r/sertralineandzoloft

I was on 50mg of Zoloft (Sertraline) for nearly 7 weeks. The side effects never reduced...AT All. I would get maybe 5 or 6 hours of partial relief some days in the evening but everything would come roaring back the following day. Unbelievable anxiety, tremors, barely sleeping, tightness in head, dizziness. I dropped down to 25mg 3 days ago and am feeling much better already. I'm going to stay on 25mg for a week to see how I feel.

My question is has anybody else done the same and how did it work out. Will 25mg still work for anxiety? Is this a temporary reprieve or will I stabilise at 25mg now? I'm happy to stay on 25mg indefinitely if it stays like this. Thanks to anyone who replies.

I want to share something that took me years to discover, because I think it could help many people in this community.

When most doctors tell you to come off antidepressants, they typically suggest cutting your dose in half or dropping by a fixed amount every few weeks. What they often don't know is that this approach is too fast and too crude for how our brains actually work. At lower doses, the same milligram reduction that felt manageable at a higher dose can feel completely overwhelming. That is not weakness or dependency. That is neuroscience.

The Horowitz-Taylor hyperbolic method, published in The Lancet Psychiatry and now endorsed by the Maudsley Deprescribing Guidelines, shows that we need to reduce by a percentage of our current dose at each step, using liquid medication to enable tiny, precise reductions. The difference in how your body responds can be significant.

I built a free calculator to make this accessible to anyone. You enter your medication, your current dose, and your target, and it generates a full personalised tapering schedule with the exact volume in ml for each step. It also includes guidance on talking to your GP, how to use an oral syringe, and crisis support numbers if things get hard.

No sign-up. No data collected. Five languages. Completely free.

liquidtaper.com

If you are in the middle of this right now and finding it brutal, please know that is not a reflection of your strength or your mental health. This process is genuinely hard and you deserve proper support and a proper method.

Hi All! This is my first post on Reddit! So I'm about 3 months into Sertraline for anxiety and OCD. I feel it has helped a lot already with both of those. However, I'm having a really weird experience during the day where I'll just randomly starting recalling a dream. I don't even know if I've actually had that dream or if it just feels that way. I can't QUITE recall details of it afterward, and the episodes last maybe 15 seconds? It's more intense than just memories. However, I'm still fully conscious during the whole thing. An important note is that I'm also a little over a year postpartum, and for probably the last 7 months or so, I was waking up on average twice a night, so I'm definitely in at least a mild sleep deficit. We've improved in the last couple weeks, but I'm still catching up. I'd been inclined to blame the Sertraline for these episodes, but I also experienced them pre-meds, right after I found out I was pregnant. Something about telling people made me feel almost more stressed than I'd ever been, and on our way to make the first announcement is when I had the first 'episode'. It happened again a handful of times, but eventually stopped after a few weeks. A couple weeks ago when the sleep deprivation was bad is when they started happening again, and it has now been happening several times a week. I have no other alarming symptoms, however, I end up reddit threads of people who have seizures and I am spiraling into thinking I have maybe some sort of partial/focal seizure. I know I need a neurologist to confirm this, which I am looking into.

Sorry for the long post, but does anyone else on Sertraline/Zoloft experience something like this? I did find a post or two from several years ago that seems to describe something similar, but I don't know, just looking for more reassurance that maybe whatever this is is more benign than I'm hoping. Thank you in advance!

Tapering off sertralin/zolof

Some years ago I had a trans aschemic attack ( mini stroke)

Along with all the tests the doc gave me prescriptions for 5 different BP drugs and one for sertralin . They suggested that when you have a stroke you are prone to anxiety.

And sure enough one day walking along a got anxiety. Hence the sertralin , I went on in and have been on it for 6 years. 50 mg daily.

Now I’m back to normal and life is good. So I researched saffron . I am going to try breaking my tablet in half so instead of 50mg of sertralin per day I will take 25 plus 165mg of saffron.

I will report back on the journey/ withdrawal and see if in fact it’s possible to replace sertralin 25 mg with saffron .

I know we were not meant to take sertralin for ever and so I do hope even if I can substitute saffron for half my original sertralin dose I will be very grateful.

Hi everyone,

I've been taking 25mg of Zoloft for 16 days now and my sleep has been very disrupted. This being said, I have struggled with insomnia for 2 years and take about half or 1/4 pill of zolpidem (under medical supervision) for this. My insomnia started getting better with CBT-I, and I was sleeping 7-8 hours every day. Then I started taking sertraline and I keep only managing to sleep 5-6 hours.

When will my sleep go back to how it was?

I started Sertraline last June firstly on 25mg then to 50mg.
Thanks to the medication I really pulled myself out of a dark place and can now function well without spiralling. I guess my main issue is, I still get PTSD symptoms and a bit emotional when triggered like my brain gets kind of caught in a loop that lasts a few days or until the trigger has resolved.
I also feel kind of like… I don’t want to kill myself anymore but I also wouldn’t say I’m happy either ?

I’m going through a big life transition as I am leaving the military after 12 years so I don’t know if I’m just supposed to feel a bit lost, and low and time is the only healer or whether I should go up a dose to 100mg. My therapist (given to me via the military who I don’t quite click with) when I told her about my “bad days” said to just up my meds. But it felt like a cop out as she constantly invalidates me anyway.

I just wondered if anyone else has been on the fence and got any words of advice either way!
Many thanks for reading!