Fully Healed 110% 27 Year-Old Success Story!!

Hi Everyone,

 

I really really don't want to write this but I'm doing it anyway to hopefully offer some hope to someone else that's going through it too. It's true what they say that a lot of people heal and then don't post it here not because they're being selfish but because you are either scared that you're going to get rocked with another wave and you're not truly done or because you just can't bring yourself to even think about the hell you just went through. Anyway, I'm writing mine because I promised myself I would and I really am healed and completely moved on with my life and I owe it to the people in here that helped me. Special shoutout to Pamster for answering all my questions when I needed them.

 

History: Took xanax recreationally in college never really got dependent or had withdrawals but always loved how well I slept on it as I've had problems sleeping my entire life and it was the only thing I've ever tried that really helped me sleep. After college my sleep issues got worse so I went to a few doctors and even went to NYU's sleep clinic to try to get some help. Got prescribed a few medications that didn't work until 1 doctor prescribed me .5mg of xanax. Didn't explain to me the side effects at all and since I didn't really have any in college I didn't really think much about it. I wound up getting just a one month prescription and then renewing it for a second month. Then after the second month I was told I had to go to a psychiatrist to get it renewed and never got around to it so after like 3 weeks I started to really have awful problems sleeping again, as in going 2-3 sometimes 4 entire days without sleeping. Which I'm sure many here can relate to how non functioning you get when you go that long without sleep. Instead of going to the psychiatrist I just went to my friend who I knew sold xanax and brought around 50 and figured it would hold me over for a while. These were the 2.5mg green ones so really strong too but again I really didn't know how awful the side effects good get. About 4-5 months go buy and I start to run out and this time I was told if I brought 500 it would only be $2 a pill as opposed to the $5 I had just paid. This sounded reasonable to me at the time and I also figured it would be years before I would have to worry about getting more. So I did that for about a year and a half and despite some of the side effects that people echo in here a lot I was able to maintain 1/2 - 1 bar max a night to sleep without it really effecting my life. The biggest problem was I was also drinking alcohol almost every weekend during this time and sometimes I'd drink then still take xanax before bed and in those cases depending on how much I drank, I would be an absolute zombie for multiple days and have no real recollection of what went on in my life during that time. One time I got pretty black out drunk and had to have taken 2-3 bars which was 3x a normal dose for me and went 5 full days without remembering a thing. I don't even want to know how much I embarrassed myself at work and around friends and to my girlfriend during that time but from what I've been told it was pretty awful. Anyway, after that I slowed down my drinking a lot then and even slowed down my xanax consumption a decent bit moving down to a quarter of a 2.5mg a night maybe 3 times a week. I didn't think I was having any withdrawals at the time but I started getting unbelievably bad migraines.

 

I had caught covid around the same time so I had really thought it was just long covid symptoms and it's still possible that's true but I seriously doubt that now and am pretty sure it's all just attribute to xanax withdrawals. I can't even begin to describe how bad the migraines were but I would sometimes go 2-3 up to 4 days without sleeping or getting out of bed with just the most awful migraines you can imagine. It was weird because they were infrequent and I thought just random at the time like maybe once or twice a month but I now know it was really just because after 3-4 days of not taking xanax the migraines would start and then once I took it I would be okay for a while. This went on for about 6 months (this is about 1.5 - 2 years after starting to regularly take xanax for those wondering) and my girlfriend and some friends and I decided to do a weekend ski trip for the first time since covid as things were opening up. It was about 4-5 days since I'd taken xanax but no migraines started yet and we were having a good time on the trip. I had a few beers but wasn't drunk as I'd been pretty strict with my drinking since the episode. We had started eating dinner when all of a sudden my head started moving involuntarily and the next thing I knew I was on the floor and everyone in the room was staring at me and you could hear a pin drop.

 

I had a massive seizure and was taken to the hospital. Long story short I went to get some tests done and nothing came back to really explain what caused it. I was still at the time pretty sure it must be some covid related thing and I also decided to stop taking xanax at the time. This was the single worst decision I've ever made in my life and it's not even remotely close. For 3 months I was basically bed ridden with migraines. I had started to think I would literally never get out of bed again sometimes. I got into such a dark place. I'd barely sleep and was in hell constantly. My father owned a business and at the time I worked for him and we were in the process of getting him into retirement and myself into running the company. I don't think I worked a single day for those 3 months. I eventually quit because of the guilt and anxiety it gave me knowing how much I wasn't able to do and I knew if I had worked anywhere else I'd be fired so I essentially just quit to not have to feel the shame. During the time of being bedridden I'd leave bed to go to doctors pretty constantly trying to figure out what was causing it. I don't know why I never mentioned that I had taken xanax for over a year but for whatever reason it never occurred to me that this could possibly be the cause.

 

After not getting any answers from doctors I began to try to look up possible causes by myself and that's when I somehow found this forum. It blew my ming how much this drug fucks people up and it scared the shit out of me to see how long some of these people took to recover, if at all. I'd like to take a moment to send a message to those people: My heart goes out to all of you that have super long withdrawal symptoms. You are all warriors and I hope one day you all can find the same healing I did. Life is truly not fair for you all. I think about how it must be for you constantly, please stay strong.

