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  • TDS Moderators: AlphaMethylPhenyl | paranoid android

8 months off benzos and no improvement

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phoenixrain88

Bluelighter
Joined
Jun 7, 2008
Messages
81
The sleeping and the pressure in my head and the difficulty thinking are no better--in fact worse--although the paranoia, delusions, and obsessive thinking which surfaced for months seem to have receded. I sleep well one night--just well enough to begin remembering how being alive used to feel--and then for days afterward the suffering sets in again as if I had been granted no reprieve at all.

HOW MUCH LONGER UNTIL I'M BETTER? I'm 20 years old, about to turn 21, I used drugs for a couple of years. Many people who are in their 40s and took benzos for a decade or two seem to heal faster than I have. I'm about to switch to a new college where I would like to take 18 credits and fulfill an internship. Yet as it is I spend about a third of my waking hours incapable of reading and retaining (much less writing)--another third capable of doing so only haltingly--and finally maybe a third of my waking hours are spent mostly functional.

I am a shadow of what I once was--from the appearance of my hollowed-out face you would think me at the edge of death--I don't know if it's time for a sedating anti-depressant or what but worst of all I don't think any chemical intervention can improve my quality of my life. It's all about coping (a word and concept I loathe). And I'm tired!!!!!

Thank God for this board full of people who understand what it is to suffer in ways that don't make sense to others. I don't know what I'd do otherwise. Wear my family and friends out even faster than I already have with my complaints I suppose. I repress the complaints but I resent them for not suffering and it leaks!
 
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I like to think of this forum as being more hopeful than miserable. :)

Anyway, I'm sorry to hear you're having a hard time, man. It sounds like you're under a lot of stress, switching to a new college and everything. You don't want to let yourself slip, just because of your anxiety but that in itself can be causing you even more anxiety. I want to say just relax but that doesn't work for everybody haha. Unfortunately, I've only done benzos a handful of times so I can't be incredibly helpful but I think other people will get a better idea of how to help if they know why you were taking benzo's in the first place? Which benzo you were taking and how much?
 
That's really awful,

If you don't me asking, how long were you on the benzos for, and how rapidly did you taper from them?

These things can all add to the severity of the withdrawal I believe... but the good news is this... as long as you manage to stay off them things will likely improve further, I know you are still suffering greatly but by removing those drugs from your life your body can begin to heal itself :).

You have plans for the future which is great, and I would have thought that studying will help your cognitive ability to restore itself to its former glory :D. If you feel that's too much pressure for you at the moment then you are still young, you can possibly take a a leave of absence and concentrate on getting back to your full potential before continuing with your studies.

Were you prescribed them? I would suggest seeing a doctor if you are still having all these worrying symptoms as they might be able to suggest something to help. Maybe not medication if you don't want to go down that route but I'm sure there are other options out there. Check around and see what there is in your local area as there are many people (unfortunately) who get into awful situations with benzos.

anyways, I wish you the best of luck :).
 
You're young, you'll get there. Life is teaching you a hell of a lesson, but your brain can and will compensate with time.
 
Thank you for understanding, Cyc.

For the first few months, the idea that life was teaching me "one hell of a lesson" was comforting. The lesson would be taught, the suffering would pass, and I would stay away from drugs forever after.

But this has not happened. First, I will specify the suffering:

  • INSOMNIA like I didn't know was possible
  • physical symptoms (heart attack etc.)
  • cognitive fog
  • paranoid delusions (messages of apocalypse encoded into music, some greater power than I is punishing me, etc.)
  • days-long loops of obsessive thought
  • sheer exhaustion and inability even to read

My hope has been depleted that this is simply a lesson to be taught, because the suffering has come randomly ever since I quit benzos cold-turkey. I suffer, seemingly independent of my behavior throughout this process.

So I have spent a great deal of time contemplating the idea of "lessons." Either a) lessons are entirely contrived (i.e., intrinsically arbitrary interpretations we assign to events largely beyond our control), or b) there is some kind of lesson plan built into the nature of each human's interactions with other humans and with the environment.

Either option is intolerable--the former because of its attendant chaos, and the latter even more so because it is religious. The only religion I can brook is fear and loathing of some greater power which is either indifferent to individual human beings or which uses us as pawns.

So I feel hopeless!

Because if a is true, then the fantasies I have relied upon to keep the faith that I will heal (which include the idea that life is teaching me one hell of a lesson), are merely after-the-fact interpretations that don't necessarily have any bearing on reality.

