Akathisia experiences

Physical vs internal Akathisia.
I’ve been hearing the distinction made between the kind that involves the compulsion to physically move, vs the mental/emotional agitation and terror.
Mine I would say is internal, and I have anxiety and despairing feelings, but mainly as a result of the physical distress which is primary. Akathisia can present in different ways.

For me it’s mostly intense physical sensations of agitation but without a lot of movement. Jumping out of my skin, with nowhere to jump. I feel restless and need to move a lot, but the intense agitation I’m feeling doesn’t really show very much on the outside in terms of movements.

I did go through a period of intense involuntary movement in 2015.

I went to a sleep specialist neurologist and showed him my symptom/drug diary. Drugs I was trying to rotate in order to not take too much of any particular one. Valium, Ambien, Benadryl. I was visibly twitching and shaking from tardive dyskinesia (as I only recently discovered) while sitting with him. He had nothing to say about the drugs, and just advised me in basic sleep hygiene (don’t look at screens at night, etc). 

TD is related to Akathisia, or Akathisia could be the umbrella for all these drug-induced unbearable movement disorders. I take the labels with a grain of salt. It’s drug poisoning, clear and simple.

I was sitting there with acute drug poisoning staring him in the face, and he had nothing to say, except to counsel me about sleep hygiene (don’t look at screens at night).

Sometimes I describe Akathisia as the feeling that there is a motor inside me that’s not supposed to be there, that feels like it’s revving me up on the inside. It’s like being forced to be on a treadmill constantly no matter how exhausted you are.

I could lie pretty still for a long time just enduring the torture. Sometimes I’m just too exhausted to move much, and moving doesn’t help. The level of exhaustion is beyond imaginable. I also have intense itching all over my skin as part of this, where I absolutely have to scratch even though it doesn’t help for more than a minute. That’s like an intense prickly feeling, almost stinging.

I went through a period of months of what I could only describe as “horrific deep nerve pain” almost every day for many hours, sometimes waking me at 4AM and I’d be writhing in torture for 8 hours straight.

It wasn’t exactly an “ow” kind of pain, but a deeper, internal distress that would come to a head with surges of muscle contractions every few minutes, each one lasting maybe a few seconds, that were so unbearable I could only sob during these episodes. No doubt a combination of Akathisia and dystonia. I don’t have that kind of intense nerve pain anymore, but I have a feeling that the chronic jitters, insomnia and itch are forms of the same thing.

The nerve pain was a medieval torture chamber. What I experience now is horrific but I’d say a notch below that on the torture scale, if that makes sense.
I’ve been completely off benzos 4 months now, after proper taper.

I haven’t listed the symptoms all in one place, that are related to Aka. Someday I might do that. They include constant nausea, severe inability to digest foods, various neuropathies/paresthesias, buzzing and vibration sensations, cardiac arrhythmias with shortness of breath, exquisite sensitivity to sound and light, inflammatory nerve pain, etc.