u/Neat_Layer_7712

I'm at 6.5 months exactly today, I've had a pretty mixed day, lots of heavy emotions and a sudden anxiety flair up, a lot less brain fog though. I had an earlier moment of looking at myself in the mirror(3 weeks into a cut and admiring the gym progress) and I realized I recognized myself, the dpdr sorta faded or at least the depersonalization part. Then just now I was thinking about something someone had said to me that made me upset and I could picture my own face and the face that I would make when I cried 😢. This is fantastic, I haven't been able to do this in 4.5 months.

Getting to a strange point, I go large chunks of my day feeling fine or forgetting PAWS all together, then occasionally I get such bad brain fog it feels like dpdr, I rarely feel bad anxiety anymore but it's usually linked to brain fog and the brain fog is usually from eating a big meal or something super processed. Still having some visual snow like symptoms, not so much static but more after images and occasionally trailing when I walk past or move my vision, an object will have a slight faint trail behind it and usually only in low lighting. I think I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, but occasionally I get super depressed over the fact I still don't feel 100% myself yet.

Yeah idk, it's not like tension, it doesn't hurt. The back of my head just has this sort of fizzy buzzy feeling on the back of my head, not like inside, it feels like it's in my hair almost and when I put my hand on it I can feel a slight pulse, it happens for a day or two at least once a month and I can't tell if it's neurotransmitter recalibration or something else.

Finally hit six months, things have been getting better, still some issues. I'd say at this point it feels like most of the time I'm living semi normally and I just have bad moments in my day or week that give me anxiety and drive me nuts. Not having a lot of dpdr these days, if I do it's a short flash and I can easily distract myself with something else. However the brain fog is still very much there and bothersome, some days/waves recently it's been incredibly bad because I'm starting to regain my memory and I'm starting to be able to think properly but just not quite still. So it's bothering me even more because I can feel I'm on the cusp of recovery but I'm still not quite there and it causes me some mild anxiety, irritability and depression sorta come and go in small waves at the end of a wave since about month 4. I used to get dizzy every once in a while and that seems to have stopped. I also recently changed my diet quite a bit, cutting processed sugar completely, it gave me horrible brain fog for the first few days but it's slowly mellowing back out as I get further into this diet change. At this point I'm wondering how much longer I have to wait until the brain fog is lifted and the slight tension headaches are gone.

Everything that I feel now is a much lighter version of what I was dealing with from months 1-3, I still get brain fog, anxiety, depression, irritability, visual snow(usually linked with the fog). But it's all lesser and takes up less of my day and I have days or weeks feeling great, I've been working full time for 2 months now and it's getting easier and easier. I'm enjoying more and more of my free time with friends and getting back into hobbies, it's all uphill from here and even when I feel bad, I know it'll come to pass. Don't take this as I feel 100, don't feel bad if you don't feel as good as me. I'm still in the 70-80% range but it's better than the 40-50.

I stopped having dpdr constantly or at all really, but since 120 days I've started getting occasional dizzy spells that last a couple of minutes and I can feel a bit nauseous for hours after. It doesn't happen every day but when it does happen I feel the effects for a while.

I've always had floaters and mild visual snow for as long as I can remember, however a month into my recovery I learned about hppd and it has since left me nervous every few weeks that I have it. For example withdrawal has exaggerated after images for me, and floaters. They're fine one week, bad for a few moments the next week and so on. I've chalked it up to withdrawal and healing as I'm only at 130 days and I still have textbook symptoms, but part of me believes it's hppd every time I notice it more often.

Quit about 135 days ago(4.5 months) and I just now started coughing up thick green phlem every morning. Is this to be expected?

I'm over 130 days at this point, 2nd week into my new and first full-time job, feeling a lot better. Laughing, getting caught up in the moment. Enjoying life. Still not feeling 100% more like a 95 at my lowest and a baseline of 98 most of the day. But I'm making progress, I'm still having small flashes of brain fog, small blips of dpdr and some early morning anxiety. I'm going on a vacation this Sunday, it should be great.

I'm at 125 days or more now, the dpdr started around day 45 and has been on and off since but less intense over time. Less of something I fear and more something I am agitated with at this point. I have felt a pretty good shift recently, I started a new job thats full time(no more sitting around the house waiting for one of my 2-3 part time shifts a week to come), it makes me overthink less and just do things. However I've noticed that whenever I'm finally alone or leaving work and transitioning to the next part of my day I get this thought, "why am I me, why can I experience my own consciousness and what are the odds of that". I understand logically that I am me and that's all there is to it. But my brain in this state sometimes randomly questions the fact that only I can experience my own experiences and it's incredibly isolating for a few moments then I forget. It happens at least once a day or every few days, my reaction to it has gotten less and less severe overtime. Almost to the point I start getting so angrily frustrated with my own brain I can't help but want to smack my own head.

