Sleep is one of the most important aspects of living a healthy life. Restful sleep allows your body and mind to heal throughout the night, preparing you for the day ahead. It can help stave off disease and protect against injuries, but it also promotes good mental health.
Unfortunately, sleep disorders are among the most common ailments that affect adults in the United States. Anxiety is also exceedingly common, and it also contributes to sleep problems.
In fact, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that as much as a third of Americans don’t get the recommended amount of sleep, which is around seven to eight hours every night. Anxiety is also the most common mental illness, with roughly 40 million adults in the country struggling with some form of anxiety every year.
To combat the struggle to get to sleep, doctors and scientists have formulated dozens of medicinal sleep aids throughout the late 19th century to today. First, barbiturates were developed and sold in the U.S. as a powerful hypnotic drug, until their adverse effects and risk of addiction made them less popular.
In the 1960s, benzodiazepines became more popular, and they are still used heavily today. However, they share some of the same side effects that made barbiturates go out of style.
Estazolam is one popular benzodiazepine (benzo) that is used to treat anxiety, seizures, and sleep disorders. But it also carries a risk of addiction and chemical dependency. Could the benefits outweigh the risk? Learn more about Estazolam addiction and how it can be treated.
Estazolam is a prescription drug in the benzodiazepine class used for its anxiolytic, anticonvulsant, and hypnotic effects. In some cases, it can also be used as a muscle relaxant. Estazolam, like all benzos, is in a broader category of central nervous system (CNS) depressants along with alcohol, barbiturates, and other prescription sleep aids. CNS depressants work by suppressing the excitability of the nervous system and causing you to relax cognitively and physically.
Depressants also cause a number of adverse effects like tolerance, dependence, addiction, and depression. For that reason, estazolam is generally used as a short-term therapeutic remedy for insomnia or anxiety.
Doctors typically discourage patients from using benzos for much longer than four weeks at a time. If you become tolerant or dependent on a benzo, it can make insomnia or anxiety symptoms worse, because your body comes to rely on the drug.
Estazolam has a medium onset of action and medium duration of action, which makes it useful as a sleep aid. While fast-active benzos are more likely to be used as a recreational drug, estazolam is sometimes used for its intoxicating effects. If you use high doses of estazolam or frequent doses, it can cause intoxicating effects that are similar to alcohol.
Common effects include dizziness, relaxation, physical euphoria, loss of coordination, poor motor function, loss of balance, impaired decision making, and sleepiness. Heavy estazolam use also increases your risk of becoming addicted, getting into an accident, or causing a potentially fatal overdose.
The path to estazolam addiction starts when you start taking larger amounts of the drug to experience the effect a previous dose yielded. This is called tolerance. Tolerance morphs into dependence when you take estazolam to the point where once it leaves the body, you experience disturbances or withdrawal symptoms.
Basically, you become estazolam-dependent because you feel normal only when the drug is present in your body.
According to ScienceDirect, the following are possible withdrawal symptoms you can experience with estazolam and virtually any other benzodiazepine medication:
Less common symptoms that can present with benzos include:
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If you’ve been using estazolam, and you’re worried that you might be developing an addiction, there are some signs and symptoms to keep in mind. While it’s possible to become addicted to benzodiazepines after normal use, especially i