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If you've tried to get off sleeping pills and ended up wide awake for hours, waking in the middle of the night, or going back to the medication, you're not alone. And it's not because your body is broken or just because you're psychologically addicted. 


In this episode, I'm going to show you:

  • How to stop taking sleeping pills without getting rebound insomnia
  • Why most attempts fail even when you're doing everything you're told
  • What needs to be in place before you try again
  • How to approach this in a way that doesn't leave you worse off than when you started


00:00 Introduction: The Struggle with Sleeping Pills

01:07 Maura's Journey Stopping Trazadone

03:35 Understanding the Hidden Reasons for Insomnia

05:20 The Correct Way to Get Off Sleeping Pills

05:26 The Three Phases of Weaning Off Medication

09:46 Final Thoughts and Encouragement


Maura’s episode: ⁠https://youtu.be/scp5QlTHiHU


Episode Transcript


[00:00:00] If you've tried to get off sleeping pills and ended up wide awake for hours, waking in the middle of the night, or going back to the medication, you're not alone. And it's not because your body is broken or just because you're psychologically addicted.


I work with people who've been on Ambien, Trazodone, benzodiazepines, and other sleep medications for years, many of whom have tried to wean off multiple times and have failed. Not because they should have to take the pill forever, but because their body wasn't ready to sleep without it yet.


In this episode, I'm going to show you how to stop taking sleeping pills without getting rebound insomnia and why most attempts fail even when you're doing everything you're told.


I'll break down the hidden reason sleep falls apart during withdrawal, what needs to be in place before you try again, and how to approach this in a way that doesn't leave you worse off than when you started.[00:01:00] 


I want to tell you about my client, Maura, who thought her sleep would come back once her son started sleeping through the night. So her story is somewhat similar to mine. For a long time she blamed her insomnia on pregnancy and that made sense. Then her son was born and like most newborns, he woke frequently.


So of course she wasn't sleeping well and again that made sense. But when he was about a year old and finally sleeping through the night, she was still lying awake, unable to sleep at all. And that was the moment she realized that this isn't the baby anymore. There's something going on with with me. So by the time Maura came to me, she had tried a lot of things her doctors recommended, and she was taking Trazodone just to get through the day, but she totally felt stuck and she did not wanna be on medication.


She told me I was so tired that I would've tried almost everything. At that point, when we started working together, what stood out to me was that Maura wasn't looking for another [00:02:00] quick fix. So she wanted to understand what was actually going on in her body. We ran comprehensive lab testing and the results explained things.


She never would've connected on her own or even with her doctor. There were clear imbalances that hadn't been addressed before. I.


So once she had that information and knew what to do, she was very consistent. She made changes, she followed the plan, and over time her sleep started to stabilize. A couple months later, she was able to slowly reduce her medication. Now she was cautious and understandably nervous, but this time the process felt different.


And so within two months she was off Trazodone completely, which is honestly very fast and. Um, not all of my clients can get off medication this quickly, but for her it totally worked and she was very motivated to do this. So now she sleeps seven to eight hours most nights, and [00:03:00] just as importantly, if she has a rough night, she doesn't panic.


She told me before One bad night meant I thought everything was falling apart. Now I just see it as a bad night, and that shift is something I see when people truly. Recover their sleep is, it's not perfect sleep because no one ever has perfect sleep. We all have off nights every now and then, but it's mostly consistent, steady, resilient sleep.


That's what we're looking for.


So we know that sleeping pills are addictive, both physically and psychologically. A lot of times my clients think that, you know, the sleeping pills might actually be hurting their sleep. But it's still really hard to commit to trying not to take them. We know that sleeping pills sedate us. They don't actually produce natural sleep, and so that's why, you know, there's this connection between sleeping pills, especially Ambien and Alzheimer's.


Whereas sleep [00:04:00] helps prevent Alzheimer's, but unnatural sleep from sleeping pills unfortunately doesn't. So pills suppress symptoms, they're really a bandaid. While cortisol is still high at night, blood sugar might be unstable at night. The detox pathways are totally overloaded. Neurotransmitters are depleted or out of balance, and the nervous system just remains in that fight or flight, hyper arousal state.


