Psychonauticunt
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Jun 1, 2010
- Messages
- 1,493
Background: I am in my late thrirties, and began using illicut drugs at age 13. By the time I turned 18 had several experiences with cannabis, cocaine, yaba / crystal meth, codeine, tramadol, benzos, excstasy and magic mushrooms as well as some stuff like lean, salvia divinorum, diphenhydramine and dextromethorpan. I had a shielded childhood, with wonderful and supportive parents, an elite, expenive private school where most people were insulated from serious drug problems by socioeconomic resilience factors (though not immune, obviously).
Since my twenties I embarked on a conscious path of becominga psychonaut and though the recreational and novelty-seeking behavior persisted for surprisingly long - as did my progression my studies, social life and other milestones for the model citizen - I became more and more accustomed to the fact that there was nary a situation in which I could optimize my performance levels using some kind of pharmacological finetuning.
Over time, I began to notice at first worrying signs of dependency to particular substances: amphetamine for studying, cannabis for relaxation whenever, benzos for anxiety, sleep and alleviating the negative effects of stimulants, and the inability to party or switch my mind into break mode without at least taking a tiny toke. I soon began to notice that substituting one for another was a band-aid at best and perpetuated my poly-drug addiction and propensity to altereds states in general. My sober state was not unbearable, it was simply boring, uninspiring and unmotivating, lacking in colour, euphoria and elation, and the constant nagging feeling that this activity, almost any activity - be it studying for a midterm, sitting through a boring lecture, meeting new people, going to a concert, having sex, doing housework, trying to get a good night's sleep - could be enhanced by a particular chemically induced state. Given the appropriate drugs, I felt that from a baseline sober reading from 1-10, I could usually improve my output in that specific endeavor by 1-2 points. It was just a matter of knowing how to finetune and coordinate them.
Preditably, this eventually ended in disaster. I'm gonna go through some of what were my key findings, and key pointers - in general, and substance-specific, for what helped me. I am an atypical addict in many cases and your milegae may vary.
About quitting in general:
1. if you hit rock bottom and your own personal motivation for change, fear of consequences of pressure from the environment can be powerful enough. If you don't, and seek detox and rehab treatment, give it an open mind. Stick with it - many people spend the first one or two weeks essentially play-acting just to get their spouse, their employer and the authorities off their back. But this "fake it til you make it" strategy can be very fruitful, once you notice it's not so bad, and are empowered by the realization that you can, in fact, pull it off.
2. Peer support is crucial. For many people, treatment brings many epiphanies about how finally, someone articulated a feeling or dilemma better than you could have said it yourself - and you thought you were alone.
3. Do not hide your impulsest to give up or relapse. Doing this makes it massively likely you will relapse, and your peers will not have seen the warning signs.
4. Addictions are usually coping or defense mechanisms for pshycologically unbearable feelings. Trauma, shame, low self-esteem or self-loathing, maintaining agency over who and when gets to hurt me, for xample. They also typically take up a large propoprtion of the psychological release from stressful mental states, they fill huge amounts of an addict's like temporarilly, in terms of their resource and time allocation, they occupy large portions of the addict's social life. Such is their comprehensive effect which permates the human experience, that the simple removal of harfmful substance use is not going to fill that hole, or satisfy that psychological need or tendency; instead, they are going to be left without a respite, escape, calming ritual, casual social seting for just getting one's mind off or discussing serious matters with drinking buddies. They will need to reimagine their life and resdiscover who they are without substances. This may be daunting, but aslo rewarding: "Hey, I can enjoy clubs and dancing sober and I no longer have hangovers!" "Hey, it turns out I like tabletop miniature wargames!" "Hey, I reignited my long lost love of sports or music!" "Hey, I found Jesus and a community where I can do charitable work!"
