I have been off ambien for 6 months now. I also have had insomnia since my mid 30s and I’m now 73. I have gone through every sleep med there is and ambien was the best until after 10 years it stopped working. I am prescribed 3 - 1 mg. clonazapam as needed per day for anxiety. Currently I’m not taking them as prescribed because I find taken together, they will knock me out for about 4 hours. So not wanting to take them at 11 pm and then wake up at 3 am and worry about everything, I watch tv until 3 am and then take them to get some much needed sleep. That way I get up and go about my day without having to worry about things because I’m busy. I resent the doctors not wanting to give out stronger benzos because of their potential addictive properties. Who should really care if at my age I do get addicted if I could get 7 to 8 hours of sleep every night. Someone else in these sleep discussions once said - what’s worse, using benzos or not getting sleep at all. That’s so true. I’ve gone through all the normally prescribed sleeping meds including the new ones, the psychiatric meds that make you sleepy, marijuana, everything, but the only thing that really makes me sleep is a strong benzo. I don’t understand the doctors’ attitudes. It seems they would just rather have the patient not sleep at all which will probably cause worse health problems. I have gone up to 3 days without taking the clonazapam and had no sleep for that time period. And for those of you who would say I’m addicted to it, I don’t think so. I’ve been on that drug for years for anxiety using it as prescribed and one time the nurse practitioner said she was going to cut my dose and wrote out a rx for .5 clonazapam. I was angry and told her to keep her rx and left. I went 6 months without it with no problems other than my anxiety returned. At that time, the ambien was still working so I was getting adequate sleep. I finally returned to the doctor and asked for the 1 mg. clonazapam again and after ascertaining that I had experienced no withdrawals from it after so abruptly quitting it, I was given a rx for 1 mg. again.