Yeah, and you typically develop some kind of mental addiction that manifests itself physically. I’ve known of habitual pot smokers who develop anxiety, which of course prompts them to take a bong hit. There are rarely (I’d say practically never) any long-term feelings of addiction.
Game/Interet addiction comes to mind. :)
I have years of experience with Ambien and a few months with Lunesta. I have been a chronic insomniac for years for a number of reasons. Partly because I have always had trouble falling asleep. Compounding this issue is that I work all around the clock and never sleep the same 8 hours on any given night. And lastly, round out a job that creates some “disturbing” memories particularly before/during sleep.
So with all that in mind, suffice to say, I haven’t sleep naturally in years. I was on ambien for 2 years which is quite a bit longer than you are suppose to be on it without a break.
Lunesta I just started on as a replacement a month or so ago so I don’t have good long term data for it. My experience with Lunesta can be summed up as follows:
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It leaves an utterly horrible taste in your mouth. If you take a penny and wrap it in tinfoil and chew it for about an hour that would be approximately the same taste. Highly metallic in flavor, you must eat something to get rid of this taste. Drinking water or particularly milk is simply foul until you eat something to clear this taste. This is the largest side effect of Lunesta
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It doesn’t work as well as Ambien. Period. It is, however, a far less harsh medication so I’m working with it the best I can. It hits me much more subtley than Ambien does, and the sleep is a bit more natural. I remember my dreams (which isn’t necessarily a good thing). Lunesta keeps me knocked down for about 5 hours give or take, then I’m more or less on my own. I usually sleep lightly for another 1-2 hours after that but its fairly crap sleep.
Lunesta is overpriced as is Ambien because the benzos/narcotics have such a bad rap now they are simply not prescribed. This allows GABA specific receptor drugs like these really dominate the market and fleece the hell out of consumers. Lunesta is apparently an S-Isomer of some other drug that has been available for years outside the US. So they repackaged it basically and raised the price to 3X the amount. Ambien is also very expensive as well so you are sort of screwed either way.
Now back to Ambien. Ambien commercials make it seem like its a fairly harmless medication. It is not, it is very powerful and will get you very high if taken improperly. Ambien had major effects on me, first and foremost, it is quite addictive particularly if you take it and then attempt to stay awake. As someone else said, it will put you in this “waking dream” state. It will also affect your cognitive and motor functions, and judgement. The first few weeks I would stumble around very badly, like being drunk off your ass, that wore off but there was still a tendency to slur speech or write non-sense emails with letters transposed, etc etc.
Memory loss on Ambien is very severe and if you take it over a long period of time like I did, cumulative. Your tendency to forget things will spill over past bedtime. I also had some nights where I would literally do things and not remember doing them the next day. I’d see the remnants of having eaten food, had a DVD in the player I had no memory of watching, sent emails to people that looked like they were written by a dyslexic, etc. etc.
Also for me, it had this intense euphoric effect which became quite addictive. So what happened was, my sleep medication, became an awake medication. If you are a person who is addictive by nature (which I am not) I would strongly advise not using Ambien. They say incidence of addiction is low, but I have read quite a bit and it seems others tend to abuse this medication as well for some of the effects I described above.
Also Ambien and again, your mileage may vary, will have the tendency to cause depression / suicidal tendencies. That was essentially when I struck the medication from my life. Also, the efficacy of the drug drops off quite a bit over time so just like any other drug you find yourself ramping up the dose for the same effect. I did not want to be on a sleep med for the rest of my life either.
I had a very bad withdraw coming off Ambien after having been on it that long, so at this point, I really do not want to go back to it for sleep and will try to stick with Lunesta even though its basically shit, and doesn’t work. Ambien works, perhaps a little too well. But for long term I would really like to find a more natural sleep solution. In my case, job and schedule are playing major roles so once those level out, I hopefully will be sleeping unassisted.
Wow hermyhermit, thankd for such a superb post. I have that exact same awful taste in my mouth from Lunesta too!
