes:
First and foremost, you need to sleep. Plan whatever you’re doing so that you can get at least 4 hours of solid sleep every night.
Second, if you feel great at any point of the day then you’re probably doing it wrong. You got here by feeling high. Then it just made you feel normal. Now you’re going to need to feel a bit low basically all of the time. How much you feel ‘low’ is determined by how fast you taper. CT means feeling absolutely horrible for a week or two. Dropping by 5% per week means feeling lethargic and irritable every day for months.
As for percentages:
Let’s say you decide to cut by 10% per week. If you are at 1000mg per day, then next week you move to 900 mg per day. Then you recalculate.
Now you’re at 900mg per day. 10% is 90 mg, so you drop to 810 mg per day, then you recalculate.
The next week you start with 810mg per day. 10% is 81mg, so you drop to 721mg per day (it doesn’t need to be exact).
You just keep going until you’re ready to jump off. But if you keep cutting by 100mg per day, on week 8 you’ll go from 200mg to 100mg and that’s HALF. Hug mistake. Tapering correctly takes fucking FOREVER!!!
NEXT PROBLEM:
When do you enjoy your drugs? At work? With dinner? On Friday nights? You need new habits. It’s best to write yourself a hand written schedule on paper with a pencil. DONT DEVIATE FOR ANY REASON!!! Family, work, weather, doesn’t matter. I don’t care if there’s a funeral. If you feel like shit and the drugs are the only thing that will make you OK to do it…. tell everyone your friend got COVID and start coughing. Stay home. One slip-up and your brain will tell you that it’s OK to cheat in an emergency. Then it will tell you to cheat when you want to relax. Then it will tell you to cheat because work was extra stressful. Then you’re just cheating ALL OF THE TIME. This is why in-patient rehab works. They don’t let patients have any contact with the outside world.
Next one:
Get your excuses ready in advance. Nobody wants to say “I can’t make it to work because I’m in withdrawal”, right?
I hurt my back. I have a new Dr and he put me on a new medication for high blood pressure and it’s making me dizzy. My neighbor is a meth addict and he kept me up all night working on his truck. Doesn’t matter. (Food poisoning is fantastic occasionally but you need to point to a specific food from about 12 hours ago)
When you’re scared of what to say when that moment comes…. when you are faced with the choice of taking more of the drugs you’re trying to taper off from… versus disappointing those people in your life who are important to you (boss, mom, child, etc)…. You will usually chose the drugs because you are afraid to expose yourself as a loser and you will be scared of what they will think. GOOD EXCUSES ARE IMPORTANT!!!. Plan ahead for Armageddon.
Last:
Addicts (And I mean any person who has become physically addicted to the drug, but also has become reliant on that drug sustaining their life), can’t taper well. There’s always a reason to deviate from the plan. EVERYONE IS ADDICTED TO SOMETHING. You’re just addicted to something that is either illegal or socially unacceptable. Caffeine is a drug. Starbucks is a drug dealer. Caffeine withdrawals last for months. It’s important to realize that you’re not a “junkie”. Stick with the plan at all costs.
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There’s usually someone close to you that will be willing to help. Ask for help. Even if they can only offer emotional support. Doing it on your own is sooooo lonely that you’ll probably fail, over and over for years. That’s what happened to me.
i would like to add a few comments from my experience, although i’m not exactly the greatest success story
First is to sort out a schedule and stick to it, my usage is historically very sporadic, i just take it when i want to feel great or i’m feeling withdrawals, i.e very random, so a taper needs to start with a strict regime which, as you say, you do not cheat on. For me my day starts at 5am and i dose 3 times (240mg a time) .. last night i woke at 2am in pretty severe withdrawals, sweats, aches etc.. i just had to stick it out, tossed and turned for 3 hours with my little bottle of pills by the bed…and with great relief swallowed them at 5am exactly! - as soon as i tell myself, ‘don’t worry, you can have them early tonight’ - then that’s it, same the following night, same with the next dose, and the wheels fall off-BE DISCIPLINED
The second thing i’ve learned is only to drop when you are stable and ready, there is no point for me planning a drop every 7 days, i just have to wait until i’m feeling normal, then give it 2 days or so, then drop, otherwise i get a wave of withdrawals on top of existing withdrawals, and then give up inevitably.. i mean when i say normal i mean not in full blown wds, i agree with your point that you are
going to feel low most of the time
What is really frustrating this time is i am struggling to stabilise, today is day 11 from a 20% drop and i still don’t feel great, which is frustrating as i’m trying to launch a business at the moment and i’m not in the right headspace at all..anyway fingers crossed
would be great to hear from others who struggled to stabilise , always get comfort from those in the same boat
Thanks again for a great post