Dayvigo/Lemborexant sleep

[heapsreal]

I tried a similar drug, Belsomra a few years back but I didn't find it helped much for falling asleep but using a z drug with it i slept ok. But defeats the purpose and its not really cheap for a sleep med. My sleep schedule etc was in a different/worse state.

So last night I started on 5mg of dayvigo and was expecting it to take atleast an hour to fall asleep. After about 10mins I couldn't resist the urge to go to sleep, wow! Only z drugs have helped me to initiate sleep anything like that.

So 9pm I took the dayvigo 5mg and my usual melatonin. 910pm I was asleep.i woke up at 1am. 130am I took a zopiclone and probably slept from 3am to 8am. Those 4hrs sleep on dayvigo seemed quite good.

I was on a cocktail of meds last year, usually a mix of z drugs and valium, 3 tabs in total, plus melatonin and some sort of sedating antihistamine. This year I've mostly been on 1 Z drug and stopped antihistamines a month ago and they probably weren't working much anyway.

I use to have problems intiating and staying asleep as well as my circadian rhythm was all over the place. The last 18months sleep initiation with meds and being able to fall asleep at a consistent time has actually been a thing. Staying asleep has been the hard part.

Im seeing a new GP and he seems willing to help me with several things, maybe cause he's young and still motivated. So he actually suggested dayvigo, which was on my list of things to try. I've never read or heard it explained that these drugs, although help improve sleep from the first night, they work on your brain over several weeks to improve sleep.

So hopefully over time my sleep returns to a more normal sleep pattern and its can slowly reduce my need for z drugs for sleep. Supposedly tolerance is extremely low to dayvigo but if I can atleast have a good break from benzo's, if I return to them they will be more effective, for awhile anyway. Hopefully I don't need them at all

I will try to update this post as I go.
I'd be interested to hear others experiences with dayvigo.
Cheers.

 

[helen1]

@heapsreal
I used dayvigo 5-10 mg for about 6 months, then stopped. I was glad to see I had not developed a tolerance to it, so that does seem accurate. And I’m someone who gets addicted very quickly to every potentially addictive substance.

On the other hand, it didn’t seem to affect my sleep much. If your sleep issue is due to orexins then it’ll be helpful, as it’s an orexin inhibitor. But if you have other sleep issues, then I doubt it will help much (eg circadian rhythm dysfunction, high histamines, lack of melatonin formation, lack of progesterone, too much glutamate, not enough GABA, oversensitized bladder, etc etc.)

I hope it keeps helping you heapsreal!

 

[overtheedge]

Ive used dayvigo most nights for the past 2-3 years, works fast

Was paying a lot for it, not having met my deductible but I got the manufacturer coupons & now only pay $10 for each bottle of 30 or something like that instead of around $100 for a bottle of 30

I find that if i take too much dayvigo i feel worse all day, that I feel best using as little as possible & also it doesn't keep me asleep long many nights, usually 2-3 hours, so i often have to use 2 or more doses, so i crush all my pills at once with a mortar n pestle then measure out around 8 doses on my milligram scale, each of which i store in a pill sorter. a dose that is just over half a tablet works for me, though it may well be more or less for you, took me some tinkering. I probably use an average of 2 doses per night which comes out to 1 tablet a night and that works well.

I will say I feel better if i don't use dayvigo for 2+ days, much more awake consistently, but i can't get enough sleep without it or or without another one of my sleeping pills, all of which are worse than dayvigo, so I just deal with it. Also, believe me, I've tested dozens of Rx and OTC sleep meds, Ive kept a log of them, so to say dayvigo is the best means something. One thing to note tho is that dayvigo does sometimes interact with other sleep meds, I tried testing benadryl along side dayvigo back when benadryl used to help me sleep and the combo knocked me out all night, also taking cyclobenzaprine with dayvigo would cause well over a dozen hours of sleep and serious groggyness.

