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Benzos Benzo tolerance?

bighooter

bighooter

Bluelighter
Joined
Mar 31, 2008
Messages
1,660
I have been taking diazepam a few times a week for a few months and have not developed a habit as of yet, I will take between 15mg to 30 mg a day on the days I do take it.

Now my question is lately whenever I take it I need 15mg to feel chilled out where as before when I first started taking it 5mg would chill me out.
So im thinking of stopping it until my tolerance goes down to how it used to be.

My question is how long does it take for your tolerance to go back to normal? (to how it originally was)
 
So does even using benzos recreationally for a long time in effect actually increase anxiety in the long term by screwing with your brain?
 
It will take a long time to go back down, maybe years. I know my tolerance to Xanax is through the roof from using it with opiates for the last four months or so. 3mg used to get me fairly loopy, to the point of not remembering the night I used them. Now, 3mg is barely enough to put me to sleep.

Also, benzo's have some very horrible withdrawals and if you're tolerant going cold turkey can kill you. I don't think your at that point yet, but its something to keep in mind.

Your tolerance will continue to go up with use! Perhaps you might consider switching to another benzo if you really need them for legit medical reasons. Right now it sounds like you're chasing the high though so probably a good time to taper down and see if you can stay off of them for awhile. Stay away for at least a few months and try again. Just keep in mind that tolerance will build quickly when you pick them back up, so if you're using these just to "chill" on the weekends try to restrict it to at least once-twice a week. I'd actually suggest once a month, but I know that's hard to do.

Respect the benzos, in the words of Rick James "They're a hell of a drug".

bighooter said:
So does even using benzos recreationally for a long time in effect actually increase anxiety in the long term by screwing with your brain?
Click to expand...

When you quit there will be rebound anxiety but it will get better with time. I suggest a taper to avoid the worse of it, but when you jump off, there will be a price to pay. I promise, it does get better with time! It might take awhile to feel normal but if you can manage to get through each day you'll eventually feel better.
 
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Benzo's have a lot of good qualities, and a lot of negative ones. If you suffer from extreme anxiety, panic disorder, or just plain cannot sleep and have tried other method/medications I would highly recommend benzo's short term. I would say the safest (even that is debatable) are clonazepam and ativan. Clonazepam is a long acting benzo so you would be good for about 6-8 hours per one dose. It is basically the same as Xanax just the Xanax hits you immediately where the Klonopin is drawn out. I would comapare the two in terms of Klonopin (Extended Release) and Xanax (Immediate Release). Anyway if you qualify with the symptoms I mentioned then you should probably get a script for SHORT-TERM treatment with benzos from your phsychiatrist. Now the negative qualities. Habit forming, loss of memory, holes in your brain (or so I have heard), stay in system a LONG time so they will fuck up a piss test, and typically have a bad stigma associated with them. Here is your best bet - if you cant get through a day without pulling your hair out, going to the ER thnking your having heart attacks when its actually panic, and your not sleeping worth a shit, then benzos are your friend. Otherwise stay the fuck away, promise.
 
bighooter said:
I have been taking diazepam a few times a week for a few months and have not developed a habit as of yet, I will take between 15mg to 30 mg a day on the days I do take it.

Now my question is lately whenever I take it I need 15mg to feel chilled out where as before when I first started taking it 5mg would chill me out.
So im thinking of stopping it until my tolerance goes down to how it used to be.

My question is how long does it take for your tolerance to go back to normal? (to how it originally was)
Click to expand...
The symptoms of diazepam withdrawal are not felt until upto 3 weeks after coming off.
This is because of the incredibly long half life of diazepam, it stays in your body for three weeks.
When I first came of diazepam it took 17 days for the symptoms to come.

Like you, I wasn't taking them everyday, but I got addicted as I didn't know about the 3 week delay. As I didn't think I was addicted, I came off them.
I was taking on average 5-10mg a day.
Long and short of it, I went back on them, updosed a few times, and tapered from 15mg to 3.48mg where I am now.

I am lucky, I don't have the physical symptoms as bad as some others, but I have anxiety and depression so bad, that I keep going to pieces and breaking down crying.
I feel pissed off and resentful of everything all of the time, and I have no interest in anything.
It's been like this since that 17th day of valium way back in 2009.
That's how long it took me to taper to where I am now.

So, careful about stopping suddenly, you might well find that in 2-3 weeks, valium will kick your arse. Headphonesandlsd is right, benzo withdrawals can kill.

Needing more is a sign of tolerance, this is the benzo way, your body craves more and more to achieve a relaxed state, and becomes totally reliant on the benzo to relax. This is why the withdrawals are so bad.
So i'm thinking of stopping it until my tolerance goes down to how it used to be.

So does even using benzos recreationally for a long time in effect actually increase anxiety in the long term by screwing with your brain?
Click to expand...
Yes, because the GABA system which is responsible for our bodies relaxation stops working.

I wouldn't switch to another benzo, because from now on your body needs a stable steady amount of valium in it. This is why I had to start using it daily, because varying my dose was 'confusing' the GABA system, which would switch on and off, making healing that much more difficult.

Taking another benzo is a mistake also, as each taper off them can get more and more uncomfortable.
 
1 mg used to get me where I wanted to be. Now it takes me at least 7 mg to at least feel somewhat sedated after about a year of use. I took a break from em for a solid year, took a bar, and it didn't do nearly what I was expecting. I figure it's never gonna go back down unfortunately. I love benzos but they're very unforgiving
 
The fact that you need more to reach the same effects then when you first started just goes to show you that your body is becoming used to the valium.
My advice is dont mess with any benzo to begin with. Just stop well your ahead. Im in the midst of a taper and this is by far the worst thing drug related thats happened to me in my life.