 

This forum really helped me to see that it was the xanax and that I could at least make a strategy to try to ween off this stuff and fix myself. I started looking up the taper methods and I really think I did the best one. Obviously I'm not a doctor and this isn't medical advice but it just made the most sense to me and was a relatively easy withdrawal process and if you compare it to what I was already going through it was a walk in the park.

 

Pre Taper Prep: Before I figured out which taper I wanted to do I realized I needed to get back onto a stable dose. Luckily, I still had about 150 xanax bars left to do it with. Before the seizure I had been taking about 1/4 to 1/2 of a 2.5 mg bar so I decided to be on the safe side and go with 1/2 or 1.25 mg a night. I got back on that dose and started to be way more consistent about taking it every day and at the same time. I did this for about 4 weeks and after 2 of those weeks I was still getting the migraines but they were way more manageable and less consistent. I was able to start doing basic stuff like go to the grocery store and go back to trading stocks and crypto. I had done really well in crypto the year before so I was lucky enough to be able to quit my old job and not be that concerned about money because I had made like 15x my yearly salary in investments the year before. After I got to a manageable state I was able to solely focus on my my only goal in life: getting off xanax forever

 

My Taper: I was researching different tapers and seeing what worked for people in this forum and came across a video on youtube. This is the title if you want to look it up: "Klonapin (CLONAZAPAM) How to taper using scale. Withdrawal Symptoms. Benzo" it's by an account called Bullets Garage. In summary his method (and I'm sure other people's method) is to buy two jewelry scales on amazon and then, using a metal file, shave off the tiniest amount off xanax off your regular dose, consistently over a long period of time, that you can determine until you reach 0.

 

So for example, my dose of 1.25g that I started with weighed .213 grams on the scale when I started. I decided I'd shave off .001 everyday until I was done so it would take me exactly 213 days or like 7ish months to be completely done. This just seemed to me to make the most sense. Theres a lot of taper schedules that take the same amount of time but I'd notice a lot of people saying things like "I hit a wall when going from .5 grams to .25 grams" and to me I felt like theres no way that my body would hit a wall when going from .107 to .106 grams there's just no way it would feel the difference. If anything I figured I'd just stay at the same dose for a few extra days if it started to get hard.

 

Anyway, this is the part I hope gives a lot of people hope (I know this wont be everyones experience and I'm sure others have done this with different outcomes but this is just my personal anecdote):

 

MY TAPER PROCESS WAS A WALK IN THE PARK!! It really was. At not one point did my withdrawal symptoms get bad enough where I really felt like I needed to stay at the same dose a long time or up dose. There was a few times where I would get a migraine again in which case I would stay on the same dose for 2 max 3 days but that was maybe 3 times. I had started in April of 2021 so when I started I was hoping to finish sometime in mid November. As I got down from .213 to .150 from April to June, I started to do the math and realized that if I increased my rate from .001 a night to .003 I'd be done with my taper in 50 days and since my sisters wedding was in mid August I'd be completely done with xanax on her wedding day, which got me excited. To be clear, I don't recommend speeding up your taper by 3x ever but this is what I did because I felt good enough to keep going and got impatient. Along the way down from .150 to 0 I did get a few pretty bad migraines and did start feeling some mild depression which scared me because I've never really been depressed before. On days when I got a migraine I'd stay at the same dose until my migraine went away which was never more than 3 days. I definitely should've slowed down from .5 to 0 and just done .001 a day because I do feel like it made my post taper withdrawals slightly worse but I still was determined to get to the other side and finished before my sisters wedding. All in my taper took around 4 - 4.5 months to be completely done and I was so fucking happy to not have to look at xanax again. I had a lot of xanax left over when I finished and it was a really empowering feeling to be able to flush them down the toilet a few weeks after my taper knowing I didn't need them.

 

Post Taper: After I finished my taper I went about a month feeling decent, not great but 100x better than my bed ridden days. Then I started to get more frequent migraines and sleepless nights. The migraines were much more manageable and didn't last even close to as long as they did before (1-2 hours bad then low grade for up to 6 hours as opposed to 1-2 days of hell). I did have low grade depression which was mostly just a lack of motivation to do things that lingered for a few months. I think we tend to attribute everything that we're feeling to xanax and that's part of the process of truly healing is to just look at what's going on in your life and just try to make it better without blaming every bad thing that happens on xanax.