Ambien… well all my idiot posts here were done on AMbien, and yes I agree on the memory loss too. I ahted waking up and finding food bits in bed with me, e-mails sent out, and other oddities and then thinking, “Oh my, what did I do now?!”
Lunesta also doens’t work like a crap for me either, but I was on Ambien for years too. I’ve got to give it time. I don’t like the MAbien side-effects.
Were there, perhaps, ever any times when you woke up, logged onto QT3, and thought “Oh my, what did I write now?” If so, this would make things so much more clear for us all, I think.
I can’t offer anything too substantive to this conversation, but my wife took Seroquel for the first time a few days ago and slept for 21 hours… She was told she could take 1 to 3 of them, and that result was from 1. She was pretty creeped out.
Were there, perhaps, ever any times when you woke up, logged onto QT3, and thought “Oh my, what did I write now?” If so, this would make things so much more clear for us all, I think.[/quote]
There are lots of times when I did that. many…
Just a little update in case anyone was still reading this thread.
I tried Lunesta and it was pretty awful. It made me horribly lethergic (not sleepy) for about 14 hours. So if I took it, my next day was more worthless than usual.
I just got Sonata, and have taken it a few times… but not working. I didn’t realize my CF specialist runs a sleep clinic in addition to CF, Pulmonary, and a bunch of other things. He said, he finds the incidence of major personality changes in people taking sleep aids is much higher than the pharmacologies state. But I think that’s due to the fact if it "doesn’t ut you to sleep right away you suffer the side effects of said medications.
Not unless you count impregnating fat women helpful! :lol:
jk
Have you been seeing a therapist ? It could be high stress or depression causing the root problem that your sleep disorder is just a symptom of…
No I haven’t.
I have tried Lunesta and I sleep two hours even with double dose. Rozerem had no effect. I may be trying Seroquel next. I had night-time events with no memory of them. I typically had one event every few months, but some were potentially deadly. Yes, I too cooked all the time with no memory of it. I would wake up and crack eggs in the sink and food on the table. I also (VERY IMPORTANT), would go on line, send e mail that was highly damaging and/or embarrassing and have no memory of doing it until I got responses. ALSO NIGHT DRIVING WITH NO MEMORY of the event.
Really, a 2005 post?
Wait for the follow up post about how Seroquel ended up working for him, followed by how you can purchase it and other cheap meds at his web site.
How many posts does he need before he can provide links to his Seroquel reseller site?
Ambien gets me 4 or so hours of sleep a night for sure.
Lunestra did absolutely nothing.
This is a very common complaint among patients I meet.
The best medicne, by far, i these situations is Propiomazine. It’s non-addictive and has no repiratory depression associated with it either. It is not OTC, at least not in Sweden, so you may well need a prescription.
It is not sleep-inducing, but it will keep you asleep throughout the night. An alarm clock or kid screaming will still wake you, so it’s more of a deepening of your sleep. Som patients combine it with a sleep-inducing medicine.
There are two drawbacks with it.
The first is that about 15% of patients complains of “itchy legs” during nighttime after taking it. This stops if you stop taking the medicine, so it’s not that serious. Unfortunately this side-effect doesn’t abate with time, so if you’re one of those 15%, just don’t take it.
The second is that it takes quite long to kick in, about 2h, (not that it has any kick as such) and has a pretty long half-life (~8h).
If you try it, take 25mg at about 8pm if you plan to get up at about 7am. Some patients take it even earlier than that, but as a general rule that works.
It does not interfer with sleep-inducing meds, so take those, if you need to, at about 10-11pm as usual.
Ask your doctor for some and let me know how it works out.
2011’s Ambien Walrus says “hi” to your 2005 self.
kin’ell! It is strange to see a pre-Ambien jpiniard.
Low doses of Remeron knock me the fuck out in about 45 minutes. And it’s actually an anti-depressant with very few side effects (it’s not an SSRI or MAOI) so it leaves me feeling pretty good when I wake up. Also, unlike SSRIs and MAOIs, which can cause a decrease in sexual function, Remeron does this:
The stuff rocks.