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  • BDD Moderators: Keif’ Richards

RC's - Anything to do to ease off the brain zaps?

C

cuberun

Greenlighter
Joined
Nov 26, 2008
Messages
35
Took MDAI 2 days ago.. brain zaps just started now. I'm not on any medication.

I get them just by moving my eyeballs/blinking. anything that can help?
cant sleep well cause they cause my dreams to be all effed up.. in the dreams people are hittin me on the head with baseball bats etc..
 
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wtf i don't understand how this drug is giving you brain zaps. did you use it all the time for weeks or what? and sorry but that shit "in the dreams people are hittin me on the head with basebal bats", is fucking halarious.

i'd do what outtta pocket said. benzos could be your friend here. if it doesn't work just go get some opiates. at least then they won't bother you as much.
 
can someone tell me exactly what are brainzaps? i have access to a similar drug but im nervous to do RC's due to lack of information on long term side effects. from what you say it sounds like i should stay away
 
They happen when you're just about to fall asleep, suddenly you hear a loud AAAAAAA like a truck is about to run you over, and you are 'zapped' wide awake. I had these regularly for over a year since I first got HPPD, and for me taking either L-Tryptohpan/5-HTP or benzos before sleeping made them go away. It's been a long time since I had any now.
 
Gabapentin and possibly baclofen could help, at least according to what they use to treat pathologic nystagmus. Other than that just give it time.
 
Oh ROXIanne! said:
can someone tell me exactly what are brainzaps? i have access to a similar drug but im nervous to do RC's due to lack of information on long term side effects. from what you say it sounds like i should stay away
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The type of explanation I was given by the psychiatrist that was treating me when I had to come off an anti-depressants in a hurry and ran into the same issue was that it was the brain "re-wiring" itself but Im not quite sure that is correct because everything during daily life will "re-wire" your brain due to its plasticity and from what I can gather it only really occurs in certain types of anti-depressants as well, so what it really could be is still not settled in my eyes.

But like I said above... I can really sympathize with the OP on this issue because you can't know how annoying and sometimes painful it can be unless its something you have experienced for yourself. I had them for a good 3 or 4 months prior to instantly being pulled off a 300mg/day regiment of wellbutrin because of an incident of seizure activity that landed me in the ICU for a night.
 
'Brain-zaps' are a notorious characteristic of many drugs that manipulate serotonin levels. Pharmacologically speaking, we don't know exactly how they occur, and that's probably why your Doc told you the 're-wiring' bit.

When I experienced these in the past, I just discontinued whatever drug(s) I suspected was causing the problem. In a week or two the symptoms were gone. In my case it was caused by a SSRI and SNRI interaction. Fuck anti-depressants. Seriously.
 
I experienced this once and never knew what it was! The day after my first time trying ecstasy I was laying in bed, falling asleep, and all of a sudden I heard this crazy noise and some sort of indecipherable language, which catapulted me back awake. Fortunately it hasn't been a reoccurring issue of mine, I hope you can achieve the same thing.
 
IVXLCDM said:
Fuck anti-depressants. Seriously.
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I totally agree with you about some of these medications. It seems that they had absolutely no follow up testing past a couple months of use, or with patients that had to drop their trials pre-maturely for health reasons and wound up with some of these awful symptoms. My sister who was on Zoloft for the longest time was looking to change her anti-depressant for the longest time due to the weight gain issue (another terrible side-effect) but was completely unable to even reduce the dose she was taking in any acceptable amount of time, it eventually took her 6 months to be free of these wicked medications, and once she was she complained to me that they can absolutely be dependency inducing due to the presence of strong withdrawal symptoms from sudden seccsation.

I was one of those kids brought up in the 90's, the "great leap forward" in medical psycho-pharmacology I guess when every little boy and girl was medicated beyond belief for the benefit of the absent minded and often self-surviving parents. Damn right I have a bias agasinst most of the common views towards medicating cases of depression and ADHD, but thats only because I have lived it my friend, and let me tell you, the years of addiction and heavy drug use weren't just coincidental.

Sorry about that self-surving tirade against the medical establishment... you may continue the serious, topic-minded discussion. %)
 
lostPixels said:
I experienced this once and never knew what it was! The day after my first time trying ecstasy I was laying in bed, falling asleep, and all of a sudden I heard this crazy noise and some sort of indecipherable language, which catapulted me back awake. Fortunately it hasn't been a reoccurring issue of mine, I hope you can achieve the same thing.
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thats not a brain zap i've had that before, many times, when fucked. i forget which drugs exactly. those are just auditory hallucinations.
 
Take any kind of pain medication, and some benzos, if you don't have any benzos take a small does of Diphenhydramine (Benadryl).


this won't cure them, but it will surely help... I've experience brain zaps from withdrawing from Lexapro, Paxil, and Zoloft.
 
Strange, everybody seems to have different ideas of what a "brain zap" is supposed to be.

I was under the impression that it is the feeling of a light jolt of electricity hitting your brain whenever you move your eyes too rapidly - atleast that's what my SSRI discontinuation syndrome was like. Oh, and there was this weird feeling of "dizziness" - well, not really the "normal", loss-of-balance/nausea kind of dizziness, it's more like your brain is mounted in some sort of gyroscope, trying to keep its orientation level whenever you tilt your head.

Anyway, the easiest way to get rid of antidepressant-induced brain zaps is to taper off slowly. Interestingly, the zaps sometimes can be staved off even with a different SSRI - I was coming off a high dosage of Effexor, and found that a Lexapro I still had lying around would immediately reduce the discontinuation symptoms.

No idea whether SSRIs can also help with serotonin-agonist induced zaps.

Heck, I remember that when switching from Effexor to Milnacipran (another SNRI), my discontinuation syndrome actually intensified.

So maybe your safest bet is probably to just sit it out.
 
Try a single dose of fluoxetine (Prozac). The half-life of its metabolite norfluoxetine is some days; this should do the trick. As someone mentioned before, benzodiazepines can also help with this. Better to try the prozac first.
 
Docus said:
They happen when you're just about to fall asleep, suddenly you hear a loud AAAAAAA like a truck is about to run you over, and you are 'zapped' wide awake. I had these regularly for over a year since I first got HPPD, and for me taking either L-Tryptohpan/5-HTP or benzos before sleeping made them go away. It's been a long time since I had any now.
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I experienced this exact thing after taking a pill and a half of ecstasy one night several years ago. I never got to sleep the next day and had a coffee at around 11 pm. This caused me to be unable to sleep for the rest of the following night as well and I spiraled into a series of panic attacks. In the calm bits in between panic attacks I would try and sleep, but as I was dosing off the "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA" would wake me up gasping for breath.

I've recently started taking lexapro...hopefully when I come off I don't experience this again.
 
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