Posted by omegon on January 15, 2004, at 20:00:11
In reply to Re: WHEN WILL IT WORK, posted by sb2 on January 15, 2004, at 18:53:49
> > been on 75 mgs for 10 days now...with effexor I cannot take in the morning because Iam to drowsy to drive to work. At night I have all kinds of dreams and jerk alot when Iam about to fall asleep. Does the drowsiness go away. Does sleep ever return to normal. I need to be alert. I need motivation!!! will this one do it?
Your experience is like mine when I started (see earlier post http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20040109/msgs/299903.html). Until I got to 225mg, each dosage level made me very sleepy once the initial dose increase side-effects wore off after a week or so. The sleepiness didn't go away with time; it got steadily worse over 5 weeks at 225mg (3 doses 8 hours apart). I then tried 150mg morning and 75mg evening for 2 weeks, which was worse - MORE drowsy, dangerous to drive to work, less motivation, etc. On return to 3 spaced-out doses, the dose-increase side effects returned much worse (adrenaline rush) and it destabilised my mood enough that I had to quit after two more weeks. (crying for no reason, rage at nothing, etc. I may need a mood stabiliser.)
For me the insane dreams did disappear completely once I'd been at the same dose for about three weeks, unless I lay in / slept during the day - you might like to avoid this; for me it gave hellish dreams and worse mood when I eventually got up. Of course, when you're feeling that sleepy it's nearly impossible to get out of bed even with dreams chasing you ;)
The muscle twitching decreased as well, but was never a major problem for me, just irritating.If you're on a low enough dose not to need to space it out, you could try switching between taking it at night <-> morning. Taking it at night still made me drowsy initially, but I couldn't get a full night's sleep that way - kept waking up - and was still hard to get out of bed in the morning. So I stuck with morning when I was on 75mg.
From the limited experience I've had with this drug, the best advice I can give you is to be absolutely rigid about taking it at the same time every day (set an alarm - seriously) and to be very cautious about changes in dosage or time of dosage. The short half-life seemed to cause major problems for me if I wasn't careful about this. Indeed it seemed to cause problems anyway. Change it slowly if possible and expect it to take at least a week to settle down.
Efexor did help my alertness and motivation a lot - but only some of the time.
poster:omegon
thread:13781
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20040114/msgs/301408.html