To stay sober while the only change you have made is evacuate the domains of your life tied to substance abuse if extremely difficult, and easily a constant state of struggle and conscious caution as to what is safe and what isn't, and questioning the safety implications of many, many decisions. Also, having to replace large amounts of one's social life and social circle can be daunting. True friends will understand and support, and with enough time, you may grow comfortable enough that the can drink in your company without it being a big deal for you.
5. Play it safe. Recovery happens outside the comfort zone and you need to challenge yourself and expose yourself to situations where you must now choose between the old and the new.
However, don't go to Otkoberfest with your old drinking buddies or a warehouse rave if that was your thing when your sobriety, were it a baby, would still only tow to poop and cry.
Specifics:
Some drugs are better suited to cold turkey, others tapering. It is also subjectively psychologically. These are not flexible across drugs or people but depend on many factors. Nevertheless, listen to expert orders. Some drugs are outright dangerous to stop cold turkey, and other drugs are particularly problematic in that regard, so some kind of tapering is often in order. Typically, the reasons to stop cold turkey are, in order:
1) Potentially life-threatening acute withdrawal syndrome. Alcohol, benzodiazepines, and GBL/GHB at high doses and prolonged periods are examples of this.
2) Severe, often long-lasting withdrawal syndrome which includes plenty of physical symptoms if, untreated, could cause such a weakening of the body's systems that the end result could be fatality. At the very least, they are so distressing that they prevent participation in ordinary life (education, employment, social) and are often so acutely distressing that individuals must go through intense drug cravings throughout their waking hours. Examples are methadone, buprenorphine, benzodiazepines. Their long elimination half-lives mean that even after the acute 1-2 weeks of the worst symptoms are gone, issues such as difficulty sleeping, prolonged anhedonia, and still noticeable residual cognitive impairment and unpleasant bodily sensations may persist for weeks (PAWS).
3) Severe withdrawal syndrome which cause serious physical symptoms , untreated, could cause such a weakening of the body's systems that the end result could be fatality. At the very least, they are so distressing that they prevent participation in ordinary life (education, employment, social) and are often so acutely distressing that individuals must go through intense drug cravings throughout their waking hours. Examples are heroin, morphine, oxycodone, hydromorphone, weaker opioids, pregabalin.
Tramadol is particulary nasty in this regard since it has activity at the mu-opioid receptor as a full agonist, and it also has SNRI effects, leading to a double whammy of opioid and antidepressant withdrawal.
4) Withdrawals from stimulant drugs like amphetamine or cocaine are mainly psychological, although they can be very intense, including low mood, irritability, anxiety or paranoia, depression, and above all, a strong craving for the drug which the user is convinced would immediately set things back to normal. They may also include anhendonia, a lack of motivation or interest in even previously motivating endeavors, and persistent fatigue and increased appetite.
5) Withdrawals from heavy periods of cannabis use are not severe compared to most drugs, but they may also present with boredom, anhedonia, reduced appetite as food tastes bland, recuced appreciation of humour and music, et cetera. They may also involve very vivid, internally coherent and realistic, and highly memorable dreams. Some people enjoy this, others preferred the dream suppression of regular cannabis use.
The worst withdrawal symptoms in my life have been, in this order: 1. Lorazepam; 2. Heroin; and 3. Methadone.
Heroin was pure torture - like the worst flu and fever you ever had, compounded by nausea and diarrhea. Hot and cold sweats, pain all over your body, massive dysphoria and the craving to score just one more hit. If you were in any situation where you could be intimate with a partner, she needed barely breathe onto your member and you'd spew you load. Good thing was its short duration, wait until it gets bad, hand in there, and on the second day of it being really bad, take a Seroquel, Zyprexa, or similar powerful long-acting sedative. It will skip 12-18h of the absolute worst peak while you were unconscious.
Methadone was like heroin, less intense, but its duration meant you had to spend weeks saying NO to the drug many times a day. With dope, you only do it ten or twenty times in total, and once you wake from your first neuroleptic stuper, you can already cound that there's not long to go left.
