How long did your anhedonia last after meth? How did you beat it?

[Stimfreak2234]

I have been clean from meth a little over a year now, but my brain doesn’t feel how it did pre meth. I occasionally smoke weed but that’s it. What sort of timeline am I looking at if anyone can give me that sort of thing?

 

[brokedownpalace10]

Forever.

No one can tell you how long it will last since no one knows how much or how long you did meth (for starters).
Large doses, especially injected, can burn out those receptors as much as prolonged use.

I'll just speak to me. The actual stronger anhedonia, which was unpleasant, lasted a few months to a year.
However, after that I did feel like things were different (like you say).
I lost my temper (still do) more easily and just kinda wanted "something". But, how can you really tell if things are different? Or, more importantly, how different?
Such things are not binary. You don't wake up one day and they are gone, they slowly taper.

Just adapt and life will go on. In my case, I worked on my temper, waiting to act on anything until I settle down (usually )
I also found myself finding pleasure in learning new stuff and being mentally sharp. I was a machinist and spent years learning programming and how to write macros.
I always wondered if I learned to find pleasure in acetylcholine instead of dopamine.

Anyway, is the anhedonia gone? Hell, I don't know. If not, I'm good with the new normal. Work on that. You'll find pleasure in life again, I know that.

 

[Nas47]

A night smoking meth-on other day still hold me...then close to week.....not anhedonia,but even dysthymia......heavy depression till felt like human again.It is not worth to use even once in a couple of months.You must abstain from meth another year.....and it will be great difference...Congrats for your one year free of meth

 

[plumbus-nine]

I hate to say it but doing exercise is your best bet
I knew a girl who was in rehab with me, she's been doing meth for most of her life, started as a teen and finally quit with 30 or so. She had one or two small relapses and was anhedonic for half a year or so but it didn't seem too bad, and she's been doing excessive sports, some martial arts stuff every day.

I've got a foretaste to meth anhedonia when I did some low doses for a few weeks and then stopped, with other stims this wouldn't have brought me more than one to three days of tiredness but with meth I felt depressed and hopeless. I guess it has to do with the long legs meth has, interfering with recovery during sleep. So I can only extrapolate what it must be feel like to crash after months of years of high dose meth. Indeed congrats for one year off!

There are potential pharmaceutical ⚕ treatments for post acute withdrawal, one being supplements like n-acetylcysteine and the other being NMDAr antagonists / dissociatives like memantine or ketamine, the latter is an accepted treatment for resistant depression nowadays but some docs might be reluctant to prescribe it if a history of drug use is known unfortunately. Memantine is pretty unknown on the medical community, it's first line use is against Alzheimers where, funnily enough, it doesn't work too well. But it does a good job against post acute depression from various substances by activating the dopaminergic system and counting tolerance. The probably easiest to get is aripiprazole, I don't like this one because it's an antipsychotic but in opposition to most not a full dopamine antagonist but instead a partial agonist which has been found to be useful in meth withdrawal. Kind of the dopamine's subutex.