While no one really wants to hear this, and I preface this with I still struggle sometimes, but lots of therapy and venlafaxine (SNRI) is what did it for me. The medication got the endless, racing, intrusive thoughts and memories to slow down so I could sleep. Then the therapy did the rest. I'm off the meds now and just smoke a lot of weed, and drink a couple times a week still. Not perfect, but better. The pills made it hard for me to get off, so I opted to manage it myself once I'd had things under control for about a year.
I’m totally onboard with therapy as a concept, if I can find one that doesn’t gaslight me. I totally feel you in it being a good idea to pursue though.
Do you mind sharing which one worked for you? I’ve been in a variety of cocktails from seroquel to vraylor, zaleplon to lithium… no shit my experiences with psychiatry led me to have sympathy for “it’s a scam” types… problematic as they often are.
Booze: quit with a friend. All forms of getting sober have shit success rates, but quitting with a friend has the highest.
Stabby dreams: Maybe look into EMDR therapy. It seems kinda nuts but it’s scientifically backed and has a good success rate with trauma responses like that
Sleep paralysis: Alcohol makes sleep paralysis worse. Seems like you’re consuming so much alcohol that you’re passing out rather than just falling asleep, which would make it so you wouldn’t wake up during REM sleep as easily. I believe alcohol also reduces frequency and length of REM sleep but don’t quote me on that. Either way, the alcohol makes sober sleep more likely to produce sleep paralysis. Could just be anxiety or some other mental health thing. Could also be narcolepsy-related. Do you fall asleep quicker and more easily than most people? You can take online screeners for that that’ll tell you whether or not you should be seen for narcolepsy.
I take forever to fall asleep, lifelong insomnia. I hear on the making it worse part, but it bats 100 in terms of preventing it, which is my foundational priority.
I’ll loon into the therapy, in a month I’ll have health insurance that covers it, yay.
You are dead on though, I use substances to las out and bypass whatever it is that’s been giving me sleep paralysis since I can recall.
im sure the drinking isnt helping with your sleep. Does THC help with your sleep if you switch to that? Have like a 10mg edible before bed kinda thing.
If you're not physically dependent on alcohol maybe try non-alcoholic alternatives? That may hit the same habitual part of the brain without making you intoxicated to the point you're not able to sleep properly.
I take great care to avoid physical dependence. I legit have charts . I often combine alcohol and delta-8, all forms of weed just induce a paranoid cycle of interpreting all my actions on the most cringe manner possible without alcohol.
Legit the “I wish they sold mids” meme in an illegal state.
Kava has been good to me, but it’s a massive pain.
I’m scared of Kratom, opiates in general terrify me.
The difference between mids and the high THC stuff you see nowadays is largely the absence of secondary cannabinoids like CBD. It is legal in most states to purchase hemp online, which is literally just weed with only cannabinoids other than THC. If you mix hemp and regular weed, you create a mid experience that you can titrate to your liking. Personally (as someone else prone to nightmares and sleep paralysis) I find a 10:1 hemp:weed ratio to be great for sleep.
I quit drinking (daily 15 years) for about 3-4 years with kratom. It was magical. Now I started drinking again a bit. About 20% of previous. It is much more controllable. I can completely stop if I want (I take 1-2 week breaks regularly) and it's more situational than built into every routine of life.
You can find out if kratom would help you by getting some leaf (powder) from a reputable online source and taking it starting about 1 g up to 3g in the afternoon. Do not take too much, it sucks. There used to be a good sidebar on /r/kratom with details. You won't get a physical dependence after a few days which is all you need to find out if it would even work. What I mean by "work" is that you would find yourself disinterested in drinking. If you drink you will be done after half a glass instead of 9. You forget to drink. It doesn't feel good anymore. It is very strange at first.
If it doesn't work then you don't worry about it. If it does work you can decide what if anything to do about using it. There is extensive folk knowledge regarding "t breaks" to avoid withdrawls. Personally every time I tried to do that I just ended up drunk off my ass. And I was physically dependent on alcohol so the choice was real, strong, dangerous, disruptive dependence vs mild, transitory dependence. Some people don't get it at all. I get wet eyes and sniffles mostly. A few people get prolonged symptoms.
People run into trouble using extracts. Stick to the plain leaf. Do not buy from gas stations or head shops. They are known to be contaminated with lead. And other things. You are way more likely to have dependence with extracts.