The main issue you will see people have with dayvigo in the reviews are that they were caught off guard by experiencing sleep paralysis for several minutes and, because they don't know what's going on, they panic and end up hating the drug for scaring them. I've never had any such issue with it and the side effects are rare, furthermore if you knew about the harmless potential side effects of this drug you wouldn't freak out if they randomly happened to you

 

[Mary]

@heapsreal - I've very recently discovered a very powerful herbal supplement, pure apigenin - I think it's the best herbal thing I've ever tried - I talk about it in this thread. You might want to check it out.

 

[heapsreal]

Ive used dayvigo most nights for the past 2-3 years, works fast

Was paying a lot for it, not having met my deductible but I got the manufacturer coupons & now only pay $10 for each bottle of 30 or something like that instead of around $100 for a bottle of 30

I find that if i take too much dayvigo i feel worse all day, that I feel best using as little as possible & also it doesn't keep me asleep long many nights, usually 2-3 hours, so i often have to use 2 or more doses, so i crush all my pills at once with a mortar n pestle then measure out around 8 doses on my milligram scale, each of which i store in a pill sorter. a dose that is just over half a tablet works for me, though it may well be more or less for you, took me some tinkering. I probably use an average of 2 doses per night which comes out to 1 tablet a night and that works well.

I will say I feel better if i don't use dayvigo for 2+ days, much more awake consistently, but i can't get enough sleep without it or or without another one of my sleeping pills, all of which are worse than dayvigo, so I just deal with it. Also, believe me, I've tested dozens of Rx and OTC sleep meds, Ive kept a log of them, so to say dayvigo is the best means something. One thing to note tho is that dayvigo does sometimes interact with other sleep meds, I tried testing benadryl along side dayvigo back when benadryl used to help me sleep and the combo knocked me out all night, also taking cyclobenzaprine with dayvigo would cause well over a dozen hours of sleep and serious groggyness.

The main issue you will see people have with dayvigo in the reviews are that they were caught off guard by experiencing sleep paralysis for several minutes and, because they don't know what's going on, they panic and end up hating the drug for scaring them. I've never had any such issue with it and the side effects are rare, furthermore if you knew about the harmless potential side effects of this drug you wouldn't freak out if they randomly happened to you

Thanks for the reply. I think i know what you mean by the sleep paralysis. The first hour or so I wasn't sure if I was dreaming or it was real or if I was sleeping lightly. I felt like I wanted to get up but didn't and I think my wife got up to get a drink or something and I was going to say something to her but I didnt/couldn't but it didn't freak me out. I guess i just wasn't sure if I was dreaming or not.

I understand about trying all sorts of pills and combinations. I usually get my sleeping pills ready an hr or so before I need them and it looks ridiculous the amount of different pills, but last night there was just 2 lonely pills on my bedside table. It just looked strange.

Thanks for the reply.

 

[heapsreal]

@heapsreal - I've very recently discovered a very powerful herbal supplement, pure apigenin - I think it's the best herbal thing I've ever tried - I talk about it in this thread. You might want to check it out.

Thanks that looks interesting, I just looked it up on ChatGPT. I will keep it in mind. The last couple of months I was also using a herbal supplement called mulungu. I used it a few years back but after awhile I couldn't find a source. It was a good add on to a sleeping tablet but not quite strong enough on its own. Dayvigo seems to be helping.

 

[heapsreal]

OK, night 2 on dayvigo, wow! I don't want to get too excited but for someone who has been on benzos and z drugs plus add on's like antihistamines etc etc for 25yrs I'm impressed.
So I took my 5mg pill at 9pm, it didn't kick in as quick as the first night. It took until 1030pm to fall asleep and prior was checking the price of the higher strength pills as I was starting to think it wasn't working.
I slept quite well the first few hrs with some strange dreams or maybe like light sleeping when you can hear things around you but I couldn't tell if I was dreaming or my wife got up or not. I will ask her when she takes up. I woke up a couple of times to 'water the horses' and was able to fall back asleep quite well.
I slept from 1030pm to 430am. Unheard of for me without a benzo. I feel like the sleep was refreshing but it's been so long since I've slept like that, that I'm unsure.
I just hope it continues, tolerance is something that concerns me but as I said before, if I get a few months off benzos it should reverse some of the tolerance I have to them. If I need to it might be something I can cycle between every couple of months, but hopefully from what I have heard, tolerance is very low???
It's only night 2 so we will see what happens

