Ambien (Zolpidem) Experiences?

[Jake007]

Thinking about trying Ambien, anybody have any experiences with it?

 

[sleepy]

That was what was prescribed to me by my ENT. It practically turned off my T when I took it. My doctor recommended me only to take half of it, but whether it was half or a full dose it knocked me out.

I haven't taken it since a week ago, I'm trying to adjust to sleeping with T in my head instead of relying on meds.

 

[Zorro!]

I've taken it short-term when things were at their worst. I believe it helped a lot by giving me some much needed sleep. I found the full dose to be too much so I only took half and that worked well for me. I was careful not to let it become a crutch to the point of dependence though and am now back to sleeping naturally.

No doubt people are going to claim that Ambien-induced somnolence isn't "real" sleep and it's bad for you and "Oh my God your brain is gonna melt!" blah blah blah. To me that's a bunch of nonsense. The stuff worked fine for what I needed it to do, which was to give my anxiety-riddle body some much needed rest. In short, it worked and I won't hesitate to use it again should the need arise.

 

[Jake007]

I got to get some, I average maybe 2 to 4 hours of sleep a night. Right before I enter my sleep I get this adrenaline rush type thing and then back fully awake then try again over and over. I need something to knock me out and keep me out. I didn't want to take this route but I feel I have no choice now.

 

[Jake007]

That was what was prescribed to me by my ENT. It practically turned off my T when I took it. My doctor recommended me only to take half of it, but whether it was half or a full dose it knocked me out.

I haven't taken it since a week ago, I'm trying to adjust to sleeping with T in my head instead of relying on meds.

Did you do any weird things that you don't remember

 

[glynis]

I have used them short term but not suitable for long term due to tinnitus.
A low dose AD to help sleep would be better ....lots of love glynis

 

[sleepy]

Did you do any weird things that you don't remember

I've never had a blackout or anything of the sort when I was on it. I've only taken 3 doses to fix my insomnia (4 days). Only side effect worth mentioning was it gave me diarrhea and a slight drowsiness when I woke up.

My onset with T was in February. I've had days where I was like you. Tossing and turning in bed. I'd only get 1-2 hours or sleep and wake up restless. I was only on it because my T spiked. I've seen a lot of negative stuff about Ambien, so that's why I've stopped. I still have it and I'll probably use it again if I get a really bad spike.

 

[Jake007]

I get anxiety when I go to bed because I'm already scared that I won't sleep again.

 

[just1morething]

@Jake007, Zolpidem works well, I've been taking it for years. It gets out of your system fast too in the morning unlike melatonin or OTC sleeping pills. I wanted to get off of it if could it possibly making my tinnitus worse. Unsure on that as some "Z" drugs could act like benzo's? I didn't take a Zolpidem last night and my head is hissing very loud right now. They come in 5 mg and 10 mg. I don't want to advise for or against because of possible addiction but they definitely knock me out even after all these years.

 

[Jake007]

And when I wake up around 1 or 2 or 3, actually it don't matter when. I wake up wide wake scared of what time it is. I have to get my anxiety under control cause I can't keep taking benzos.

 

[Jeff M.]

Dude, Ambien is gnarly!! I tripped out on that stuff! "Woke" up making some eggs at 3a.m. Personally I do not like the stuff!! Had a couple of incidents. Bailed it after a weird week. Be careful.

 

[Nordland90]

Hello. I'm pretty new to tinnitus but I have struggled with sleeping before so have used some pills. I prefer imovane/zopiclone over ambien/zolpidem. The reason for this is that zopiclone got a longer half-life time than zolpidem, so it will last longer in your body and should then in theory give you a longer sleep. The only problem about these pills is that they lose effect after awhile but they are great for a shorter period.

I would not advice taking them in larger doses since it can lead to unfortunate happenings. And if sleep is really bad and you take more than the doctor tells you, dont have the rest of the pills close to your bed since its very easy to forget what you have taken and take more. I've done this a few times myself, and while its not dangerous (you'll run out of pills before you overdose, unless you consume alcohol) it can make you do things that you wouldn't do in a normal state of mind.

*Edit.

Another thing I forgot to write is that zopiclone might give you awfull taste in your mouth in the morning, but this usually goes away after you eat or drink something.

 

[sleepy]

Sorry Jake, I really feel for you. I don't want to be some random guy on the internet telling you what to take and what not to take. You have to talk to your doctor and tell him your issues and how it's making things difficult for you.

