One of the benzo withdrawal symptoms that is listed on so many institutional websites is: irritability. Irritability? That doesn’t sound so bad. It doesn’t sound like nearly breaking your hand smacking a wall after you couldn’t put together a plastic toy set for your child. No, I would say I experienced something more like inhuman rage during benzo withdrawal. 

Now, anyone can have frustrations that boil over. But benzo withdrawal turns you into a live wire. Every negative sensation and emotion gets turned up to volume 11. And while I wasn’t angry and enraged every second, when it struck me, it was as if I was possessed. 

A lot of benzo withdrawal feels like that. Like there is another entity taking possession of your mind and body. In some cases, like during depersonalization and derealization episodes, you actually feel like you are outside of your physical body. 

Front to back, benzo withdrawal is terrifying and miserable and awful. I don’t want in any way to rank symptoms, and to be honest even if I did, anger and rage would not be at the top of the list. It would be akathisia, without a doubt. 

But one thing that made this out of control rage really difficult to handle was the deep regret I would have afterwards. I would say and do things that I felt were not me, inflicting emotional pain on those around me. I was mostly surrounded by family and friends who were very understanding of what I was going through, but regardless, once certain things are said, they can’t be taken back.

There are so many times where I wish I could have gone back and used one of the following tactics. 

Drop everything and go for a walk

Going for a walk is one of life’s cheat codes. And I would say in particular, a walk in nature. But even if you can’t go in nature, just try to find somewhere that is a bit quiet. Any amount of time is good, but at least 20 minutes is ideal. There are all sorts of physical health benefits to walking – increased energy, better circulation, better sleep, lower cholesterol, weight loss – but walking is also an enormous net positive for your mental health. 

Walking reduces the reactivity of your hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. Let me translate that. Walking makes your central nervous system less reactive. During benzo withdrawal your central nervous system is like a sling shot that has been pulled back beyond all physical limits. Walking itself is not going to heal this. The passage of time is the one true medicine for benzo withdrawal. But walking helps enormously. And it can be an instant balm for anger and rage. 

Scream into a pillow

You may not have time to go walking or you may be at a phase in your benzo withdrawal when you don’t even want to leave the house. Scream into a pillow. Yes, I’m serious. Try it. Next time you feel this inhuman anger and rage coming on, scream full strength into a pillow. Do not hold anything back. It is liberating. It is cathartic. For me, it often feels like the anger is leaving my body. Sometimes it was screaming and crying simultaneously. And that’s fine. What matters is how you feel afterwards. 

Learn to breathe the right way

My previous video was about air hunger, and in that video I shared a few breathing techniques that have helped me. Breathing techniques are great because you can use them whenever. They are free tools that are always available. And they are tools that we neglect to our detriment. It turns out that much of our physical and mental health is tied to our blood chemistry which in turn is linked to our breathing. 

Try inhaling through your nose for 4 seconds, holding your breath for 7 seconds and then slowly exhaling through the mouth for 8 seconds. The nasal inhale is important. Breathing through your nose slows down your breathing and it helps fill up the lower lobes of the lungs. It also releases nitric oxide, which is a vasodilator that serves to widen your blood vessels, increasing the circulation of oxygen in the bloodstream. 

The longer exhale is also important. Longer exhales stimulate your parasympathetic nervous system. While your sympathetic nervous system carries signals that activate your “fight or flight” stress response, your parasympathetic nervous system carries signals that relax and calm the body and mind.

I’ve also found that focusing on the breath and having to count out each phase can actually calm my brain and body just through distraction. 

I nearly lost it restringing a guitar. Something so simple and so unimportant almost wrecked my day. This breathing technique dissolved the anger. I ended up laughing about it.

Sometimes it is the things that are so petty and so unimportant that make us furious. But in the moment you can’t just tell yourself this is not worth getting angry over. When you are enraged, the rational brain has checked out and you need to bypass some neural circuitry in order to calm yourself down. That’s where these techniques come in.

As with many of my other symptoms it was around the 8-9 month mark that I started to see progress. I noticed that certain things that would have triggered me to no end were no longer doing so, or at least not to the same extent. This is not to say that the symptom of anger and rage disappeared entirely or even that it was a straight line of forward progress. 

As you know, nothing is easy or straightforward with benzo withdrawal. But now, at 15 months off benzos, while I still don’t want to see I am entirely free of it, it’s starting to feel like something close to that.