I was on 150mg of Effexor daily for over 2 years and decided to come off as my anxiety at the time subsided.
Went down from 150mg per day to 37.5mg in 3 weeks with no noticeable withdrawal effects. The next phase of the taper took 3 months as the lower the dosage became, the harder it seemed to come off completely.
I cut the 37.5mg tablet in four and kept lowering my dose until I was taking a quarter of a tablet once a day.
Since cutting the tablets any smaller wasn’t practical, I crushed a whole tablet with a spoon and dissolved it in a 1 litre bottle of drink(juice, cordial) where every 100ml would be a tenth of a tablet, making it really easy to taper down until I could stop completely.
Since Venlafaxine has such a short half life you will immediately know if you’re tapering down too fast, which made it really easy to gauge the dose reduction.
Even though it took a while, I can honestly say it wasn’t hard at all.