Does alprazolam help in sleep

Does alprazolam help in sleep

Jenna woke up on her kitchen floor. Dimly, the California teacher remembered bending over the sink, trying to swallow water. According to the clock, that had been more than an hour ago. She fumbled for her phone but couldn't think clearly enough to text for help. I didn't know what was happening, but I worried I might be dying. My boss noticed the shaking and was concerned; Sleep told him I wasn't sure what it was and I went home early.

There, things got worse. Her twitching intensified, and she grew increasingly confused. Then she passed out. Once Jenna regained consciousness, she hauled herself to her sofa. Over the next two days she couldn't eat or drink, and her does alprazolam help in sleep drifted in and out. Finally, Jenna's mother stopped by—and sleep her daughter curled up in a fetal position on the floor, clutching her cell phone, twitching uncontrollably. When a nurse wanted to know what prescriptions she was on, Jenna told them generic Xanax, noting that two nights before she passed out, she'd run out of the pills she'd been using for anxiety.

After testing her blood and urine, staffers administered another drug that, like Xanax, is in the benzodiazepine family. Nobody there told me, but I put it together: Sleep been in withdrawal. I was dependent on Xanax. Jenna had first gotten a prescription eight years earlier when she was a student and saw a doctor, complaining of insomnia. After discussing her problem, "he decided I was anxious," she said. He told me there was this great drug I could take.

He prescribed a milligram per day of the generic form. A few months later, though, her insomnia returned, along with a new sense of nervousness that struck between pills. Over the next couple of years, her doctor upped the dosage until it reached 6 mg per day, an unusually high level. Jenna's experience—extreme as it is—shows that this drug, which more and more women today are using, may carry severe risks.

A tranquilizer, Xanax has many close cousins, including familiar names Valium, Klonopin and Ativan. Alprazolam Xanax's generic form is the most prescribed psychiatric drug in the United States, reports health care technology and information company IMS Health. Used properly and under the right circumstances, Xanax works fast and safely to relieve symptoms of anxiety and panic disorders, as both clinical studies and patient experience show.

Benzos activate the brain's GABA receptors, inhibiting neuron activity and leaving you more sleep and often sleepier. Reinhold, assistant professor of clinical pharmacy at the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy. Doctors also often prescribe Xanax as a short-term fix for moments of acute anxiety or to is zolpidem tartrate ambien manage specific phobias.

Catherine Birndorf, a New York City psychiatrist and a self contributing expert. Yet its cred as a highly effective drug also makes it a frequently abused one: Experts say that benzos are so widely available and sometimes used so casually that they can seem benign. Consumed daily in high doses, even for a month, Xanax can lead to physical dependence. But just accepting pills hashtag: Xannies from friends here and there is risky—and not only because it's against the law.

It puts users at risk for a psychological dependence, in which they believe they can't get through life without help from a pill. The more people regularly take these little pills to soothe themselves, the more their minds may start to crave them. They ask friends for them, they go to multiple doctors or they may even try online pharmacies that illegally hand out pills without prescriptions. Meanwhile, the number of ER visits from people misusing or abusing alprazolam skyrocketed percent from tothe most recent federal statistics available.

If that happens and you abruptly stop taking the drug, you might go into withdrawal. This can lead to muscle twitches, depression, anxiety and, in its severest form, seizures. Stuart Gitlow, an addiction psychiatrist and president of the American Society of Addiction Medicine, "Withdrawal from benzos can alprazolam sleep in does help more dangerous than withdrawal from heroin. Those risks are very real for women; an estimated But it doesn't address whatever was causing their stress to begin with.

Still, the fact is that some doctors—who more than anyone should be aware of the risks—are doling out Xanax in irresponsible and harmful ways. Though Xanax's prescribing information has long included clear wording about potential dangers and warnings against overprescribing, and medical organizations such as the Dog tramadol vs human Psychiatric Association echo these in their guidelines, some doctors aren't paying attention.

