Hi all! I've been on Paxil for 22 years. I was diagnosed with background anxiety and mild depression at 35 years old, after wondering my whole life what was wrong with me. It changed my life for the better. I think a lot of my depression is due to growing up in a very dysfunctional household with 2 alcoholic parents.

Now at 57 years old, I'd like to see if I can taper off of it completely so I can take a psilocybin trip without the Paxil dulling the effects. My hope is that doing so might negate most of the damage done by my dysfunctional upbringing by resetting my default mode network. (See the Clinical Significance section in Wikipedia for the "Default_mode_network" page.)

In order to taper while managing symptoms, I built a spreadsheet to track my daily dosage and the estimated amount of Paxil in my system based on the average half-life of 21 hours. (This half-life varies by metabolism rate and other differences between individuals).

It's been useful because if I start to have debilitating symptoms, I can raise my dosage by testing various values in the spreadsheet for the current day to adjust it to when I last had no symptoms.

I thought it might be of use to others, so here is how I built it:

First, see the attached screenshot of the Google Doc.

Here are the values and formula:

A2: "4/10/2023" (a few days before I started tapering)
A3: =A2+1 (this makes the date progress down the column; just fill down from A3 to add more days)
Column B is for manually entering the dose I take in the morning.
Column C estimates the amount still in my system based on how much I've taken today and the previous 4 days, and the average half-life of 21 hours. The formula for C3 is:

=ROUND(SUM(B3*EXP(-LN(2)/21*24*0), IF(ROW() > 1, B2*EXP(-LN(2)/21*24*1), 0), IF(ROW() > 2, B3*EXP(-LN(2)/21*24*2), 0), IF(ROW() > 3, B4*EXP(-LN(2)/21*24*3), 0), IF(ROW() > 4, B5*EXP(-LN(2)/21*24*4), 0)))

Fill down from C3.

The rest of the columns are for symptoms I experience by the end of the day, if any.