Effexor side-effects: sleeping, eating

[cimorene]

So far I've been taking Effexor for a month or so, and it has given me reason to be cautiously optimistic. It has two really noticeable side-effects which are... not exactly bad so much as irritating and piquant, respectively.

I. Appetite

waxjism lost a bunch of weight on Effexor. What happened to me is that I can't go more than about four hours without eating (but I can't then eat a big meal - it's impossible to get through a 24-hour period on one giant "dinner" and one very small snack-sized "breakfast", like I did most of last summer when I wasn't on any meds). Eating multiple small meals is supposed to be more healthy anyway, but the medication enforces it.

I get so hungry that I can't concentrate on anything after 4-5 hours of no food, even if I've been drinking tea or even popping occasional candies in my mouth all along; and if I start to overeat, I feel faintly nauseated. (When presented with half a delicious pizza on the ferry from Sweden, I only was able to eat about 2/3. Last summer I'd've eaten the whole thing and then lain in bed moaning that I hate feeling full.)

The problem is that I hate being interrupted in whatever I'm doing to stop and eat so frequently. Eating is usually a chore for me, with exception only for the times when I get to eat one of my very favorite foods. Also I'm kind of lazy about preparing food. It's just not practical to cook that often so for the past month I've been eating tons of single servings of oatmeal or egg noodles or open-face sandwiches, which is about the right size of meal. But that's a really boring diet. I think the long-term solution may require that I plan what I'm doing in advance and cook and divide the food up in portions. :( But I really suck at planning, like, really.

II. Sleeping & Dreaming

The doctor asked if I have a history of insomnia, which I don't, so clearly Effexor has known sleep effects. It doesn't make it any harder for me to fall asleep, weirdly. But what it does seem to do is make it much easier for me to wake up. When I first started I would wake up very briefly about a billion times per night, at what I think was the end of each sleep cycle, before falling right back to sleep again. Now the short wake-ups are starting to blur together into a routine, but I still notice them.

Also my dreams have been startlingly vivid, and not just that, but I think I'm maybe not dreaming as... deeply, because I keep having dreams where I'm apparently struggling to remember that I'm dreaming. This results in a lot of dreams where I have to exert an effort to remember that I can control the dream, and these efforts sometimes work and sometimes don't as I sort of get distracted and forget that I'm dreaming. Also I keep waking myself up by physically mirroring the movements that I made in the dream, or even that one time when I woke myself up by speaking, which are both things that have never happened to me before. Last night I dreamed a witch was trying to drag me out of a fairy tale cottage's open door into a sinister alternate universe and I woke myself up by kicking [the witch] quite vigorously three times. I felt my foot bounce back onto the mattress, which jolted me awake!

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

what is Effexor for?

[cimorene]

It's one of the more popular SSRIs of the past few years. I guess ≈ 5, since it was already gaining vogue before it was prescribed to Wax, and has just now been made available (in the EU anyway) in generic form (Venlafaxin). Standard SSRI stuff, but in my particular case: depression, general anxiety & mild panic disorder, and social anxiety.

[princessofgeeks]

thank you; i had not heard of that one! fascinating.

[lazulisong]

Yeah effexor gives you the trippy dreams. With zoloft I only rerally get them if I've forgotten to take my meds for a day or two, and then its like an REM acid trip.

[brownbetty]

I have wacky effexor dreams too! But mainly when I step up/down a dosage. And then they are CRAAAAAZYnuts. Like, the sort of dreams that when you explain to other people, they actually find briefly interesting for the sheer batshittery.