Heroin WD=nasty but not life threatening
Benzo WD= grand mal siezures, cardiac arrest etc.
 
How sad :( I used to love alprazolam....I actually just got out of detox for it...I was fed 50mg of librium all week...then the last day 25mg....I never even felt it...once....not for a second
 
Sorry to be nosey, please could you expand on your experience.

I ask because I have taken over two years to taper from 15mg valium to 3.48mg.
Even though I am doing it very slow, I am having a really bad time with anxiety and depression so bad, that I have to keep fighting off use of opiates.
Today's not so bad, thankfully, but it's the first okayish day I have had in months and months.
 
As per MrNaptown - Agreed. Fuck the benzo's. Was on 10mg Valium and 20mg Temazepam myself for over 2 years until I weened myself off at the end of last year over a month. Went down to 5mg Valium and 10mg Temazepam after 2 weeks, then stopped completely 2 weeks after that. I was quite lucky in the respect that I never took more than my prescribed amount, so even though I was tolerant I didn't find it difficult to get off..?! Which is strange in itself, as a LOT of people here say benzo w/d's are worse than opiate w/d's, but I managed to stop them no problem while getting completely off the opiates is something I am still trying to do... and finding exasperately difficult :(
 
3dmusic said:
I don't think benzo tolerance ever goes down.
Nasty drugs.
Click to expand...

I can promise you that it does go down. Won't ever go back to how it was before you took that first benzo, but it definately does go down atleast a bit. Also I wouldn't rely on any "it takes xxx days to feel the w/d" advice because especially if you are taking varying amounts irregularly, it is possible for you to be withdrawing even when still using them (irregularly). This is extremely important and it's probably what got me really physically dependant on benzos in the first place. I would have anxiety and get prescribed clonazepam 0,5mg 1-3 times a day when needed. So in the beginning I would take it a few times a day. Eventually, I would feel like the anxiety had gone away so I would take only one, or maybe even none. At this point I was already mildly addicted/dependant but did not realize it. Thus, lowering my intake resulted in withdrawal symptoms in the form of rebound anxiety, which I would mistake for the worsening of my "anxiety disorder". So I upped my dose until the "disorder" was in control again. Then at some point I probably had so little anxiety that I didn't take my meds at all for a day or two and the withdrawals began, worse than ever. It was scary as I didn't know what was causing it, I did not understand that it was the benzos (or the lack of them at that point). Then I'd take even more of them just as a desperate attempt to knock out myself and get some sleep after staying up a few nights.

Point is, you can have withdrawal symptoms if you take a drug often enough but irregularly and in different amounts, it is not necessary to completely stop taking the drug. Just like a heroin addict needs a fix of certain size for his w/d to go away, if he's used to big IV hits simply sucking on some used filters that have some heroin residue will get him sick pretty fast.

Diazepam has a long half-life that's true. But it's called half-life for a reason (approx. amount of time it takes for the body to rid half of the substance, a percentage not a fixed amount). We experience withdrawal symptoms because there's a sudden drop of drugs in our blood levels. Generally speaking taking more drugs means more drugs are metabolized in the same amount of time (atleast to a certain extent), diazepam withdrawal can definately start sooner than 17 days after cessation of drug.

EDIT: if this 2-3 weeks before withdrawals claim held any truth, wouldn't benzo addicts be able to safely take one week breaks from their meds potentially every month? Personally I wouldn't recommend anyone taking large amounts of benzos to skip their daily dose for even 3 days...
 
I have a question for you guys that have experience with benzos, normally I'd post another thread for this but I think it can help the OP and some other posters in here as well.

As I said before, I have a bad tolerance to xanax to the point that it isn't even effective for me at sane dosages anymore. However, about 4 days back I took 5mg of Valium because I just simply needed some sleep. No only did it allow me to sleep for 12 hours (in acute opiate W/D at that!) it provided relief for the next day or so as well. Those two nights of sleep were the best I got in over two weeks.

So my question is, is there no/minimal cross tolerance between xanax and Valium? I was expecting 5mg to do nothing because of my tolerance, but it was just what I needed. I didn't get high, I just relaxed enough to go to sleep.

I don't plan on playing with this fire much, but its nice to have a safety net. I'll be spacing 5mgs of Valium out by at least a week, and only as needed, to avoid gaining a larger tolerance to it.

Would it be possible for some of these guys to switch from a longer acting benzo to a shorting acting one that are near the end of their tapers? Or would that be a bad idea?
 
I used to take anywhere from 8-12mg alprazolam once every 2 weeks for about a year and never really felt any withdrawal. I guess I'm lucky.
 
I have been scripted alprazolam .5mg and get 30 a month for sleep problems. This spring will be 2 years I've had the script and my tolerance has only gone up a little and that was because of a few week binge of temazepam and alpraz. I can still feel the effects of .5 if I have an empty stomach but that's only the first few times I take it form a new script. I can never seem to make the bottle last more than 2 weeks and that's being conservative.

I know its been said but if you can help it don't take them every day and you'll be fine. Now I will only take benzo's 3-4x per week. I've stuck by this for the past few months. I only get 15mgs of xanax a month so its not really a lot. At one point I was getting 30mgx30 temazepam's and 15mg of xanax but I told my doc to drop the temaz cause I didn't want to become dependent. I might switch back, temaz is more sedating for me.
 
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