So when you try and stop taking the sleeping pill, the body still can't sleep because it's still out of balance. And the truth is, if your body can't sleep with support, it's not going to sleep without it. So taking away the sleeping pill first. Is not going to help. It's gonna leave you in the same place that you were before.


I will be right back to the show in a second, but have you been trained all the things to sleep better, and yet you're still relying on sleep aids if you're ready to fall [00:05:00] asleep, easily stay asleep all night and wake up feeling rested without medication. That's exactly what I help people do in the Complete Sleep Solution Program.


To get started, you can apply at the link in the description. So let's talk about the correct way to get off sleeping pills. So there are really three phases. The first one is first stabilize the body. So we want to get the body back in balance first before we remove a sleep aid. So we're. You know, that's what I do with the lab testing is look for everything in the body that's outta balance.


So I'm looking at blood sugar, I'm looking at gut health, I'm looking at liver detox. I'm looking at neurotransmitters. I'm looking for toxins and. Um, helping with calming the nervous system. So in this phase, we aren't tapering off any kind of sleep meds yet. We're helping the body get back in balance first.


And then the second phase is [00:06:00] then we create this capacity for sleep. So we want sleep to becoming more consistent, even on the medication. And so we wanna see night wakings reduce or falling asleep faster and anxiety about sleep, definitely going down. And then that's when we know that the body's ready.


So then I recommend for phase three, a very gradual wean down process. Now I'm not a doctor, so this has to be done with doctor's approval, but so far I haven't had any client's, doctors say that this, um, wean down plan is not appropriate. If anything, it's much slower than they would recommend. So what I recommend is a very slow and strategic taper where let's say you're taking.


Trazodone every night. So I recommend the first week, that one night out of the week, ideally probably on a weekend, um, night that you take [00:07:00] half a dose of the Trazodone, and then the next week you do that two nights of the week and the next week, three nights of the week, and so on. And by doing it this way, your body isn't actually going through withdrawal from the drug.


So it's usually the withdrawal that. Is going to cause that rebound insomnia where sleep gets even worse than before. And it's not that your sleep has gotten worse, it's that your body's withdrawing from a drug. So this really eliminates that. And then after you're down at to half a dose. Every night.


Then on the eighth week, one night you do zero of the dose that first week. And then the second week you do two nights without any and the third week and so on. So you can see this takes a while. It's gonna take 14 weeks. Um, and some people wanna do it slower and some people are able to do it a lot faster.


So that's why I work with people, you know, one-on-one to figure out what's gonna work best [00:08:00] for them. So. Then this becomes this biological process instead of a mindset challenge. So then this is also psychologically easier to do because you know you're not going to go through withdrawals. You know that everything's probably gonna be fine on half the dose and that it's only gonna be one night.


And so we kind of talk through the mindset too of like, if that's a rough night, here's how we're gonna think about it. Here's what you're actually going to do. And then if it, and a lot of times it's a totally fine night or totally not any different than any other night. So, and a lot of times people find that they are sleeping much better.


Without the medication and sometimes the medication is actually making sleep worse. I mean, some of the side effects, some of these medications for sleep are insomnia. It's totally crazy, but it [00:09:00] does help to, and what's, it is essential to work on the imbalances in the body first, and then it's so much easier to wean off when your body's going to be able to sleep normally without needing that medication.


Now I also wanna add that this is different for benzodiazepines, and again, I'm not a doctor, so this definitely needs to be done under a doctor's approval. But for benzos, it's recommended to wean down like 10% per month. So it needs to be a very slow, gradual wean down for something like that. So if you're trying to get off sleep meds right now, I actually recommend to stop tapering and to stabilize, first to find out what's going on in your body first.


And so know that if you failed before, it wasn't your, it wasn't you, it wasn't your fault. You just have skipped the foundation of, again, addressing. [00:10:00] The health of the body, and just because you failed before does not mean that you won't be able to get off sleep meds in the future and get your body back in balance.


And so if you're, if you're scared, you'll never sleep naturally again. Just know your body can relearn sleep. It's what we're meant to do, but only when we're in balance. So if you want help figuring out what's actually keeping your body depending on sleep meds, that's the work that I do. And again, you comply for the Complete Sleep Solution Program at the link in the description.


And I recommend you listen to Maura's video next - ⁠https://youtu.be/scp5QlTHiHU


And if you wanna hear More's story, you can watch the next video where I have her on the podcast.

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