Just shy of 4 months right now and I had a really good 2-3 weeks before this and now it suddenly feels like that's unraveling, I thought I had made some kind of progress or permanent change for the better, but now at almost 4 months the last 2 days have sucked, dpdr is back(albeit not as bad as at 8 weeks) but it's really bothering me cause I thought it was almost gone, and then the brain fog keeps appearing randomly throughout my day for like an hour at a time. I just am losing hope and feel like I'm never gonna recover, or I'm just impossibly tired of this 3 steps forward 2 steps back. I'm so tired of making progress and feeling so confident that I start making big changes for myself or better routines and commitments just for me to go back to feeling like shit and feeling incapable of keeping those commitments.

I'm at around 110 days now, and at the 95-100 day mark I had a significant improvement out of nowhere, and it's left me with an almost jarring feeling. I'm not having anxiety, dpdr, I'm living life normally and maybe once or twice a day I have a moment where I realize that the last 3 months have been hell compared to these last 2 weeks. At first I thought it might've been like the pink cloud, but this seems to me like a permanent change, did anyone else have a sudden increase in clarity and stability around 90-100 days? Like I'm definitely not 100% but I'd say most days I'm like 90-95%. I've had brain fog like once or twice this whole 2 weeks and it usually just lasts an hour or two and it seems to have to do with diet. I'm just feeling strange not constantly overthinking my symptoms and feeling detached after about a month and a half of wild emotional unrest.

Is it normal to suddenly just feel yourself one day and not have any of the mental shit you've been dealing with for months any more? It's been a few days of like completely normal existence and it's great, does it happen like this? Like I've had windows of clarity but none that felt like this, usually a window would just be milder symptoms, but this is different.

I'm at 13 weeks, haven't had a panic attack since the first 4 weeks, usually my panic attacks would be a whole body flush and racing heart and a feeling of restlessness, around 6 weeks I stopped having all of that and fell into dpdr and it was pretty intense for 2 weeks then for 4 weeks it's been getting lower and lower in intensity, and this last week I'd say it's pretty much going away. Randomly last night while sitting with my friends in my living room I got the full body flush feeling again, no restlessness or racing heart but my whole body went flush and was hot for like 20 minutes. I'm unsure if this is a good sign or not. It wasn't really frightening just concerning because I thought I was over having panic attacks.

If you're like me, then at some point during ur first 2 months you started experiencing dpdr, for me it started around 6 weeks into my sobriety and hit me out of nowhere like a ton of bricks. The pink cloud faded and panic attacks ceased. In between the joy of 4 weeks and 6 weeks, I started to get weird mood swings that would leave me paralyzed and confused. At about 6 weeks that's when I realized what was happening, I started to derealize occasionally and it would get worse until it peaked at around 8 weeks where I went 5 days feeling like I was in a dream. I'm now at 13 weeks and I can say it has gotten significantly better, instead of being constant or taking up large portions of my day it's more of a passing thought or feeling I get from time to time. You can't straight out ignore these thoughts, but you can accept them for what they are, thoughts. I may not be 100% but I'm getting closer and closer to that every week and I encourage you to stop counting the minutes or hours and simply be as present as you can.

I've noticed since the beginning of my quit that my anxiety has taken numerous forms, it started out as panic attacks and sour stomach/lack of appetite. That shifted to racing thoughts of worry and facial tension, panic attacks ceased. Then that shifted at about 6 weeks into derealization, and for the next 6 weeks that was what I dealt with, facial tension stopped at some point during this. Now I'm at 96 days and in the last 2 days I've had a horrible sour stomach, hard to eat without feeling like I might vomit, but I had a realization today that I had not had any derealization since this started and I had noticed a gradual shift down in its symptoms sometime in the last 2 weeks. For me and for most of us our anxiety tends to take on different forms especially when we get used to one or manage it. But also this can be a sign that you're recovering as your mind is allowing itself to feel stress and anxiety properly instead of derealizing. During my first month despite the stomach issues I was in a pink cloud. I'm starting to experience those same pink cloud feelings in the last 2 days and I'm curious to ask if anyone else experienced a shift in forms of anxiety before recovering.(I've felt the best I have in 3 months in the last week tbh)