Tips for Managing Long-Term Benzodiazepine Use, Stress, and Anxiety?

[throwaway4benzos]

Ayo,

Been a minute, just need some advice before I see my psych. I recently started an actual career and had to swallow the 9 to 5 pill. Anyone have ideas on how to handle stress? Change terrifies me. Stress basically breaks me: brain fog, I cannot think, I get quiet, cannot sleep, caught up in my thoughts, overthinking. It's debilitating. I'm 23 doing something I've never done before, basically like trade school.

I take 20mg of Prozac daily (works wonders for OCD), 4mg of diazepam BID. I think I should ask for 6mg daily TID. I also take 0.4mg of clonidine at night to sleep. I've barely gotten any sleep this week. Sleep deprivation and stress will drive you insane.

I need to find a way to relax at home. Might ask for a low dose of quetiapine to mellow me out at night.

I know benzos shouldn't be used long-term, but I believe I need them. I've always been like this, even before drug use. I don't want to fearmonger the only class of drugs that are anxiolytic.

All in all, I just wanted to bitch a little. I might go back to clonazepam 0.5mg daily, but diazepam might be better due to how long it lasts and its active metabolites.

I would also like to know ANY holistic approach that might help.

Stay safe everyone.

 

[neversickanymore]

Just a heads up chronic long term benzo therapy causes hyper anxiety. Long term medication and substance induced hyper physiological alterations can be extremely difficult both for a suffer\ to identify and accept. The reason behind this is they still treat the negative symptoms they successfully exacerbate. This promotes prolonged destructive spiral where the significant negative unintended consequences of the chronic treatment increase the degree of the symptoms they fail to treat and steady increase while presenting the false impression they are successfully treating the condition long term.

Check out opioid induced hyperalgesia;.. yes it's the opiate version,, same shit due to tolerance due to chronic use of tolerance creating medications.

Long term harms of opioids

Opioids Aware: Side effects and harms to consider with long-term opioid use

www.fpm.ac.uk

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