On the other hand, if b is true, then the existence of lessons to be learned reflects the existence of some greater power. And should that greater power be judging the minutia of my every action and thought, then my life is not my own, and I wish I did not have to live it!
 
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It takes some people 2 years to heal from benzos. Check out www.benzobuddies.org for support.

At 8 months off I was sleeping maybe 5 hours a night on a good night and awake all night on a bad night. I had severe agoraphobia and anxiety and crippling depression. I also had severe cog fog.

I'm 20 months off now and the only thing I still deal with is insomnia, but even that is a lot better. I thought I had destroyed my brain but now I'm back in school in a math based major. Things do get better, just not on the schedule we would like them too.

I was a high dose abuser for almost 10 years if that makes any difference.
 
villian said:
It takes some people 2 years to heal from benzos. Check out www.benzobuddies.org for support.

At 8 months off I was sleeping maybe 5 hours a night on a good night and awake all night on a bad night. I had severe agoraphobia and anxiety and crippling depression. I also had severe cog fog.

I'm 20 months off now and the only thing I still deal with is insomnia, but even that is a lot better. I thought I had destroyed my brain but now I'm back in school in a math based major. Things do get better, just not on the schedule we would like them too.

I was a high dose abuser for almost 10 years if that makes any difference.
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Thanks for your reply!

Would you say your cognition and your emotions are fully back to normal?

Did any dietary or other modifications help you during the withdrawal process?

At some point, did your improvement become linear rather than cyclic?

How's your sleep now, since that's the one discomfort that's lingered from withdrawal?

I've already spent far too much time on sites like Benzo Buddies. It's comforting that I'm not the only one suffering, but it's far too easy to be dispirited by the cases of people who are three years out and posting about "the worst flare-up yet."
 
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Did you do a proper taper with valium or did you do it 'cold turkey'?

I'm assuming you were taking these meds for anxiety, has your doctor replaced the benzo with something for your condition?

Which benzo was it that you were taking?

I had been taking upwards of 4mg of klonopin a day until I got on lyrica and neurontin for both nerve pain and anxiety/anhedonia. Since then I've managed to keep it to 1mg per morning, and I don't use the lyrica that often because it's infamous for causing rapid tolerance which I find doesn't happen with neurontin.

Congratulations on the 8 months though, that's quite an achievement. I went the same amount of time, maybe longer I can't remember before getting back on klonopin 6 months ago. Protracted withdrawal from an SNRI led to the worsening of my anxiety issues.
 
I don't know if I would go as far as to say my cognition and emotions are 100% back to normal, however they are infinitely better then I was at 8 months. I'd say they are about 95% back to normal, but I do believe they will get to 100% in time.

As as far as thing that help the withdrawal process, meditation is key. Try to sit for 20 minutes a day, there are countless studies about the benefits of meditation. As far as nutrition I cut excess sugar and stopped drinking alcohol. Lots of fruit and veggies. Some people recommend cutting caffeine but I did not.

As far as the linear question, at some point it did. It was probably around 14 months off I started to feel better out of the blue one day. From 14-17 months I'd say the healing felt pretty linear. I'm about the same now as I was at 17 months, that is when the last of my symptoms (cog fog) dropped off.

My sleep still isn't great. I get about 6 hours a night, but I am grateful for every one of them. To be fair though, I have had insomnia since I was a teenager, it is the reason I went on benzos in the first place. I don't think it is fair for me to call it solely a withdrawal symptom because it is something I have always had to deal with.

I hope you start feeling better soon! A lot of people get hit with symptoms at 6-10 months off. I was just as bad at 8 months as I was at 6 weeks... (I cold turkeyed)
 
consider the possibility that this is not all benzo withdrawal. at 8 months, it might help you to act like it has nothing to do with benzo WD. just work on improving the quality of your life on a day to day basis. create a schedule. force yourself out of bed at reasonable hour. don't stay up past midnight, even if that means spending hours lying awake in bed only to have to wake up in a few hours. eat a real breakfast. go running; you will get immediate results from that one. don't drink. forget about benzos. drugs are far from the only hurdle in life. you talk about obsessive thinking. did you have that before you started benzos? you might have turned to drugs because of problems that are of course still gonna be there once you're off. life's hard--especially if you have psychological problems. drugs can make it harder, but coming off doesn't make the original any easier.
 
villian said:
It is extremely common for benzo withdrawal to become protracted and last this long. It's not something you can think your way out of. "Manning up" isn't really an option.
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Exactly. The symptoms clear up for a while, then flare for no reason, then clear up, ad nauseum.

