@Myheadhurts, that's exactly what I did. Stopped it all at once because I ran out of pills. Just figured it was a good time to stop everything and clean myself up. What a stupid mistake. My seizures started at around 36 hours after I stopped.
Something else I forgot to mention about benzo withdrawal: Most people get whacked out on these things begin using them to find relief from anxiety, or from insomnia. The ironic (read: evil) thing about benzos is that when you stop taking them cold turkey, the problem of anxiety and insomnia comes back fast, only it's at least 1 000 000 worse. It's the reverse of the pills intended effect, multiplied exponentially.
In the first 2 months of coming off Xanax and Stilnox (Ambien) I can count the number of days I slept on one hand. Seriously. One stretch was 11 days without a wink of sleep, and most other days I'd get maybe 15 minutes before having some of the worst psychotic dreams one can experience. With that little sleep I had many days of audio hallucinations and a few visual as well. (Room swelling, floor waving)
And anxiety? I thought I had bad anxiety before, but when I stopped taking my benzos that anxiety turned into straight up paranoia, agoraphobia, mania, e.t.c... which lasted for most of the 5 months. The anxiety I felt before taking them would have been welcome relief from what was happening to my mind after stopping. And it lasted a bloody long time, enough that I thought about eating a bullet more than once just to make it stop. Eventually I had enough and started drinking again just to feel normal. That withdrawal was the impetus for my downward spiral into heavy and hopeless alcoholism.
It's funny because when I first started on Xanax and Stilnox (Ambien) I thought I had found a miracle cure. The abuse started the moment those little magic pills made me calm and confident, serene and happy. Told my wife that I wished we had a Xanax tree in the back yard so I could just take them for the rest of my life. If I was prescribed Xanax now I'd likely punch the doctor in the face just on general principal. That class of meds needs to be dealt with in extremely responsible fashion. In fact I'd love to see a statistic regarding how many people have attempted suicide trying to withdraw from benzos, because I know it has to be a very high number. I seriously wanted to die plenty of times, and had I access to a hand gun then, I seriously think I may have topped myself.
Just thought that was important to mention this stuff, because I cannot stress enough how important it is to wean down slowly from these things. Cold turkey is a disaster waiting to happen.