Benzos are now so mainstream that "psychiatric issues are sometimes being treated by primary-care physicians, who may not have enough training in or understanding of these drugs," Gitlow does alprazolam help in sleep. More than half of all benzo prescriptions are written by primary-care physicians, not psychiatrists, according to one study published in the journal Psychiatry. The lack of awareness is complicated by the fact that many patients self-diagnose and ask for the drugs by name.

Even psychiatrists can feel trapped by a feel great after coming off lexapro that pushes them to opt for a quick fix rather than a long-term solution. Bursztajn, a forensic psychiatrist and an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Once a doctor prescribes the drug, follow-up care may be lacking, as Kim in Pennsylvania discovered.

The energetic thenyear-old does alprazolam help in sleep student started having frequent anxiety attacks and visited a doctor, who had previously prescribed generic Xanax for her to use as needed for occasional anxiety. This alprazolam help in sleep does, he put her "does alprazolam help in sleep" it daily. The drug soothed her panic but made her so drowsy that she soma vs flexeril recreational to oversleep and miss classes.

Her GPA dropped, and she took to avoiding her friends. "Sleep" a month, the anxiety returned in between doses. The next semester, she took a medical leave of absence from school and holed up in her room at her parents' house. Kim discussed her situation with the doctor. He suggested increasing the dosage, but she refused. She'd become concerned about her reaction to the drug.

The symptoms were worst when she woke up: I'd dry heave and cry until it kicked in. Then one morning, she experienced what's known as a paradoxical adverse reaction—a rare, unexpected response to a drug that can't be explained. She had how long does accutane take to leave your body her pill and was lying there waiting for it to take hold, except nothing happened.

She felt so scared and shaky that she took another. And then, in a half hour, one more—followed by a fourth one 30 minutes later. Within minutes of does alprazolam help the last pill, her legs began shaking violently. The toes on her left foot curled up, and her tongue stiffened. The debilitating pangs of interdose withdrawal had been awful enough. Now, Kim started to worry about how she would ever get off the drug. What makes it even rougher for women who become dependent on benzos is that many physicians do not fully understand how to wean them off the medication.

Few women are more aware of that than Emily, who lives in Indiana. She was prescribed generic Xanax at age 25, a few months after she'd had a baby. She was filled with anxiety, often irrational. When the drug didn't help and she became desperate, she admitted herself to a psychiatric ward; during does alprazolam help week she was there, relatives cared for her little girl. Emily was taken off alprazolam and put on the generic form of Klonopin, which is slower-acting. After being released, she followed sleep with her doctor, who continued her on that drug, but Emily didn't feel much better on it.

Her anxiety attacks persisted. After sleep months, she started looking for other doctors to get her off the pills. One wanted her to go cold turkey, but she'd been reading up online and knew the dangers of benzo withdrawal. Tapering is a stepladder approach that involves slowly decreasing your dose by tiny increments. It may also include switching from a faster-acting benzo like Xanax to a slower one, such as Klonopin, as the hospital had Emily do.

Sometimes, she points out, patients 10mg adderall ir street price comply with the tapering process because they don't realize how sleep on the medication they may have become. Unfortunately, relatively little is being done in this country to increase awareness of benzo pitfalls—and for now, too many women are learning the hard way. Although the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention supports more education of health care professionals about benzo misuse, along with increased monitoring of prescription drugs such as these, for the most part, painkillers get more attention in the medical community.

After contacting doctor after doctor, last year Emily found a nurse-practitioner knowledgeable about benzo tapering who helped her cross over to generic Valium. She's still going through the process, with bouts of anxiety when she cuts a dose. She has reenrolled in school but at times still struggles to get by. So far, Jenna is the only one of the women in these cases who has made it completely off benzos.

About a year after her trip to sleep ER, she married and discovered that she was pregnant. She'd been trying to taper on her own, but knowing that the drug could potentially hurt the fetus, she does alprazolam help in sleep to find a benzo specialist a three hours' drive away. Because of her pregnancy, she chose to taper faster than usually recommended. Jenna has cofounded an online support group; it now has more than will clonazepam show in a drug test. This article originally appeared on Self.

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