 

For example, I hadn't worked in 6 months, hadn't worked out in forever, was eating like shit and had gained like 25 pounds since the pandemic. Of course I'm going to feel a little depressed and shitty about myself. I had nothing going on in my life besides my amazing girlfriend, who somehow was still with me despite the absolute collapse of the person I used to be when we started dating. The most annoying thing was the migraines though because even though they weren't as bad as before they were still debilitating. So I decided to get serious about getting those fixed. I began eating healthier and working out which helped with the depression a lot but didn't do a thing for the migraines. My girlfriend found a doctor who specialized in migraines and he had mentioned that botox works the best. For those that don't know botox was originally used to treat migraines well before people started using it for cosmetic reasons. After telling me more about botox he said I'd need to go on 3-4 different medications first and if those don't work only then will insurance cover the botox, otherwise it would be $1,100 out of pocket. He could have told me it was $100,000 at the time, I didn't care. I know I'm in a privileged position to be able to but I didn't think twice about it and just paid the $1,100 and am so glad I did because it was instant relief for me. I didn't get a single migraine for 3-4 months after the botox! Once it started to ware off I started getting them again and just went back to the doctor and once again had to pay $1,100 out of pocket. From then on insurance has been covering it so now I go once every 3 months and rarely ever get migraines.

 

The Good Stuff: SO after botox and once I started getting healthier my life has been amazing. I no longer have any depression, I no longer get migraines, I eat healthy (mostly), I'm in the best shape of my life, I realized I didn't want to work in the family business and found my dream job working in crypto. I work from home now so I can travel with my girlfriend whenever she's off which has been great and I also make more money than I ever have. I wouldn't just say I'm back to 100% of where I was before xanax I'd say I'm 110% because I'm even better than where I was before xanax. The only thing I'm grateful for with xanax was it did force me to leave the family business and I was able to focus my career on something I actually like. Other than that Xanax was the shittiest thing to ever happen to me. As of today I haven't touched a xanax in about 13 months and will absolutely never take one again.

 

Advice:

1) Once you make your plan for how you're going to get off xanax get off this site and don't come back unless you have questions you need answered. Other than that there's a lot of people in here who are in awful states mentally and physically and although we have sympathy for them you need to prioritize helping yourself first. Reading depressing stories will only make you more depressed and part of this battle is definitely mental.

2) Once you decide what your taper is going to be you can slow down the speed of the taper and how much you taper each time but don't updose. You're brain needs to get used to receiving slightly less xanax gradually don't let it or yourself think that if it gets shitty enough for you that you'll just take more. Obviously there will be exceptions if things truly get unbearable but I'd avoid updosing at all costs.

3) If you get migraines go to a doctor and get botox it is amazing how well it works. If you can't afford to pay out of pocket get prescribed a few medications and maybe one will work but if they don't after 3 prescriptions insurance will cover it most of the time

4) Force yourself to do things when you don't feel like it. If I think back to when I was bedridden I wish I would've forced myself to get up and walk around. I was in so much pain and it hurt a little less when I'd lay in a dark area but when I started to get them after my taper I would think to myself "I am not literally going to die if I walk around and I'm going to be in a ton of pain regardless so I might as well try to fight back" and just reframing the way I thought about my symptoms from things I had no control over to things I could at fight made me feel more in control. I would literally sometimes lose vision, get dizzy, fall over, throw up, pass out etc. but I didn't care I was going to fight if I physically could. I am sympathetic to a lot of people here but I do think sometimes people underestimate themselves and call themselves bedridden here when if they just pushed themselves to no matter how bad it hurt they could at least get up and walk around. I'd recommend this line of thinking: If you're legs are working and it's not going to kill you, you can walk.

5) Everyone says it but eat healthy and workout if you can. It's probably not going to fix you on it's own but you do yourself no favors if you're eating like shit. Especially as your symptoms start slowly getting better you're just delaying the healing process.

6) Ice baths - they're fucking incredible. Literally just clean out a garbage can, fill it up with water, dump 4 bags of ice in it and go sit in there for 3-5 minutes. You have no idea how much energy you get, how much better you sleep at night, how much fat you burn and how much discipline you teach yourself when you take an ice bath. I started doing them after my taper and I think this helped me heal the fastest your body is forced to prioritize your internal organs and the good cells and let the bad cells die and then you regenerate good cells when you get out. (I'm 100% butchering what actually happens scientifically but just do it you feel amazing).

7) Kratom - I almost forgot to mention Kratom. Please do research first because I haven't really looked whether or not people withdrawing from xanax should take it but I had a doctor I trust reccomend it as an alternative to antidepressants and it's a natural substance. It helped me get through the low grade depression and really enhanced my mood. It also was non addictive for me as I stopped taking it when I felt my depression go away and had no problem doing that.

 

On a final note. Fuck you xanax you stole a few years of the prime of my life. I am so happy to be on the other side.  If you are looking for proof that people can heal I am a perfect example of that. I can do every single thing I did before xanax and more and have no lasting side effects, 110% healed baby. WE MADE IT. Thanks again Pamster for helping me you are a saint.

 

If anyone has questions I'll keep my account active until Halloween and then I will be deleting this forever and moving on with my life. Good luck to everyone recovering and never lose hope.

Beautiful story. Glad to hear you’re doing well again and thanks for sharing.

Thanks, Staplehost19 for returning and writing up your story to give others hope.  I'm sure there are a lot of other things you would have rather done than revisit that period of your life, but it did it anyway so others could see that healing is possible.

 

Thanks Frank and Cmagneto! I wish you both well!!

Thank you for returning and writing your Success Story!  Thank you for including so much detail too.  This is such an important gift to others.  You will never know how many people you've helped with this gift!