Zopiclone worsened sleep problem, trying to get off

The problem is that without sleep the average person starts to feel irritable and

has no energy.

Why is it that some people need sleep and some don't? Is the answer pscychological or is it chemical? I suspect that it is mainly the later. Just look at a child sleeping and as they wake they have that groggy behaviour consistent with coming out of a drugged slumber.

In response to what Dave said--i think it's both bio-chemical and psychological, i mean, what i should say is, in my case it's both.  There's no doubt about it that many times i feel better, more energy, more motivated on days when i had very little sleep the night before, say, 4 hours or less, and other times i have what for me is a lot of sleep and i don't feel that good, i feel tired, so there's more going on than just the sleep meds.  There are physical things, health things, maybe it's nutrition, various things going on with any individual.

The psychological part, for me, is that even though i know for a fact that just bceause i get "little" sleep doesn't mean i will feel tired or yucky the next day, still because there are also days when i get 3 or 4 hours of sleep and i do feel yucky, i feel tired, i feel fragile, and i feel unmotivated to do anything and i feel so tired that i can't even enjoy watching a TV show, i can't enjoy social media, etc, it's painfully boring, i just have to get through those days.  But for me, the truth is, i more often do NOT feel bad when i get 3 or 4 hours of sleep, and also, in my case, it tends to happen that if i only get a little sleep, i usually sleep better the next night.  That isn't always true but is try more often than not.

But despite this variability and despite the FACT that just because i get 3 or 4 hours sleep doesn't mean i'm going to feel bad, i will take a second dose of (very short acting) zolpidem durign the night, after i've had 4 hours of sleep, in order to get more.  i am struggling with this and working on it.  I expect to get through it and overcome my way of just continuing to poison myself.

i do not believe that the damage to sleep is permanent, though many people including medical people, do think this.  i do think that if you have been depending on a crutch for sleep for a long time, again, in my case, it will be a long time for the body to consistently sleep well, at least a lot more well than what i currently have.  

I first began using something that put me to sleep in 1967, it was marijuana and at the end of a long night, smoking one would put me to sleep. i don't remember the details but i guess eventually this didn't always work anymore and that was when my doctor prescribed Valium for sleep, diazapam. It worked. i liked it.  i was in my 20s then.  i took it for 20 years, til 1993.  Then i got a tolerance when i was up to 30mg a night for a brief time and since it wasn't working anymore, i just quit it, cold turkey. I would never ever have considered tapering, i didn't even know there was such a thing. I just thought, "it's not working so what's the point in taking it?"  and i stopped. i had some withdrawal symptoms for a few days, the worst was only two days, and it wasn't THAT bad, and then it was over, except sleep was no longer controled by taking the medication, i had to just hope for the best each night.  

But over time, it progressed, showing that at least in my case, the body adapts--that was after about 25 years of sleep aid and while far from perfect, my sleep just kept getting better, longer stretches, like 5 or 6  hour stretches, and able to get back to sleep, that was after 4 to 6 months.

But during that time, my doctor, when i told him i sometimes would go 3 or 4 days with very little sleep (and i had a really intense social worker job and was a single parent of a little kid) prescribed zolpidem (Ambien). i was just really happy to no longer be poisoning myself so i was reluctant to take it, so for a year or two, i just took it once in a while, maybe 3 times a month or less.  But at some point, i increased it and then took it regularly and i am still taking it now.  

So it's now been about 45 years of using a sleep aid. And i added zopiclone into the mix about a year and a half ago.  In January and February this year, i tapered off the Zopiclone and didn't have any diffculty with it, that is, i was able to get off it easily, *because* i was taking a lot of zolpidem so i never had to deal with not being able to sleep.  

I went to an addiction medicine doctor for help getting off the zolpidem and he advised going onto diazapam and quitting the zolpidem which i did, no problem with that, i switched from Ambien to Diazapam, which i had thought i would never take again. But then i was supposed to taper off the diazapam pretty fast and i tried doing 1mg a week, and when i got to 7mg, i gave up, went back up to 8mg and have added zolpidem/Ambien back in with it.  This had to do with some life events that caused sleep challenges.  

Having said all this, i don't feel that helpless to get off these meds. i believe i'm making choices to continue to take it and that's where the psychological part comes in. i know in fact from past and recent experiences that i can sleep without the meds, not at first, but that if i stay off of them, my body will adapt, the neuro-chemistry will adapt. I won't be like those lucky people who just zonk out at night and sleep deep for 9 hours, but i don't need to be like that to be happy and to feel well. I know that.  It's the psychological stuff that's in my way and that i have to deal with. 

In the middle of this project of quitting the sleeping meds, i found out i have this very rare and potentially dangerous illness, it's an insulinoma, there are 4 per million a year (according to the usual web sources, wikipedia etc). It's a tumor on the pancreas that secrets insulin into the blood, and if you're not diabetic and don't have high blood sugar, then insulin will make your blood sugar extremely low, and that can be dangerous, causing seizures, coma, brain damage in extreme cases, including death. My glucose is so low in the morning when i haven't eaten for many hours, that it's considered "critical."  

My doctor told me i need to eat every hour and a half, 24/7, i'm like, yeah right, with my insomnia, and the sleep meds i take, i'm not going to be waking myself up in the night to eat.  But i do keep food by my bed. i guess i have had a coma and possibly a seizure before in the morning because two days in a row, i woke up laying on the floor next to my bed with no clue how i got there, no memory of it, and unable to get up, strugglilng to get up, disoriented. and then after about 10 minutes i could get up.

after that, i started eating more. i didn't want to gain weight so i was dragging my feet but now i know what i'm dealing wiht (this was just diagnosed last week) i'm eating like it's my religion.  90% of these super rare tumors are benign in terms of cancer, and the treatment is surgery to remove it, and then, voila, no more low blood sugar and all the impairment that comes with it, you're cured.  So i'm trying to get that arranged now, and i plan to need and use sleep meds because surgery hurts and i want to get through the worst of it with an ability to sleep.

But when i'm ready and when i'm through this thing, i don't want to taper off these meds anymore. i want to just stop them and let myself go through that process like i did with diazapam in 1993, i always remember that as a huge and happy success. My efforts at tapering have left me feeling like a failure.  

i thought your story was inspiring and look forward to hearing more from you.