Clonazepam taper question

I have 1 mg tablets of clonazepam that I can manage to cut as small as approx. .125 mg pieces. I stayed at a 1.125 nightly dose for nearly three weeks. This was the first cut that I had some trouble with, so I decided to be flexible in my 10% reduction every two weeks plan. Anyway, reducing from 1.125 to 1 mg by removing that .125 piece is slightly more than a 10% reduction, which I feel is a little too much all at once. So I was wondering what people thought of my "plan B". Last night I took 1 mg. I can feel some brain fog this a.m., which may or may not be due to the cut (it was a long week at work and I'm tired). Tonight I will take 1.125. The two nights together average 1.06 over 48 hours, which is slightly less than a 10% reduction. I am considering taking the reduced 1 mg amount every two or three nights - and 1.125 the other nights - for a week or so, then every other night for a week or so, until I am ready to take 1 mg each night without aggravating symptoms. This is the best I can do with what I have. So my question is, have others used an every second or third night taper approach successfully?

(I tried some .5 mg sublingual tabs to get smaller cuts and they were completely ineffective for me, causing a bout of troubling symptoms, so I am sticking with my trusty 1 mg oral tablets for now) My prescribing physician is pretty clueless on this topic, telling me only to "do what feels right"

It's not a good idea to skip doses on  a regular basis. You need to still take the same doses every day and then taper from that dose. It will confuse your CNS.

Uh-oh, fuzzy head >> fuzzy math. Upon closer review, it seems I spent approx 3 weeks on more like 1.16 mg clonazepam, so a cut directly to 1 mg represents more like ...16.6%? - no wonder I feel fuzzy. The question remains the same though, as to whether anyone has had success taking a reduced dose every second, third, etc. night and move slowly toward the reduced dose every night. I am considering taking 1 mg every third or 4th night and 1.16 on the other nights and slowly reducing to 1 mg per night. 1 mg every 4th night would average to just under 10% over 4 nights (?)

 

I would not do that if it were me.  I think it may end up being harmful.  K is too potent to taper by dry pills.  The right pill sizes are not made.  Why not just drop the 1mg pill into full fat whole milk?  Then you can split it as fine as you like.  K really needs to be liquified to taper.

When I first began to taper in July I took 1.5 mg and 1.25 mg every other night and I was fine with that. It averaged to a 10% reduction over 48 hours. In retrospect, because my math had been off, taking just 1 mg last night was a pretty bad idea. I hear what folks are saying about maintaining a steady dose as opposed to going up and down. But I've nearly reached a point where I can't do that and continue to taper. I'm not supposed to have milk fat (animal fats), and I really don't want to go the liquid measurement route, so titration is not really an option. I just managed to cut a 1 mg tablet into 8 .125-ish pieces - there was plenty of blue dust on the cutting board so they don't add up to 1 full mg, but it might be a better next step to go with 1.125-ish for a while instead of alternating doses. At some point, however, I am going to get back to this question. When it's time to reduce from 1.125 I can't make further cuts to the pill. The .5 mg tabs I tried were ineffective so I am very hesitant to use anything other than the 1 mg tabs I've been using for years. I will be faced with alternating between 1.125 and 1 mg until I reduce to 1 mg. Hoping someone out there did okay this way. My intermediate goal is to get to 1 mg and stay there for a spell, regroup, no annoying and confusing cutting pills, no more anxiety over how much and when for a while...it's just getting there that stings...

The other thing is that I read all the time that people vary their doses - for example between 1 and 2 mg per day "as needed". Even my prescription says 1-1.5 mg each night, though I have stayed at 1.5 most of the time recently until I began my taper. This is what led me to believe it would be okay to safely vary the doses.

I think the thing that gets the healing/upregulating process going is a shortage of benzo.  This is needed and is what stimulates the body to heal.  If the benzo level is up one day and down the next, what will your body make of this?

Ideally one would make small cuts from one steady dose to the next steady dose. Understood. Just wondering if anyone with experience and/or success taking a reduced dose every 2-4 days until getting down to the next steady dose could speak to this. A steady dose of 1.16 was more difficult for me than both varying between 1.5 - 1.25 mg and a steady dose of 1.25

It's been an interesting week, but I worked with what I had on hand - 1 mg tabs. So I tapered from 1.16 to 1.125. The 1.125 has been okay for one night but I can't handle it two nights in a row without nasty side effects, mostly insomnia. Since I cannot deal with another extended bout of working on no sleep, I varied my nightly dose between 1.16 and 1.125 every other night. It has felt better than straight up 1.125. In a week or less I'll try straight up 1.125 again, and if I'm ready for it, stay there for 2 or 3 weeks. This is the part of the taper that stung me two times already - getting from 1.25 down to 1 mg, so I am going extremely slow. This drug no longer enhances sleep and I want off, but tapering destroys sleep and I cannot face another bout of demanding work days from minute one in the building with ongoing sleep deprivation and/or withdrawal symptoms.  So I'm choosing to look at this 1.125 and 1.16 every other day as about a 5% taper over two days from 1.16. None of it is exact science, especially since I'm cutting 1 mg pills into 6 or 8 pieces. All I know is that I am decreasing my dose in some fashion and that's going to have to be good enough for me right now.

The only two things I have ever taken that helped me sleep and didn't give me a hangover the next day were Unisom and Clonazepam. I wonder if Unisom would help with current taper-related sleep trouble but am nervous about the effects of the two of them together. I am super sensitive to meds. If Unisom helped me to sleep and didn't leave me feeling drugged the next day it might be an alternative to varying K between two doses every other day. Dunno

I guess the message for anyone who's interested is, even though it is not encouraged in this forum as far as I can tell, using varied or staggered doses of K every other night to move between two doses can work for some if you're in a pinch. This is just ONE person's experience.