I got an Ativan script to help w anxiety for an upcoming surgery- and I have struggled w anxiety my whole life – I did try ssris and Wellbutrin, neither made me this relaxed this easily.
I know it’s addictive, but damn I wish it could be the OTC anxiety option like Tylenol or Advil
In: Chemistry
They effect different chemicals that do very different things.
Benzo’s effect GABA, which determines how fast things happen in your brain. Think of a stoplight at an intersection! It tells the stop light to be red and yellow more often. You can change the programming in the sign quickly and traffic won’t really notice – unless you adjust it for months. Then traffic WILL adjust and that’s why getting off benzo’s or alcohol (both effect GABA) can cause seizures or death. Because once the lights are back to normal, the traffic isn’t, and you’ll get a lot more “accidents” – including fatal ones.
SSRI effect serotonin, which does a lot of things in the body, and need to be adjusted very, very slowly because your body needs time to adjust. If you have too many pitchers on the field your body will create more catchers. And if suddenly there’s a lot of catchers and no pitchers, your baseball field gets really messed up. And your body can take a loooong time to hire or fire more pitchers and catchers. Like if you took MDMA and suddenly have a hundred pitchers and one catcher? Your body won’t realize it needs way lay catchers for weeks or months or years!
And your body only wants so many balls being thrown on the field at one time, so your body is making fewer baseballs too! So if you adjust things too quickly or too slowly you may have too many or two few pitchers, catchers, or not enough baseballs to play a game! And it’s really, really important you have enough baseballs to play and the right pitchers and catchers.
We can talk about downstream effects (longer term, more complex) of both but that’s the basic difference.
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