Please try to hold out until you can talk to a doctor so he can prescribe what you need. Try some deep breathing and some sound therapy or whatever can mask your T so you can relax for now.

 

[Jake007]

My T isn't maskable, at all. I don't really want to take anything but I need sleep. I'm gonna have to try something, but I wanna make sure it knocks me out for 8 hours straight.

 

[Jake007]

Dude, Ambien is gnarly!! I tripped out on that stuff! "Woke" up making some eggs at 3a.m. Personally I do not like the stuff!! Had a couple of incidents. Bailed it after a weird week. Be careful.

I read alot of stuff where people make food, drive, walk around naked in the front yard. I think you gotta be in bed ready to sleep when you take it.

 

[Jake007]

Hello. I'm pretty new to tinnitus but I have struggled with sleeping before so have used some pills. I prefer imovane/zopiclone over ambien/zolpidem. The reason for this is that zopiclone got a longer half-life time than zolpidem, so it will last longer in your body and should then in theory give you a longer sleep. The only problem about these pills is that they lose effect after awhile but they are great for a shorter period.

I would not advice taking them in larger doses since it can lead to unfortunate happenings. And if sleep is really bad and you take more than the doctor tells you, dont have the rest of the pills close to your bed since its very easy to forget what you have taken and take more. I've done this a few times myself, and while its not dangerous (you'll run out of pills before you overdose, unless you consume alcohol) it can make you do things that you wouldn't do in a normal state of mind.

*Edit.

Another thing I forgot to write is that zopiclone might give you awfull taste in your mouth in the morning, but this usually goes away after you eat or drink something.

Does the zopiclone put you out pretty fast?

 

[glynis]

Ambien was fine for me and took it about 20 mins before I went bed.
I took it for 6 weeks but not every night as was told space them out as will find them hard get off.
Best talk to your doctor if a low AD would be better for sleep...lots of love glynis

 

[Nordland90]

I usually take it when im heading towards bed and then read for 30-40min until I feel it kick in and then usually I fall asleep pretty fast.

I also find it much, much easier to stop taking these pills than benzos. with zopiclone i've quitted several times cold turkey without much else than having sleep problems for a day or two. Benzos is another story...

 

[just1morething]

I read alot of stuff where people make food, drive, walk around naked in the front yard. I think you gotta be in bed ready to sleep when you take it.

Other than going outside and howling at a full moon I've never had any really weird things happen taking it. Addiction and possible reduced R.E.M. sleep would be the problem IMO.

 

[linearb]

I get anxiety when I go to bed because I'm already scared that I won't sleep again.

Hi Jake007!

I realize this is a thread asking about Ambien, and if you want to go that route, that's your decision. I think those drugs are okay as a way to very occasionally deal with insomnia -- but, if you use them a lot, you will become dependent and the insomnia you will experience while trying to get off them may be insane. I have been down that path. Worse, Ambien is a bandaid -- until you address the real reasons for your insomnia, you're going to have a bad time.

All I really wanted to say is -- you have to find a way to shake the fear of not sleeping, because as long as you are afraid, you are not going to sleep, your whole nervous system has spent millions of years evolving to keep you safe, which means not letting you sleep while you think you're in danger.

When I finally got off of benzos (which are very similar to ambien), I went several months of often only sleeping an hour or two. It was awful. But -- at some point, I realized... I wasn't going to go insane, I wasn't going to become totally nonfunctional and hallucinate and lose my job (those were the anxieties I had at the time). None of that was real. I wasn't in danger, I was just inconvenienced.

You are also safe. You can continue to have insomnia for a long time, and nothing really bad will happen -- you will just be tired (and probably anxious, sweaty, unhappy). That's very annoying and unpleasant. But it's not dangerous. You don't need to be scared of not sleeping, because it's not a threat, its just an annoyance.

Just my .02. It took me a long time and a lot of tricks and CBT and nonsense to figure out how to sleep without drugs, but it was one of the most useful things I've done for myself.

I still get bouts of insomnia, from time to time, and now it's fine. It annoys me, but I get up, read a book, do something useful with the time.

 

[Jake007]

@linearb My T is bad, unmaskable. It's so hard to put my mind in a relaxed state to get tired to fall asleep. I don't wanna take pills, but I gotta get some good sleep sometime. I don't know what to do.

 

[Jake007]

I'm almost 100% positive it's from anxiety. And t blowing my head off.

