Oh man, I hear you—that sounds absolutely rough. Yeah, lamotrigine tapering can be *intense*, and what you're describing is pretty textbook for what people experience when they're coming off it. You're definitely not alone in this.
The hypervigilance and panic spikes you're hitting are really common when your brain is adjusting to lower doses. Lamotrigine does a lot of stabilizing work in there, so when you drop it, especially when you drop it relatively quickly, your nervous system can go into overdrive for a bit. It's like your body's alarm system is suddenly turned all the way up and doesn't know how to dial back down yet.
A couple things I've heard from others going through this: some people found that going slower between cuts helped way more than they expected—like, giving their system a longer adjustment period between each drop. And a few have mentioned that the intense stuff (the panic, the hypervigilance) does tend to settle down after a week or two as your body recalibrates, even though I know that doesn't make it suck any less *right now*.
Have you been able to talk to your prescriber about how intense the drops have been? Sometimes they can help you figure out if you need to slow the taper down, or if there are things that might help you feel a bit more grounded during the adjustment periods.
How are you holding up otherwise? Do you have any grounding stuff that helps when the anxiety spikes hit?
