Dr. Nicole Cain outlines how to safely taper benzodiazepines with a doctor's help, explaining how the drugs suppress your body's natural GABA production. Withdrawal peaks within 12-24 hours and can last up to two weeks. She recommends meditation, hydration at half your body weight in ounces, magnesium L-threonate, and an amino-acid supplement to bridge GABA during the taper.
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Today we're going to talk about how you can get off of benzodiazepine using safe, natural and effective strategies. Getting off of benzodiazepines like Xanax, Valium, Klonopin and Ativan can be extremely difficult and for some, nearly impossible. There are, however, powerful safe and effective natural solutions to help you not only taper off, but but to discontinue your medications and also actually feel like yourself again. I want to give a disclaimer that it's important to always have a physician who's got your back during this process. Slow and steady always wins the race. And so while getting off of benzos is possible, you want to make sure that you're individualizing your experience and working with a trusted clinician to help you get the safest and best results. That being said, let's talk about integrative strategies for tapering off of benzos. First, we need to talk about how do benzodiazepine medications work? In order to help our patients enjoy true restoration, a naturopathic physician must first identify the root cause of symptoms. This means that we have to understand what's happening physiologically when someone's taking a benzodiazepine. When you take any kind of benzodiazepine, it increases the amount of a neurochemical called GABA in your system. GABA is an amino acid that acts as a neurotransmitter in your central nervous system. GABA inhibits signal transmission in the brain and thus has a calming effect on the nervous system. GABA is often prescribed, for example, for those who suffer from anxiety, panic attacks and insomnia. As a result of taking your benzodiazepine, your body has an increased amount of exogenous or originating from outside of you, amounts of GABA and compensates by shutting down its own production of endogenous or internal gaba. Therefore, when you start to try to wean off or taper down on your benzodiazepine because your own natural production of GABA has been shut down and you will suddenly find yourself with too low GABA and you will develop symptoms of withdrawal. Let's talk about benzodiazepine withdrawal syndrome. Symptoms of benzodiazepine withdrawal typically emerge within 12 to 24 hours of your last dose. This will depend, of course, on which type of benzodiazepine you're taking. Some benzodiazepines are short acting, while others are in your system quite a lot longer, which will impact your withdrawal. Initially, you may experience what is called Rebound. The duration of this rebound depends again on which medication you're taking, the dosage, the duration of taking this medication, and any other health conditions that you're dealing with. Next, you may start to suffer from benzodiazepine withdrawal syndrome, which can last up to two weeks. Symptoms of benzodiazepine withdrawal syndrome may include sleep disturbances or insomnia, feelings of anger, irritability, increased tension, muscle pain, anxiety, panic attacks. People also report tremors, shaking. Sometimes people get seizures, increased sweating, difficulty, concentration, throwing up, dry retching, nausea, weight loss and so many other symptoms. Long term effects of benzodiazepine withdrawal may occur from weeks, months to months to even years. We see long term effects more commonly in those who take in a high dose, shorter acting benzodiazepine like Xanax. So let me give you my top tips for success when you're thinking about or beginning the process of tapering under your physician's supervision. Number one is to take it slow. The research shows that those who taper more slowly tend to do better in the long term. A taper that is too quick will likely result in rebound symptoms like anxiety, seizures, panic, heart racing and more. And symptoms may persist from months to years even after the medication has been discontinued. The key is to individualize your taper schedule according to your unique biochemistry. When you reduce a dose, note your symptoms, physically and mentally and emotionally. If the withdrawal symptoms are troublesome, the taper reduction may be too soon, too much or too fast. Some patients take years to taper and others take longer. I talk quite a lot more about benzodiazepine tapering in the tapering medications course. But the good news is that you can get well. Just be patient and be sure to see an educated clinician who is willing to work with you and who skills in assisting with this process using integrative methods. So let's talk about some of those integrative methods. The first thing is to always have a daily meditation. You need to be using meditation. This can not only help with the anxiety, depression and withdrawal symptoms that you may be experiencing, but it has also been shown to actually decrease the sympathetic or fight flight response that your body may be accustomed to. This approach will also increase what's called your parasympathetic response. It will help relax your body, improve digestion and help you sleep better. One of my approaches for this is easy and you can do it anywhere. It's called four count left nasal breathing. To do this, you just simply inhale for four counts. You hold at the top for four counts. You exhale for four counts and then you hold at the bottom for four counts. Doing it through the left nostril will actually increase the parasympathetic effect of the breathing. But of course, if your nose is congested or just the left side is congested, then just simply doing the square breathing technique will give you benefit. Also, make sure to drink lots of water. Typically I recommend half your weight in ounces. Your brain is made of fat and water and we're working on asking your brain to rebalance, re equilibriate and heal. And, and so we need to give it the water so that it can do that. You're going to get best results if you avoid caffeine, sugar and highly processed foods, as these will make your symptoms worse. Make sure to eat a diet high in protein, healthy oils and fats. Try to limit your time in front of screens, so reduce your television time, your phone time and your ipod time. There's the blue light conversation. And also we have found that screens can be quite, quite overstimulating for a nervous system. One of my best tools for helping taper down and off of benzodiazepines is Happy Sleepy Powder, which you can find@drnicolecane.com after over a decade of helping people taper down and off of their medications with the supervision of their prescribing physician, I have found that the number one benefit is to get those amino acids regulated and back up in the body. Remember we were talking about how as you go down on your benzodiazepines, your GABA levels go down. So we want to create something called a GABA Bridge. The Happy Sleepy Powder formulation contains nutrients that support your body's natural ability to make gaba and it creates that GABA Bridge. This will help reduce the side effects and the withdrawal symptoms as you're coming down on your benzodiazepine. And they also, each of the amino acids has incredible benefit in different areas of your mind and body. Another boost to Happy Sleepy powder is adding magnesium L threonate, specifically the threonate form, as we've seen in the clinical literature, that it is best able to cross the blood brain barrier. We know that magnesium is used for a myriad of biochemical pathways and supporting those pathways with magnesium will help your brain with the tapering process. Magnesium is also relaxing, so it can help with headaches, anxiety, it can help you sleep, and it can reduce muscle pain and tension that can come with a benzo taper. For more helpful information, check out our social media at DrNicolecane. And as always, we're adding things to our website constantly at www.drnicolecane.com.