 

[overtheedge]

I just hope it continues, tolerance is something that concerns me but as I said before, if I get a few months off benzos it should reverse some of the tolerance I have to them. If I need to it might be something I can cycle between every couple of months, but hopefully from what I have heard, tolerance is very low???
It's only night 2 so we will see what happens

For me personally it's hard to tell if i've experienced tolerance as my health seems to shift a lot but I really don't think I've increased my average dosage per night. Now and then I've taken week long breaks from it and relied on less effective meds or gone wo meds when I could. I take these breaks b/c I'm having real trouble sleeping for a few days and i want to make sure it doesn't have to do with tolerance building and I just don't like the idea of taking a sleep med uninterrupted all year long but usually there is a lot of exertion during these times when sleep isn't coming.

This issue of bad sleep seems to happen less lately though as I've found I can fall asleep with much greater frequency on my stomach for some reason, especially when paired with a sleep med, so it's less common for a sleep med to just make me sleepy but not put me to sleep. It won't work for me to sleep for hours on my stomach as I'll wake up feeling very bad and will stay that way the whole day so when I lie down on my stomach I set a 20 min alarm on my phone that is on the quiet and slow side, I use "slow rise" under classic alarms on the iphone, If i use a louder alarm the jolt of adrenaline wont let me fall back asleep but with a quiet slow alarm I just wake up & roll on my side before quickly falling back asleep. No clue why any of this works

My doctor who runs the sleep center and Rx'd me Dayvigo in the first place told me some patients do build a tolerance and so she increases the dosage from 5mg tabs to 10mg tabs but if I remember correctly she made it sound like it was uncommon for this to happen

 

[heapsreal]

Night 3, just melatonin and dayvigo still. Slept from about 1030pm to almost 5am.
I didn't have to get up to go to the toilet last night which is very rare.
I felt like I woke up a few times but went back to sleep but I cant tell if I was actually dreaming this or not.
Im suprised that stopping benzo's I've been able to sleep like this. I have in the past had week here and there where I took no meds but used several natural alternatives but was only able to cat nap here and there and only do this if I had time off work.

 

[heapsreal]

I think I'm moving in the right direction. ChatGPT is helpful and confirming alot of things ie researched about sleep and information that i could never get from drs, mostly cause they don't know lol.

I've been having alot a dreaming sleep which is most likely rem sleep and I'm catching up on it after many years of it being suppressed. I feel like I'm not getting enough deep stage 3 sleep, which ChatGPT confirmed that this can happen and over several weeks my sleep architecture should improve.

I asked ChatGPT about adding periactin infrequently to help with deep sleep. It said this was a good idea as research says periactin helps increase deep sleep and shouldn't interrupt sleep architect using it this way.

So just for tonight I will take my usual melatonin and dayvigo and add 4mg of periactin. I haven't used any antihistamines for atleast 4 weeks so hopefully tolerance to these meds has reduced.

Hopefully my sleep architecture returns to normal .

PS, I'm going down this line also because today I fell asleep at 9am and slept until noon. It was a deep sleep too. I only woke up because my daughter came over and I was as groggy as he'll.i think my little brain just shut off to get the deep stage 3 sleep it needed. I think I need some more hopefully.

Im not anti benzo's as I really needed them to function and to be able to keep working. Drugged sleep was better then no sleep or very light fragemented sleep. The Combination of cfsme and shift work really destroyed my sleep. Now with the help of these new orexin meds I can improve and fix my sleep.

