This article is not meant as medical advice of any kind. It is just my personal experience.
My doctor prescribed me Atenolol for anxiety-related heart palpitations. Besides a vitamin D deficiency and cataracts, I am in generally good heath. (Atenolol is a beta blocker, normally used for lowering blood pressure, but is sometimes prescribed for social or other anxiety problems).This turned out to be a nightmare drug for me, and was extremely hard to get off. I was prescribes 25 mg once a day. I was only taking it for about a month, but almost the whole time I was trying to wean myself off.
You can’t just stop taking Atenolol, it can cause serious heart and other health problems, even death for some people who stop taking it suddenly. I was at a relatively low dose, but even trying to lower my dosage by a quarter of a pill created major heart palpitations and other scary effects.
The side effects of taking Atenolol were horrible for me, and started almost immediately. First was the incredible sleepiness, lasting about six to eight hours during the day. I literally could not get off the couch during the middle of the day. My mother or sister had to come over to watch the kids. It was the same every day, so I sort of learned to work around it to the best of my ability, getting anything important or physical done during the time I woke up, about 8 AM, till right around noon, when I would suddenly be overcome by extreme fatigue. Then I would start feeling better some time late in the evening, but it would only be about an hour or two before I would have to take my daily dosage at 9 PM. Then I would (oddly) itch for about an hour, and then fall asleep
About a week into this, I started having either heart palpitations, or full-blown anxiety attacks right after I fell asleep each night. After a couple nights of this, I was able to just ignore it and fall back to sleep, but it still scary as hell.
My hair started getting dry and crackly, and breaking off. I’d been reading horror stories online of people taking Atenolol and losing their hair It seemed like I had almost every bad side effect you can get from this drug. Depression, hair loss, itching, feeling cold (it felt like there was ice water literally running through my veins), extreme fatigue, weird anxiety attacks, loss of any ability to concentrate or think clearly, but the worst part was just feeling like a zombie constantly..
Eventually I was able to wean my self off. Slowly, cutting the pills and taking less for several days at a time, and then cutting it further for a few more days, and so on). Luckily, I don’t have a blood pressure problem, so medically I don’t need to take a beta blocker, so the decision to stop taking it was an easy one for me. The only thing good about it was that it DID eliminate my anxiety (although I did have the palpitations and a few panic attacks, my normal daily anxiety and constant worrying was gone) But I’m not willing to trade a loss of general worry for all those problems. I would much rather have my anxiety instead of being a zombie.
After quitting, all of the problems caused by the Atenolol have completely disappeared. In fact, I’m not having the heart palpitations anymore either. In the time sinse, I’ve started eating a better diet, taking vitamins (including a prescription of high dose D to bring up my levels quickly), and lowering my caffeine intake.
