Benzodiazepines provide you with crucial relief. Without them, you suffer from crippling anxiety and sometimes worse.

You have a supportive doctor and a standing prescription that you can reliably fill.

You suffer from no side effects (that you are aware of) and it genuinely seems like your life is better on benzodiazepines.

You’ve read about patients taking benzodiazepines for years, decades even. They seem to be doing alright. It would appear that there are many people that take benzodiazepines their whole adult lives.

You’ve also learned about the possibility of devastating withdrawal that can occur if you stop taking benzodiazepines.

So the question is, why would you ever stop?

Here are a few things to consider. For me personally, the only reason I needed was the last one.

You Could Run Out of Them

The most lightweight reason on this list, but it is real and something to consider. You could be traveling and have a change of plans or run into a delay or forget your pills somewhere.

There could be a shortage of the pills themselves. Look at what we saw post-COVID with supply chain ruptures.

There have also been cases where psychiatrists have abruptly changed or discontinued prescriptions depending on changing healthcare guidelines. Yes, this is completely insane and dangerous. And yes, it still happens.

Tolerance and Dependence

Our bodies want homeostasis. If you start using a drug chronically, your body pushes back and introduces countermeasures to get you back to baseline.

In my own case, I started having more panic attacks once I started taking Ativan. What started as sporadic use turned into daily use. In many cases, I would have to take more than one dose in a day. Eventually, I could not sleep without Ativan.

While some people feel like they are able to stabilize their dosage, environmental factors and life events can easily rock the boat and send you on a path to tolerance withdrawal.

Benzodiazepine users who have been taking the same dose for years without experiencing tolerance are often convinced that they have been spared this phenomenon. Maybe. Or Maybe not. There are people that get blindsided by tolerance withdrawal years after taking what appeared to be a stabilized dose.

You may think you are immune to tolerance only to have a nasty surprise down the road.

Cognitive Impairment and Sleep Disruption

You may feel better on benzodiazepines, but there are a few things going on behind the scenes that are seriously distressing.

Let’s start with sleep. If you have been taking benzodiazepines habitually, you may have already noticed this. You don’t dream. There is a jaw-dropping reduction of REM sleep.

There is also a reduction of stages 3 and 4 of non-REM sleep. All these drugs — xanax, ativan, valium, klonopin — will help you fall asleep quickly and you will stay asleep longer. But the quality of your sleep is worse.

Cognitive Impairment

I first noticed memory lapses. Simple things. Not being able to remember the name of someone that was a relatively close acquaintance. Then I realized how long it took me to process certain thoughts. I realized how difficult it was to concentrate. Sometimes it felt like my brain was stuck between gears. These are typical markers of brain fog.

A meta analysis of studies of benzodiazepine users conducted in 2018, “revealed statistically significant, negative effects for the cognitive domains of working memory, processing speed, divided attention, visuoconstruction, recent memory, and expressive language.”

Across the board, those who were chronically medicated with benzos did worse on mental aptitude tests. These drugs are blunting anxiety but sacrificing our mental faculties in the process.

The Building Blocks for Dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease

Benzodiazepines have an impact on your brain right now, but they can also lay the foundation for something much more sinister years later. Several studies have linked them with the onset of dementia and Alzheimer’s. Chronic use of benzodiazepines with a longer half-life, such as diazepam, tipped the scales even further.

There are some analyses that suggest that the onset of dementia may be incidental and not related to benzo use itself. This obviously warrants more research, but knowing what we know about the impact of benzodiazepine use on general cognitive function, it would be prudent to tread carefully when trying to absolve benzos in this case.

A Gray, Colorless Life

screenshot from the benzo recovery subreddit.

This is it for me. Benzodiazepines are like a general anesthetic to life itself. It flattens our senses and our experience of the world. Everything gets jumbled together in a colorless, gray mass.

Yes, I had less anxiety when I took ativan. But what was my actual experience of life like? My dreams disappeared and so did my memories. My waking life was dull and tolerable and not much else. I was constantly fatigued and rarely motivated.

Benzo withdrawal is a nightmare, and there are days where I feel like I am still laboring through it. But I am deeply grateful that I didn’t settle for sleepwalking through life in a haze. My energy is back. Life has color again.

There are many tools at our disposal to calm an overly sensitized nervous system. Benzos are one of them. But they are crude. They are an atomic bomb laying waste to everything, the good and the bad. I would rather wrangle with the bad while being able to fully appreciate the good. I would rather live with anxiety than not live at all.