Lorazepam was the most intense during its peak, it also had the longest duration, and it had the most comprehensive and distressing set of symptoms. The withdrawals were intense - like, heroin intense at worst, very multifaceted, and seemingy without end or reliefin sight. You didn't have these little moments where you noticed feeling clearly better than previous few days ago, making it feel like you were over the biggest hill. They were a mirror image of the therapetic effect. Instead of treating anxiety and panic, they generated it consistently. The anticonvulsant withdrawals had me kicking and flailing uncontrollably which both shook me awake periodically and cause me to spill and break various pieses of glassware and cutlery. My muscles were constantly aching and only found brief respite through hod/cold, massage, stretching, and other such activities. And obviously, I had massive problems with restlessness. All of this culminated and combined to sabotage trying to sleep, which was an absolutely nightmare.
Management:
- Focus on alleviating symptoms, maintaining what scraps of enjoyment and quality life you have, and forget about getting shit done.
- Eliminate additional stress factors insofar as possible.
- Use approved medications moderately to alleviate symptoms, but be careful not to trade an addiction for another, like drinking alcohol for benzo withdrawal (weaning off opioids with another strong opioid, unless it's maintenance therapy - there are good reasons to switch opioids for the less abusable ones like buprenorphine and methadone).
- Clonidine is typically prescribed for kicking opioids, as is lofexidine. Small amounts of benzos may be indicated. Gabapentin and pregabalin are effective for opioid withdrawals. Also, anything to help you relax in the short term is probably advantageous, such as hydroxyzine or quetiapine at low doses. Loperamide will help with the shits.
- Muscle relaxants like orphenadrine and tizanidine may be useful for the worst nights. Cannabis, if you enjoy it and don't get paranoid or psychotic-esque effects from it, may also be useful in alleviating psychological discomfort, help with the pain slightly, increase appetite, and reducing nausea, give you something to distract yourself: Netflix marathons or video gaming binges are often enhanced by being stoned.
- Following from that, a huge part of both acute discomfort and the anguish of recovery is psychological. Distract yourself, and you will ignore it for parts of the day. Spend all day concertating and moaning about how shit you feel, and you will amplify those feelings and also spread the negativity around you.
Since my twenties I embarked on a conscious path of becominga psychonaut and though the recreational and novelty-seeking behavior persisted for surprisingly long - as did my progression my studies, social life and other milestones for the model citizen - I became more and more accustomed to the fact that there was nary a situation in which I could optimize my performance levels using some kind of pharmacological finetuning.
Over time, I began to notice at first worrying signs of dependency to particular substances: amphetamine for studying, cannabis for relaxation whenever, benzos for anxiety, sleep and alleviating the negative effects of stimulants, and the inability to party or switch my mind into break mode without at least taking a tiny toke. I soon began to notice that substituting one for another was a band-aid at best and perpetuated my poly-drug addiction and propensity to altereds states in general. My sober state was not unbearable, it was simply boring, uninspiring and unmotivating, lacking in colour, euphoria and elation, and the constant nagging feeling that this activity, almost any activity - be it studying for a midterm, sitting through a boring lecture, meeting new people, going to a concert, having sex, doing housework, trying to get a good night's sleep - could be enhanced by a particular chemically induced state. Given the appropriate drugs, I felt that from a baseline sober reading from 1-10, I could usually improve my output in that specific endeavor by 1-2 points. It was just a matter of knowing how to finetune and coordinate them.
Preditably, this eventually ended in disaster. I'm gonna go through some of what were my key findings, and key pointers - in general, and substance-specific, for what helped me. I am an atypical addict in many cases and your milegae may vary.
About quitting in general:
1. if you hit rock bottom and your own personal motivation for change, fear of consequences of pressure from the environment can be powerful enough. If you don't, and seek detox and rehab treatment, give it an open mind. Stick with it - many people spend the first one or two weeks essentially play-acting just to get their spouse, their employer and the authorities off their back. But this "fake it til you make it" strategy can be very fruitful, once you notice it's not so bad, and are empowered by the realization that you can, in fact, pull it off.
