I took my time.... about a month or so it took to stop taking it, have been off ambien for a month now. I stayed at about 7.5 mg for about a week......then I went to about 0.5 mg for another week......33 another week......25 another week.....then zero. I only take 4.5mg melatonin, somehow I fall asleep. I am so happy about this yet my Dr wants me to start taking Lexapro because he thinks i have a bad case of anxiety. He thinks I am taking it. I won't take it for fear of weight gain and loss of sex interest which is bad enough already, I will not risk making it worse.

Hi @humanehuman I totally understand what you’re going through. Read my journey on this thread. Maybe it will help you. I started with substituting Ambien with Trazodone. I no longer take any other drugs. At this point, my sleep therapist and PCP are ok with me taking 25 mg of the Trazodone. I am still in therapy. Good luck. Feel free to ask me any questions.

New member here. Age: 59. I started taking ambien to relieve Jet Lag on overseas business trips 10 years ago. I travel so much I ended up taking 10mg a day for a few years straight. I decided to quit back in October & did cold turkey. I chose to quit when I had 5 days in a row off from work. I had two nights of bad sleep and a week or so of very strange dreams. Also for the first few weeks I made myself get up at 5:30 am every morning no matter how much sleep I got. That seemed to do the trick for me as waking up at 5:30 is as much a "habit" as popping an ambien at night. Otherwise, since then, my sleep pattern has been pretty good. To be honest I'd forgotten what normal sleep was like. I have taken on three occasions since I quit, all for jet lag only. Each time it was easy to go back to normal. As a tool for brutal jet lag the drug is great but for sleeplessness I'm not so sure. Ambien sleep is so different from normal sleep (at least for me) that I wonder what the negative effects of long term use might be. I can 100% relate to the fear of not sleeping. I had gotten programmed to the feeling that ambien gave me as a precursor to sleep. For me, at least, the issues were totally in my mind. There was no physical reason for me not to sleep. I hope it's going well for you. Also, I started an ambitious hiking/ walking program when I quit which also helped a lot.