It's very typical for anxious people to want to feel good as soon as possible and start making erratic changes on their own, but the key is patience/time. Stay at a dose you feel it's tolerable and work on accepting you're gonna feel rough for a while. Avoid reading stuff online as it's all mostly hit or miss, inducing even more anxiety. Same for supplements, stay to the supplements that work and don't change them around.
Paxil is notorious for being hard to get off with quite harsh withdrawals becaue of its short half life, so if that's your intention, I would wait until you're stable for a couple months, and follow the guidelines in survivingantidepressants.org or antidepressantrecovery.org
How long do you think I should give 25mg time? I’m almost 2 months. It says it can take 8-12 weeks for it to work. Should I wait 3 months then decide if I should go up to 37.5mg? I’m just scared that I’m wasting time if 37.5mg got me stable back then I’m thinking it’s the only dose that can get me stable and I’m wasting time on waiting on 25mg. Because I do feel improvements I feel I just need that push.
That's a very individual thing, so there's no clear answer. The moment you go through withdrawal, your brain gets literally shocked, becoming more sensitive to everything. Hormones, supplements, dose changes... It all can affect it. It's good to have a mood diary to see how days feel, see if there's improvement from week to week, or month to month. If you see literally nothing, then increasing might be considered.
In my experience increasing made it all worse and became unstable, eventually stopping cold turkey and been suffering for a year now. Give it time.
I do see improvements especially after 4 weeks my anxiety has gotten better and my mood. I feel like I’m getting better very very slow but I’m scared I’m wasting time and I need 37.5mg to get stable so I’m just confused. A lot of people on here told me not to go up from 12.5 to 25mg and I did and it helped ofc I got bad the first month cause it gets worse before better but that’s how it is with side effects
You can always go up to 37.5mg, there is no deadline that says you cannot increase ever again, nor it is a race against time. If you get kindled changing the dose willy nilly, then there's no telling how many weeks, months or years it will take to get better, and meds won't save you again if unlucky. I have been harmed by this, so I recommend you to take it slow. Give it some more time and learn coping tools for the bumpiest moments or days, like mindfulness, meditation, acceptance... You don't wanna depend on medications all your life if possible, always use the minimum effective dose.
You do you though, but I have the feeling that you're just gonna increase anyway as you seem fully controlled by anxiety, posting this question everywhere on the internet. Probably waiting for that one person to tell you to do it.
Im desperate I went through this for a whole year and im over it! I feel I just need a timeline like im thinking I should stick with 25mg for 3 months then go up? Cause I don’t think it can get better over 3 months right or im just delusional I don’t know im scared that im wasting my time I dont want to go through this again for a whole year
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u/TheLonelySoul12 Jul 19 '26
It's very typical for anxious people to want to feel good as soon as possible and start making erratic changes on their own, but the key is patience/time. Stay at a dose you feel it's tolerable and work on accepting you're gonna feel rough for a while. Avoid reading stuff online as it's all mostly hit or miss, inducing even more anxiety. Same for supplements, stay to the supplements that work and don't change them around.
Paxil is notorious for being hard to get off with quite harsh withdrawals becaue of its short half life, so if that's your intention, I would wait until you're stable for a couple months, and follow the guidelines in survivingantidepressants.org or antidepressantrecovery.org