The Ambien Scam!
I know that is a pretty incendiary title but wait and judge for yourself. Unfortunately, I have taken Ambien on and off for the last 12 years. No I never took it longer than the prescribed week and most of the time it was one night a week or less, sometimes months in between. I would use it when I hadn’t been getting much sleep for a few days. I figured that if I could get one good night sleep I might stop myself from getting sick and missing work. Now anyone that has taking Ambien knows that it can be addicting even when the drug company says it isn’t. If you can’t sleep but you can when you take Ambien, you soon grow to rely on Ambiens ability to put you to sleep. I simply used it sparingly, thinking I could minimize the risks. All drugs have side effects and if we think otherwise we are simply fooling ourselves.
Now, I knew Ambien could be psychologically addicting and one of my doctors, who also took it occasionally, told me that it could slow your thinking capabilities when you were taking it and possibly more over time. When I heard that I really cut back, but over time the pull for a good night sleep would win out even if it was fewer and farther between. Now, why I noticed this I am not sure, but one day after I had taken Ambien to sleep, I felt a lot of anxiety. It didn’t make sense, nothing bad had happened that day. Things were going well and in fact I was very happy with recent events in my life. So, why was I feeling anxious ,stressed and depressed. Something was happening to my body that I didn’t like and couldn’t understand. I tried to analyze what I had done that was different that day or the day before, and then it hit me that I had taken Ambien the night before. I had never heard that Ambien could increase depression symptoms or just outright cause them, so I Googled. What I great thing the internet is! I found page after page of people complaining about how Ambien was effecting them. Depression, stressed, anger! Most of the people writing had never had depression in their life. Now, I have had depression but everything I was doing from lifestyle changes to Bio-identical Hormones had changed that. This for me was a frightening discovery. It was literally changing how I felt, and undoing all the good the other things I was using were doing. That is a pretty powerful drug in my estimation.
Now, you have to decide if you think I have a point that Ambien is a scam. For me it was clear that Ambien was perpetuating itself . We get depressed when we don’t sleep so we take Ambien thinking it will help, but it causes the cycle to continue. We are sleeping but we still feel depressed. Well it was clear to me what I needed to do. I don’t take Ambien anymore, I don’t need the artificial depression, life is just too short for that. sometimes we just can’t have our cake and eat it too. We can’t live the hectic lives we do, without some consequences. Sleep might just be one of those, so cut back and relax and get a good night sleep and do it without Ambien.
Just some more things to think about.
Kris