As far as running et al., I do all that. I already wake up at 8 or 9 every morning regardless of when I fall asleep. It doesn't make a difference when I wake up; regardless of how exhausted I feel by day, I become physically "revved-up" by 9 or 10, unless I have been blessed with one of those days when sleep intrudes inexorably regardless of my actions.

I don't have a condition. The psychological problems I have now are entirely drug-induced. I started using benzos to cope with pot-smoking episodes that resembled schizophrenia following my use of pot and LSD simultaneously. I was depressed prior to starting my drug abuse at 16, but I would kill to return to a state of depression rather than the schizophrenia-OCD-physical discomfort amalgam which has characterized my benzo withdrawal.

The day that I accept this wretched shadow to be "who I am from here on out" is the day I resign myself either to the symbolic death of psychiatric medication or, should I muster the resolve, the literal alternative. I'm willing to tolerate the gradual decline of aging, but I refuse to acclimate to this meteoric descent from youthful vitality into half-demented psychosis, obsession, and sheer exhaustion. I'd rather die!

For all this bluster, the truth is that like any organism I cannot resist the imperative to go on living and to carve out the best life I can for myself under even the most frustrating and compromised circumstances.

I can't say I've grown personally as a result of this process, except inasmuch as I've learned to cope with distress which I should never have experienced in the first place!

Even now the feeling nags me that I will be punished for taking the time to make such a self-centered thread and to make posts so insular and narcissistic. Life seems to have an order all its own and it is that more than anything which makes me want to die.
 
well congrats on 8 months clean. you are ever changing. up to that literal point of death. focus on what you will.
 
It is possible you may have developed a "condition" through your drug use.
I know all about those kind of episodes induced by pot and the benzo road that I went along as well to help me deal with it. I took klonopin for a few years, and did a little taper and quit. Been off for about two years, still have a lot of anxiety and all that shit but wouldn't be surprised if the pot isn't partly to blame. It only takes so long for benzos to get out of your system and I think its not really withdrawals but actually the after math of what benzos do to your brain chemistry thats the hardest to deal with. For me though at home I'm mostly alright except for a few obsessive intrusive episodes occasionaly but when I leave dealing with the anxiety I face is almost unbearable but that's life :\.

Do you see a therapist or anything of that nature, perhaps think about trying something like lyrica which can be helpful with anxiety a little bit.
 
phoenixrain88--there's a lot more to recovery than to simply stop using drugs. You have to modify your behavior and
recover emotionally. What kind of program are you working? Do you go to NA/AA? There are a lot of NA/AA haters on
Bluelight for reasons I don't understand but I would encourage you to give it a try. Plus it would take some of the pressure
off of your boyfriend that you described in another post.
 
Lyrica did not help me. I just cried a lot and got bloated. Which is the effect of most psychiatric medication I've tried.

I'm looking back up! Even if I keep feeling like this the rest of my life it's better than being oblivious and benzo'd out! At least now I'm perceptive enough to be considerate of other people (my sense of the people around me evaporated while I was getting frequently high) and to do quality work that I care about as a freelance writer.-

Thanks to everyone who's posted a response. If I'm still faltering a month from now when school starts up, I'll consider antidepressants or clonidine, but until then I'll just endure and do my daily work as well as I can.
 
Lyrica builds tolerence way too fast and is expensive.

I've scripts for both neurontin and lyica, lately I've been prefferring the neurontin. It works better for my mood and my neuralgia/arthritis. I only take the lyrica by insufflation every now and then to catch a buzz, but I wouldn't recommend this by any means. YMMV.

Look into NMDA antagonists like memantine and as I've mentioned earlier, if you haven't done a proper taper with diazepam you're most likely experiencing protracted withdrawal. This happens with SNRI/SSRI's as well. To me the AD withdrawal was worse, but to each his own.

If that is the case I'd advise getting a script for 5 mg valium and do a SLOW taper every two weeks have the dose until you're literally taking .25 mg using liquid measurement. Propylene Glycol is a good solvent for benzos, this is of course for measuring small doses. Shouldn't take more than 3 months, then the last two weeks take the .25 every other day and supplement with theanine, excersize, neurontin, memantine, whatever works. You've many options at your disposal.
 
After being off benzos for eight months, do you think a taper would really help at this point? I'm curious, but I really don't think it would aid much.
 
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