No sleep or sleep meds

I don't know - Benadryl works for a lot of folks, but it causes me to have jitters, does not make me sleepy at all.

CBT-I is cognitive behavioraL therapy for Insomnia. I suppose it works for some people but it did not work for me because I am not willing to get out of bed after 20 minutes of being awake over and over. I can lie there and meditate and deep breathe and practice progressive relaxation and be in a much more conducive state to fall asleep that the anxiety of having to get up over and over through the night.

Yeah, well I took 3, got to sleep, I’m still alive and sick and tired of all these fresh out of school doctors who think they know what’s good for me. Obviously I didn’t tell my doctor I was taking all 3 of my rx at once and I’m not going to. I wish they’d get over this addiction/dependency issue. I also am on pain management for degenerative disc disease and I take 2. - 7.5 hydrocodone a day. I don’t think I’m addicted to that either because sometimes if I lay around all day and don’t exert myself, I don’t experience pain so I don’t take it at all. When I had my knee replaced, that hurt like hell and I was on 2 5mg oxycodone for the pain. After two months, the pain was a lot less and I went down to 1 pill each time I needed it. When the pain subsided completely, I stopped taking them. I have never had a problem with these drugs. However, I read something on the internet recently that said people become addicted because of the euphoric effects. Well, I’ve never had a euphoric effect- just a cessation of pain. Maybe that’s why I don’t get addicted because I haven’t taken more of the pain killers than the doctor prescribed and promptly stopped once I noticed the pain was gone. Back to the sleep issue, that’s a tough one. I did take more than the doctor prescribed but I slept without side effects or any drugged feeling upon waking with the clonazapam. I have been on it for years but once the nurse practitioner reduced my dose when the doctor was on vacation and I had a temper tantrum, ripped up the prescription and threw it on the floor and left. Since this was when I was on ambien, I didn’t experience any sleep issues and I also had no problem going without clonazapam for over 4 months other than a return of my anxiety issues. After that time I returned to the doctor and he put me back on the clonazapam at my regular dose. If the ambien had continued working, I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing now to get sleep. I have tried literally everything since my sleep issues have been doing on since my 30s and I’m 73 now. I wish the ambien still worked.

I’ve been through cognitive behavioral therapy for anxiety which didn’t do anything. My sleep issues seem to be familial as both my mother and brother had them. My mother didn’t take anything and once I asked her how she could just go through night after night without sleep and she said usually on the 3rd night she’d go to sleep on what she called the sheer exhaustion method. She was right. On the 3rd day without sleep, I’d just conk out laying on the couch watching tv and when I’d awake my husband would tell me I’d been deeply asleep for 4 hours.

Cognitive behavior therapy for insomnia.

Exactly!

7.5 mg

Working well for me. Do I have 7 hours of sleep every single night? No, but I don’t stress about it anymore and if I don’t have a grey night, I know I’ll have one soon.

Please know that there is no condemnation here at all. We just do the best we can and that includes when drugs work for our issues. I, too, do not feel like I was "addicted" in the sense of craving a drug or taking more than prescribed. I was just alerted to the dangers of taking psych drugs, particularly benzos, regularly. It is just like when pain killers became an evil, but they are not when they are needed. I have a friend who is a Stage 4 cancer survivor and I remember when she had fentanyl patches daily and oxycontin for break through pain. She has been off any pain meds for 5 yrs now. I know those were crucial in her ability to go through her cancer and treatments. All these drugs have a purpose and just because there is the potential for abuse and overuse and side effects does not mean they don't have a good therapeutic effect in the right circumstances.

But the CDC and doctors never tire of trying to get you off of them and pushing newer drugs that sometimes do one more harm than good. For years, I couldn’t get an anxiety drug that worked and didn’t even know about the benzo drugs. I took what I was prescribed; sometimes the side effects were so bad I couldn’t take them and other times I didn’t know what they were doing to me physically, only knew they weren’t effective for my anxiety. In time I found a doctor who prescribed 1 mg clonazepam for me 3 times a day which actually worked and he tried different sleeping medication on me until the ambien worked. Come to find out that a lot of these newer drugs can damage your heart and after I repeatedly flatlined first in the doctor’s office who sent me to the E.R. where I continued to flatline, each time restarting and then flatlining again which caused me to be airlifted to the nearest cardiac hospital where I was taken off all my medication and placed in cardiac intensive care for 3 days while they slowly started me on my medications again but not the psychiatric drugs. Then after I was implanted with a pacemaker and was scheduled for a watchman implantation, the cardiac hospital told me that I should never take that type of drug again and said I could take the clonazepam and opioids I was prescribed because they didn’t have that effect on the heart. I am probably one of those uncommon cases but if you read the warning labels on most of the newer psychiatric drugs, the side effects listed will usually include tachycardia (rapidly beating heart) and bradycardia (heart hardly beating) that can damage your heart if the medication causing it is continued. And that’s my story.