However, it will not help you sleep.
I have a z-drug for sleep because I can never sleep on my own. Trazadone worked for a little while but I would wake up totally ravenous and eat literally anything and gained like 40 lbs.
Hams.cc take harm reduction as far as works for you all the way to abstinence. Their “better is better” mantra saved my life and you don’t have to go to meetings and do the war stories thing which just makes everyone want to drink/drug
I get racing thoughts when I try to sleep as well. Lately just putting in headphones and listening to a podcast that I don't care too much about has helped a lot. Keeps my mind just distracted enough to not do the racing thoughts but not so distracting that I stay awake to listen. The podcast "Guys" is like perfectly in this sweet spot for me.
Plugging Northwoods Baseball Sleep Radio. They put on fake baseball games, it's very calming.
Quitting cold turkey is the best way to end an addiction but if that’s not possible (because alcohol addiction can literally kill you if bad enough) then you have to ween yourself off the junk ideally with medical intervention. Throw out whatever alcohol you may have if it isn’t going to literally kill you, if you will literally die without it then get real fucking help.
I'm sorry your sleep is so awful. That shit will break you down over time, and then everything just gets harder.
Alcohol is really helping you in several material ways, so in your position, I'd prioritize finding replacement strategies over anything else. Here are some suggestions I have from my own experience:
- Prazosin for nightmares. Got this from a psychiatrist, it's low risk (a repurposed blood pressure drug rather than a typical psych med), maybe helps with effects of alcohol use as well?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7572699/
-
Hemp for sleep. I like to dry herb vape mine. Maybe at minimum this reduces how much alcohol you need.
-
Specifically this herbal tea which has multiple sedating plants in it:
https://www.republicoftea.com/chamomile-lemon-herbal-tea/p/v00675/
- This one is very much YMMV, but have you tried playing around while in sleep paralysis in order to reduce your fear of it? This is extremely difficult at the beginning because it will physically feel like (and you will literally believe) you are about to die. But when you're in sleep paralysis, allow yourself to feel the complete all-consuming terror without reacting and struggling away from it. If you feel your heart going a million miles a minute, it isn't actually, it's an illusion. (I usually do not have the feeling of breathlessness, crushing, or suffocation, but I'd wager those are illusory as well, because actual inability to breathe would wake you up fully.) Then, as the fear recedes, and it will eventually - stay with me here - peel yourself out of your body. Or roll out of your body, or pop up out of it. Now the sleep paralysis is over and you are having a cool dream, congrats. Because of this method, I actually look forward to sleep paralysis. But again, YMMV, not all sleep paralysis is experienced the same way.
edit: Forgot one thing. When you peel out, you may feel very intense vibrations. These are also okay and cannot hurt you, so simply observe like you do the other fearful sensations (much much easier said than done)
I was at about 4-6 beers a day with double or triple that on weekends, managed to be coming up on 2 years without alcohol now. A few things helped me. I set up a spreadsheet to track consumption so I could actually see the scale of what I was doing and look at my chart to try and get my rolling averages down. I got to about an alcohol a day but couldn't get past that just by weening.
I started taking low doses of mushrooms once a week (more than micro dosing, less than hallucinating) which helped me process a lot of the underlying stuff I was trying to ro hide by drinking. Hot swapped most my social so I didn't feel like my alcoholism was the norm anymore. So much therapy. Therapy every week, sometimes twice if I had really rough patches.
The event that finally got me past the week mark was I got COVID. I felt too miserable to drink and by the time I felt like I wouldn't die on the spot if I had a beer it had been two weeks and my cravings had really eased up.
So a combination of years working through the underlying reasons I was drinking, weening as much as I could, and finally having a break long enough to bump me past the worst parts of withdrawal. If I had gotten COVID before I worked on all the underlying stuff it wouldn't have mattered I would have just gone back to covering everything up.
I don't have great advice for sleep. I also have bad insomnia. I can often get away with a very high CBD low THC edible and some tea with valerian root. I'm working on fixing some different underlying issues causing my brain to race really badly when I try to sleep.
The dependence can creep up on you. I let it happen to me. Trying to quit and waking up in the hospital was not a good time. Regardless of where this goes I'm glad you're looking into fixing it now instead of later.
