Just a data point. I dealt with anxiety my entire life, and too much weed absolutely destroys me but small amount of weed definitely calms me down. When I smoke too much weed, it really doesn't feel like my anxieties deep down are surfaces. It feels like my brain is making up new stupid things. To me, weed is a very strong sensory experience. When I'm too high it almost feels I'm hearing too much, feeling too much, seeing too much and that disorients me. Also due to my anxiety I've dealt with dp/dr in the past (luckily I don't have this problem any more) and too much weed induces this dp/dr back.

When I was young and stupid I did get too high and got bitten by it. One needs to learn lessons the hard way. You need to be respectful to drugs, try understand the science behind how substances affect your brain and start small and increase doses infinitesimally as you feel comfortable and as you decide it does not affect your life negatively in any way objectively.

You probably need to try a strain with less THC and more CBD (like a 2:8 ratio).

Yes nowadays I smoke mixed CBD-only and THC-only strains this way I can make custom ratios. Weed's been orders of magnitude more comfortable since I started doing this.

Another data point: I have anxiety and weed/hash reduce my anxiety, it helps a lot with falling asleep while I'm awake but I'm known to scream while sleeping under the influence; another time I was sound asleep near a friend who was snoring and his snoring woke me up and I was convinced he was in fact drowning in his own vomit and I slapped and shook him and tried to get him on his side, after I realized he was fine, I happily went back to sleep as if nothing happened.

I also had visual hallucinations, visual/auditory synesthesia once from a high dosage of hash, so I might be an outlier.

What kind of made up anxiety have you encountered? I ask just to understand. I've never run into an anxiety after smoking weed that wasn't rooted in reality. I find it helpful for the same reasons the previous poster stated.

Like one time I accidentally dosed my weed wrong. I prepared a bowl with super-high THC strain (I live in a legal state) when I was trying to smoke a 1:1 THC:CBD strain (I wasn't trying to get high, I was trying to medicate against my chronic inflammation problem). I vaped the entire bowl. Continued to watch Portlandia and 30 seconds in, I realized something is wrong and I can barely keep my eyes open. After managing the initial disorientation, I got up to take a shower because my heart was beating at 150 bpm so I wanted to distract myself. When I got up I heard someone talking outside. It sounded like it's my coworker's sound. I got worried for some reason. I was worried that my coworker would see me high and think I'm a "loser stoner" getting high alone. Of course it was just my neighbor talking on his phone outside. Anyway, I never felt like this before or ever since. This was a unique paranoid experience I felt at that moment.

That the airplanes constantly flying over your home, which you can hear but not see, are actually missiles being lobbed across the world as countries that are not your own duke it out.

Not completely rooted in reality, and you’ll probably calm down as you come down. But now you feel a brief stab of anxiety any time you hear an airplane fly overhead.

For me it's just the feeling of anxiety, no specific anxiety inducing subject is running through my head and no paranoia. When I eat edibles (which I do rarely and almost always regret it) the anxiety is worse, I get really cold and my whole body shakes.

I stick to small amounts of vaped weed and I can enjoy it

This is a good way of putting it.

I view THC as having an 'echoing' effect of whatever I am feeling. If something makes me laugh, the feeling of laughing will cause more laughter. If I am feeling anxiety, the feeling of anxiety will cause more anxiety.

That's absolutely true, weed is a big enhancer.

I feel like it makes your inner Voice louder.

some days you can control your inner voice better than others

Also thc tolerance helps, once you get the tolerance up it is a lot less anxiety inducing and more relaxing.