It's good to have an alternative to benzo's that actually helps. Many things I added to benzo's helped improve sleep and helped me stay on low doses of benzo's, I think that was a good move. Early on in the cfs forum days I saw many people prescribed klonopin for sleep, but over time the dose kept escalating and then it stopped working, leaving them in a horrendous position of severe insomnia and a very high tolerance to benzo's. Hindsight many should have stayed on the low side of klonopin and added a different class of drugs and or natural alternatives. I always use to preach to alternate the crap out of different classes of sleep meds.

I think these are in sleep meds are probably a good idea to alternate between benzo/z drugs but i wouldn't combine them as then you don't have an alternative when tolerance occurs. Anyway just my 2 cents worth.

Cheers

 

[heapsreal]

Night 4, added periactin and slept well. 10pm to 6am, could have slept longer but had my alarm set. 8hrs wow. Still dreaming but not as vivid so feels like im sleeping deeper. Woke a few times but easily fell back to sleep.
Prior to all this if I woke up, I'd be awake for a couple hrs minimum. I actually woke up at 1045pm and thought, your kidding, but went to the toilet came back to sleep. That just doesn't happen.
Tonight I will just stick to melatonin and dayvigo for a few days before considering periactin.

 

[heapsreal]

ChatGPT
That’s fantastic to hear—especially in your case, where sleep has been such a long-term challenge despite trying many strategies.

Getting 8 hours of restorative sleep and feeling like you could have slept longer is a very strong indicator of high sleep quality, not just sedation. It means your brain was likely hitting those deeper stages (especially N3 and stable REM) more efficiently.

Here’s what likely happened:

Periactin helped deepen NREM sleep and reduce arousals (by calming histamine and serotonin-driven wake signals).

Dayvigo kept your orexin system quiet, reducing hypervigilance and making it easier to fall back asleep during the night.

The combo allowed your body to reset and restore, without creating that groggy or "drugged" feeling that benzos or z-drugs often leave.

If this keeps working reliably, you might have finally found your "rescue formula"—and you could build a longer-term plan with it:

Use Periactin 2–4x/week only, to avoid tolerance.

Use Dayvigo nightly or every second night while gradually reducing melatonin as planned.

Optionally rotate in natural supports like apigenin, glycine, or low-dose lemon balm on Periactin off-nights.

 

[heapsreal]

Night 5 melatonin + dayvigo. Slept 10pm-6am. I think those first few hrs are deep sleep and I'm guessing alot of rem sleep after that as alot of vivid dreams.

There's definitely a disconnect with the dreams, hard to explain. Some of the awakenings I'm not sure i was really awake or dreaming that I was. At one stage I thought I'm tossing and turning too much, I'm going to feel like crap when I eventually get up. But when I finally woke up, I felt well rested. Maybe the awakenings are so short that it's hard to tell. Usually I roll over and fall back to sleep straight away. Previously that wouldn't be the case.

That's 4 nights with no benzo at all. There's no rebound anxiety etc, so far.

 

[heapsreal]

8 nights so far on dayvigo. After 4 nights the vivid dreams reduced. Has the increased rem sleep balanced out??? The last 2 nights I have woken up at midnight and 1am after taking 5mg at 9pm and falling asleep by 10pm. I took a second 5mg tablet when I woke and managed to sleep well until 5am this morning and yesterday morning until 7am.
There is a 10mg tablet, so I may move up a dose or just wing it and take a 2nd 5mg dose if I wake up after a few hrs??
I hope this isn't a tolerance starting to kick in.
How long does it take for benzo tolerance to reverse considerably and how long would it last. That's the other way I've considered using this med, to use it for hopefully a couple of months or as long as it keeps working and then if needed back to zopiclone. The other thing i can do which has worked well for me the couple of times I've used it is to take the antihistamine periactin with dayvigo, this has worked well. Can maybe prolong using benzos for abit longer?? As well as trial apigenin and probably add mulungu to prolong time away from benzo's.
Maybe benzo replacement for many cfsers is like hormone replacement for cortisol or insulin????? I hope not.