 

[linearb]

@Jake007

I don't know if your tinnitus is louder than mine; I can hear mine over nearly-but-not-quite-everything that I'm exposed to in the world. It's shrill, and the parts of it that are super high pitched (around 14.5khz) are very unpleasant sounds to me. That said -- not only do I sleep okay, I sleep with earplugs most of the time (the wife snores, the cat meows, the kid screams) -- and you can learn how to do that, too.

Again -- you are not broken. Your mind isn't broken. Your body is keeping you awake because you are in a state of fear/hyperarousal, so you have convinced your limbic system that there is a threat, and as long as you are threatened, your nervous system says "OH NO I AM IN DANGER I NEED TO RELEASE LOTS OF ADRENALINE TO STAY ALERT".

It's basically impossible to get real, useful sleep in that situation. Yeah, you can carpet bomb your GABA receptors with Ambien or Valium or something, and that will make you "sleep", but it's not good restorative sleep, and over time, those drugs are gonna cause you worse problems than you have now (unless you only take them ~once a month or something, which is probably fine -- I still take the odd valium when I am unable to distract myself from T or other anxiety.... but a bottle of 30 pills lasts me 2 years).

What you need to do, is convince your limbic system to shut off. That you are not in danger. That you are safe and loved.

It sounds cheesy as hell, but when I was at my worst, I would lay in bed all night, just telling myself over and over again, "I am safe, I am loved". I would think about how safe and secure my body was in a comfy bed. I would think of all the people and animals that love me and wish me well.

If you can get to a place where you are able to lie in bed, sleepless, but not anxious, not afraid of being sleepless -- you will be well on your way to getting out of this. And, if your T is anything like mine, it gets louder, nastier, more obnoxious, the less sleep you are getting. So, when you reverse that, you will still have tinnitus... but it might be a very different experience than what you're dealing with now.

As to how you snap out of that, sorry, I have no magic. For me, I basically had to find a unicorn: an MD psychiatrist who thinks drugs are scary and dangerous and should be avoided. He just reminded me over and over that actually insomnia was not going to ruin my life. I would call him frantically at 7am, swearing that if I had another sleepless night I was going to lose my mind, begging for valium... and he'd just say "no, you're fine, drugs might make a bad situation worse, and actually you're fine, really, even if you don't seem to be sleeping, if you can lay in bed as calmly as possible you are getting rest even if it doesn't feels like it, trust your body". Blah, blah, blah. Somehow, over a period of time, between making those frantic phone calls, and being pretty dedicated about exercise, meditation, and sleep hygiene... it all went away.

Now I have a screaming baby in the house who doesn't give a rat's ass about my sleep needs, a demanding period at work, and a wife who is also not sleeping much because of the baby... so, my sleep lately again, is quite a mess! But, something fundamental has changed in me, because now when I don't sleep I just think "huh I'm not sleeping, I'm gonna be tired tomorrow, that's kind of a bummer", and totally don't get anxious at all about it. That took me years to figure out, but I'm not particularly clever or resourceful, so if you are a clever and resourceful person you may be able to turn this around a lot faster than I did. Also, I was horribly addicted to sleeping pills at the beginning of this nightmare, which probably made it a lot harder (and that's why I'm skeptical of ambien for people with severe anxiety-based insomnia).

Anyway, sorry to leave you a wall of text, but hopefully some of it is useful. I have a laundry list of free resources that helped me (guided meditations, stuff to read, exercise protocols, etc). Happy to share all of that. Basically, my tinnitus is a pain in the butt, but my tinnitus combined with severe insomnia was an entirely different level of hell and I hope to avoid it....

edit: one FINAL caveat -- if you're so strung out now that you just need to get. some. sleep, come hell or high water -- I don't personally think it would be very risky to take ambien for a couple nights to just get some sleep and catch up, and have fresh eyes and be a little more balanced about this whole thing. But, every time you resort to ambien, you are teaching yourself "I am broken and can't sleep without drugs", and that is a very hard lesson to unlearn, so I would say try not to do that unless you're on the verge of completely losing your mind. Also it's a weird drug and can sometimes cause hallucinations (not the fun kind), and there are documented vestibular effects (so it could potentially interact with or worsen tinnitus, as with all the BDZ-like drugs).

