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Edgar, Valium like other ‘sleep drugs’ does not send you into the restorative stages of sleep – 3 (deep sleep) and 4 (REM sleep) so if you have say 3 hours sleep induced by valium you will feel worse than 3 hours of ‘normal’ sleep.
Also I am stating the obvious here but any type of broken sleep where you don’t complete a full sleep cycle will leave you feeling worse. These generally last 75-90 minutes and ideally we should get 5 per night to feel at our best.
You are not likely to have any seizures or worse on a low dose but you will more than likely get bad withdrawl symptoms including rebound insomnia worse than it is now if you quit cold turkey.
Edgar, you are selling Croatia short there.. they beat my team England in the semi finals so were World Cup finalists 😉
Oh and its Steve who had the scan…..ill let you off though as insomnia does affect the memory 🙂
Edgar, please do not stop the valium cold turkey…..I don’t want to scare you but this is a very bad idea and could potentially be fatal.
You need a plan to taper off it safely over a number of months.
You make a fair point Edgar, I slept for 5 hours last night and went to bed with no anxiety or stress…not sure what was going on in my head to make me sleep so little….maybe I need to start praying 😉
It’s hard and on my bad days I just want to hide from the world…… at it’s worst it has made me feel like life is not worth living……that said I always feel it is good if possible to get yourself out, be it going to the gym, socialising etc
Hiding away from things just give insomnia more power over you.
I’m married with two kids and my chronic insomnia of 15 years intensified last August. By October I was having 3-4 nights a week with zero sleep…this hit me hard and I really struggled to be dad and husband.
TBH I was more concerned about the impact on my kids (they knew something was wrong) than anything else and it got so bad by January this year that I ended up severely depressed about the whole situation and to cut a long story short I was hospitalised for 4 weeks.
Things have improved for me though in recent weeks and I am back to my normal 5-6 hours a night which I can manage on…. only one night in the last few weeks has been problem for me and I ended up taking a Zopiclone to stop me having an all nighter.
I’ve heard insomnia called a ‘living hell’ and at it worst in recent months is how it felt to me. The constant intense fatigue was truly horrible.
From my research the medial community seems to have given up on medication that might offer a long term fix when CBT-I fails for people.
Good luck to all out there that are dealing with this condition.
Ok. It’s just from reading your post you seem to be rather depressed and this could be causing your sleep issues…..your insomnia could be a secondary condition to the depression.
If your psychiatrist knows how you feel they really should give you an anti-depressant to try and lift your mood.
I agree jazzcat22, you could add too low levels of GABA to those physiological areas you mention….
If you are having suicidal thoughts your problem has moved on from insomnia to severe depression (the two are often linked though).
Was the mirtazapine prescribed for depression? if so how long have you been on it? if more than 4 weeks and your mood has not improved I’d suggest going back to your doctor and getting it switched to something else.
I was prescribed mirtazapine in the past for depression/suicidal thoughts and it never worked so I was switched to Venaflaxine and it was like a ‘light’ switched on in my head.
I know some components of CBT-I require you to measure the amount of sleep you get but I think on occasion this can be counter productive and people get obsessed with the amount rather than the quality.
I think a better measure of your sleep is rating how you feel the following days using a 1 – 5 or 1 – 10 scale…if you are feeling better during the day this is what matters of course.
Good luck.
Just tell them! You probably won’t get much sympathy but there is no need to be embarrassed…
Seroquel is addictive and most people will build a tolerance to it if they use it often enough.
Also most people will experience some bad withdrawl side effects even when tapering off. Whilst not a benzo it is a heavy duty drug that I would put in the same class as Lorazepam and Xanax. People need to be very careful with it.