2. Peer support is crucial. For many people, treatment brings many epiphanies about how finally, someone articulated a feeling or dilemma better than you could have said it yourself - and you thought you were alone.
3. Do not hide your impulsest to give up or relapse. Doing this makes it massively likely you will relapse, and your peers will not have seen the warning signs.
4. Addictions are usually coping or defense mechanisms for pshycologically unbearable feelings. Trauma, shame, low self-esteem or self-loathing, maintaining agency over who and when gets to hurt me, for xample. They also typically take up a large propoprtion of the psychological release from stressful mental states, they fill huge amounts of an addict's like temporarilly, in terms of their resource and time allocation, they occupy large portions of the addict's social life. Such is their comprehensive effect which permates the human experience, that the simple removal of harfmful substance use is not going to fill that hole, or satisfy that psychological need or tendency; instead, they are going to be left without a respite, escape, calming ritual, casual social seting for just getting one's mind off or discussing serious matters with drinking buddies. They will need to reimagine their life and resdiscover who they are without substances. This may be daunting, but aslo rewarding: "Hey, I can enjoy clubs and dancing sober and I no longer have hangovers!" "Hey, it turns out I like tabletop miniature wargames!" "Hey, I reignited my long lost love of sports or music!" "Hey, I found Jesus and a community where I can do charitable work!"
To stay sober while the only change you have made is evacuate the domains of your life tied to substance abuse if extremely difficult, and easily a constant state of struggle and conscious caution as to what is safe and what isn't, and questioning the safety implications of many, many decisions. Also, having to replace large amounts of one's social life and social circle can be daunting. True friends will understand and support, and with enough time, you may grow comfortable enough that the can drink in your company without it being a big deal for you.
5. Play it safe. Recovery happens outside the comfort zone and you need to challenge yourself and expose yourself to situations where you must now choose between the old and the new.
However, don't go to Otkoberfest with your old drinking buddies or a warehouse rave if that was your thing when your sobriety, were it a baby, would still only tow to poop and cry.
Specifics:
Some drugs are better suited to cold turkey, others tapering. It is also subjectively psychologically. These are not flexible across drugs or people but depend on many factors. Nevertheless, listen to expert orders. Some drugs are outright dangerous to stop cold turkey, and other drugs are particularly problematic in that regard, so some kind of tapering is often in order. Typically, the reasons to stop cold turkey are, in order:
1) Potentially life-threatening acute withdrawal syndrome. Alcohol, benzodiazepines, and GBL/GHB at high doses and prolonged periods are examples of this.
2) Severe, often long-lasting withdrawal syndrome which includes plenty of physical symptoms if, untreated, could cause such a weakening of the body's systems that the end result could be fatality. At the very least, they are so distressing that they prevent participation in ordinary life (education, employment, social) and are often so acutely distressing that individuals must go through intense drug cravings throughout their waking hours. Examples are methadone, buprenorphine, benzodiazepines. Their long elimination half-lives mean that even after the acute 1-2 weeks of the worst symptoms are gone, issues such as difficulty sleeping, prolonged anhedonia, and still noticeable residual cognitive impairment and unpleasant bodily sensations may persist for weeks (PAWS).
3) Severe withdrawal syndrome which cause serious physical symptoms , untreated, could cause such a weakening of the body's systems that the end result could be fatality. At the very least, they are so distressing that they prevent participation in ordinary life (education, employment, social) and are often so acutely distressing that individuals must go through intense drug cravings throughout their waking hours. Examples are heroin, morphine, oxycodone, hydromorphone, weaker opioids, pregabalin.