 

[Jake007]

@linearb

You have no idea how much I needed to hear that. For real. Everything you said is spot on correct. I will keep pushing on and try to find a way to calm limbic system down. Thank you man I'm very great full you logged in today.

 

[Jeff M.]

Dude @linearb ! Nailed it!! @Jake007 listen to him!! Good stuff!!!

 

[Jake007]

Dude @linearb ! Nailed it!! @Jake007 listen to him!! Good stuff!!!

He nailed it big time, I heard him loud and clear. I don't think he could've said it any better. That post itself would help alot of people I believe.

 

[ChrisfromCanada]

Hi Jake007!

I realize this is a thread asking about Ambien, and if you want to go that route, that's your decision. I think those drugs are okay as a way to very occasionally deal with insomnia -- but, if you use them a lot, you will become dependent and the insomnia you will experience while trying to get off them may be insane. I have been down that path. Worse, Ambien is a bandaid -- until you address the real reasons for your insomnia, you're going to have a bad time.

All I really wanted to say is -- you have to find a way to shake the fear of not sleeping, because as long as you are afraid, you are not going to sleep, your whole nervous system has spent millions of years evolving to keep you safe, which means not letting you sleep while you think you're in danger.

When I finally got off of benzos (which are very similar to ambien), I went several months of often only sleeping an hour or two. It was awful. But -- at some point, I realized... I wasn't going to go insane, I wasn't going to become totally nonfunctional and hallucinate and lose my job (those were the anxieties I had at the time). None of that was real. I wasn't in danger, I was just inconvenienced.

You are also safe. You can continue to have insomnia for a long time, and nothing really bad will happen -- you will just be tired (and probably anxious, sweaty, unhappy). That's very annoying and unpleasant. But it's not dangerous. You don't need to be scared of not sleeping, because it's not a threat, its just an annoyance.

Just my .02. It took me a long time and a lot of tricks and CBT and nonsense to figure out how to sleep without drugs, but it was one of the most useful things I've done for myself.

I still get bouts of insomnia, from time to time, and now it's fine. It annoys me, but I get up, read a book, do something useful with the time.

Wow I needed to hear this. I am currently tapering off of benzo's and look forward to the day I am off. I am expecting insomnia and anxiety but fk it. I'm so sick of being dependant on a medication to sleep. Its only been two months on ativan and I dont really feel messed up or anything but there is better ways. I have been telling Jake to not touch benzo's as they are a great short term solution but in the long run they will ruin your life! Ive recommended yoga and deep breathing as well as epsom salt baths and chamomile nor any other natural way of sleeping because it is the better way

 

[Jake007]

Hi Jake007!

I realize this is a thread asking about Ambien, and if you want to go that route, that's your decision. I think those drugs are okay as a way to very occasionally deal with insomnia -- but, if you use them a lot, you will become dependent and the insomnia you will experience while trying to get off them may be insane. I have been down that path. Worse, Ambien is a bandaid -- until you address the real reasons for your insomnia, you're going to have a bad time.

All I really wanted to say is -- you have to find a way to shake the fear of not sleeping, because as long as you are afraid, you are not going to sleep, your whole nervous system has spent millions of years evolving to keep you safe, which means not letting you sleep while you think you're in danger.

When I finally got off of benzos (which are very similar to ambien), I went several months of often only sleeping an hour or two. It was awful. But -- at some point, I realized... I wasn't going to go insane, I wasn't going to become totally nonfunctional and hallucinate and lose my job (those were the anxieties I had at the time). None of that was real. I wasn't in danger, I was just inconvenienced.

You are also safe. You can continue to have insomnia for a long time, and nothing really bad will happen -- you will just be tired (and probably anxious, sweaty, unhappy). That's very annoying and unpleasant. But it's not dangerous. You don't need to be scared of not sleeping, because it's not a threat, its just an annoyance.

Just my .02. It took me a long time and a lot of tricks and CBT and nonsense to figure out how to sleep without drugs, but it was one of the most useful things I've done for myself.

I still get bouts of insomnia, from time to time, and now it's fine. It annoys me, but I get up, read a book, do something useful with the time.

@HeidiB

 

[IrinaM]

@glynis
How did got of them after 6 weeks?
Slowly smaller the dose? Was it hard?
I am using them 3 weeks and want to end it up but safely because of side effects.

 

[glynis]

I was only on them a short while and not every day.
Go by your doctors advice coming off them .
I sleep ok now on a low dose AD for sleep 25mg.
Love glynis x