Well this sucks. First night taking valium 10mg instead of .5 of xanax and i didnt sleep at all not one minute. I havent taken valium in along time, it made me very dizzy and just felt not good on it. I guess i am use to the xanax knocking me out every night. This did nothing, so i just laid there for hours then started to get anxiety from it all as i watched the hours slip by. Is this normal during a cross over? Makes me want to take the xanax again so at least i can sleep. This last 7 days actually have been pretty good on xanax, no interdose withdrawls. Im wondering if it just took me a while to get stable on it...i was all over the place taking it until i gave in 3 weeks ago Dr.s orders and started taking it every night same dose same time ect. She was trying to get me stable so i could then cut down.... maybe i jumped the gun here...sigh. 
Hi [...],
I just read through this thread and also went back to your intro to refresh myself with your situation. There are a few issues that I feel I should bring to your attention and the first thing is in relation to your history/signature which we didn’t have when I did your intro.
1) I see that your doctor advised you to stretch your doses out to every other day as you tapered. This should not ever happen with any benzodiazepine taper, because all it succeeds in doing is putting your system through a continuous cycle of inter-dose withdrawals because your blood serum levels continually drop dramatically between doses, and this is especially so with Xanax, because it has such a short half life. It must’ve been horrid stretching the doses out like that. Continual cycles of inter-dose withdrawals also increase the risk of Kindling, which only makes future withdrawal attempts even more difficult.
Kindling - Benzodiazepine Information Coalition
https://www.benzoinfo.com/kindling/2) To successfully taper, blood serum levels need to be kept very stabile, and I find it very difficult to believe you could be dosing Xanax only once per day and not go through at least some level of inter-dose withdrawals. I suspect this has possibly been an issue for quite a while. If you decide to taper from the Xanax, I expect you will need to dose multiple times per day to keep your blood serum levels stabile enough to avoid inter-dose withdrawals.
3) In regard to the valium, please understand that it wouldn’t have been the valium causing the anxiety when you switched directly from the Xanax to the valium. The Xanax has such an extremely short half life, and valium such a long half life, that the Xanax was leaving your system very quickly, whist the valium takes a very long time for blood serum levels to build up. What happened was you were going through withdrawals from the Xanax, which is why the anxiety came on, and the Valium simply couldn’t compensate because it takes so much longer to build up in your body. This is why it’s important to do a slow crossover from Xanax to Valium. Because you did a direct switch, you actually put yourself into withdrawals from the Xanax, and the blood serum levels of the Valium were nowhere near the level they needed to be to at to buffer the withdrawal symptoms from the Xanax. It’s also important to understand that although both are benzodiazepines, they are very different drugs and swapping one directly for another will not stop you from going through withdrawals from the one you stopped dosing, this is why a slow crossover is necessary and also comes with its own set of challenges.
It sounds like you’re now leaning towards a Xanax taper again , which is absolutely fine, but I just want to make sure you are not putting yourself through inter-dose withdrawals unnecessarily by only dosing the once per day. There’s nothing wrong with splitting your dose and dosing twice a day or more to keep your blood serum levels even throughout a 24hr period.