Tramadol is particulary nasty in this regard since it has activity at the mu-opioid receptor as a full agonist, and it also has SNRI effects, leading to a double whammy of opioid and antidepressant withdrawal.
4) Withdrawals from stimulant drugs like amphetamine or cocaine are mainly psychological, although they can be very intense, including low mood, irritability, anxiety or paranoia, depression, and above all, a strong craving for the drug which the user is convinced would immediately set things back to normal. They may also include anhendonia, a lack of motivation or interest in even previously motivating endeavors, and persistent fatigue and increased appetite.
5) Withdrawals from heavy periods of cannabis use are not severe compared to most drugs, but they may also present with boredom, anhedonia, reduced appetite as food tastes bland, recuced appreciation of humour and music, et cetera. They may also involve very vivid, internally coherent and realistic, and highly memorable dreams. Some people enjoy this, others preferred the dream suppression of regular cannabis use.
The worst withdrawal symptoms in my life have been, in this order: 1. Lorazepam; 2. Heroin; and 3. Methadone.
Heroin was pure torture - like the worst flu and fever you ever had, compounded by nausea and diarrhea. Hot and cold sweats, pain all over your body, massive dysphoria and the craving to score just one more hit. If you were in any situation where you could be intimate with a partner, she needed barely breathe onto your member and you'd spew you load. Good thing was its short duration, wait until it gets bad, hand in there, and on the second day of it being really bad, take a Seroquel, Zyprexa, or similar powerful long-acting sedative. It will skip 12-18h of the absolute worst peak while you were unconscious.
Methadone was like heroin, less intense, but its duration meant you had to spend weeks saying NO to the drug many times a day. With dope, you only do it ten or twenty times in total, and once you wake from your first neuroleptic stuper, you can already cound that there's not long to go left.
Lorazepam was the most intense during its peak, it also had the longest duration, and it had the most comprehensive and distressing set of symptoms. The withdrawals were intense - like, heroin intense at worst, very multifaceted, and seemingy without end or reliefin sight. You didn't have these little moments where you noticed feeling clearly better than previous few days ago, making it feel like you were over the biggest hill. They were a mirror image of the therapetic effect. Instead of treating anxiety and panic, they generated it consistently. The anticonvulsant withdrawals had me kicking and flailing uncontrollably which both shook me awake periodically and cause me to spill and break various pieses of glassware and cutlery. My muscles were constantly aching and only found brief respite through hod/cold, massage, stretching, and other such activities. And obviously, I had massive problems with restlessness. All of this culminated and combined to sabotage trying to sleep, which was an absolutely nightmare.
Management:
- Focus on alleviating symptoms, maintaining what scraps of enjoyment and quality life you have, and forget about getting shit done.
- Eliminate additional stress factors insofar as possible.
- Use approved medications moderately to alleviate symptoms, but be careful not to trade an addiction for another, like drinking alcohol for benzo withdrawal (weaning off opioids with another strong opioid, unless it's maintenance therapy - there are good reasons to switch opioids for the less abusable ones like buprenorphine and methadone).
- Clonidine is typically prescribed for kicking opioids, as is lofexidine. Small amounts of benzos may be indicated. Gabapentin and pregabalin are effective for opioid withdrawals. Also, anything to help you relax in the short term is probably advantageous, such as hydroxyzine or quetiapine at low doses. Loperamide will help with the shits.
- Muscle relaxants like orphenadrine and tizanidine may be useful for the worst nights. Cannabis, if you enjoy it and don't get paranoid or psychotic-esque effects from it, may also be useful in alleviating psychological discomfort, help with the pain slightly, increase appetite, and reducing nausea, give you something to distract yourself: Netflix marathons or video gaming binges are often enhanced by being stoned.
- Following from that, a huge part of both acute discomfort and the anguish of recovery is psychological. Distract yourself, and you will ignore it for parts of the day. Spend all day concertating and moaning about how shit you feel, and you will amplify those feelings and also spread the negativity around you.
