> Personally I can't smoke it anymore, I get super anxious now and nervous

I've heard so many people say the same thing, that they used to enjoy using cannabis, then some years later they find it induces anxiety, jitters and nervousness - I wonder what the mechanism behind this anxiety is?

Is it as simple as "modern" cannabis strains having much THC than older ones, or is it something else, possibly age-related, like thyroid hormones?

The CB1 receptors actually shrink up and recede with long term use and the effects change with aging. For many long term smokers, this long term heavy use does bring more anxiety. Stronger THC profiles with less CBN, CBG, or CBD in the flower being smoked, coupled with the terpene profiles present in the flower also have widely varying effects. Some smoke a kush strain that is heavy in caryophylene, myrcene, and/or linalool and feel a relaxing effect. For some, couch locking, sedative effects cause more anxiety. While still for others, sometimes lemony strains full of limonene and pinene causes more anxiety but for others the limonene gives one an energetic and uplifting buzz without the anxiety. It's also a psychoactive (THC) and so similar to hallucinogens, for some it's what anxieties are already in the head that amplifies anxiety once high.

Unless you dive deep into the latest chemical/terpene profiles or live in a legal state you may not have heard that much of the type of high actually comes from a compound effect of the terpenes present and level of THC to CBD to CBG to CBN. Every single strain and plant to plant should be thought of as a concoction of sorts.

Like Shrooms, Cannabis will sooner or later confront you with aspects of yourself that you're not entirely comfortable with.

There was always strong weed, and hashish; it just means you either consume less or fall asleep.

Hormones are possible, I guess.

Was there always strong weed though? Modern strains go up to 20% THC and 0% CBD.

At least when I were lad (in UK), we only got brick weed (which I remember was a good bit less strong than hash), but it was almost exclusively Moroccan hash we got, and even though that is a "concentrate", THC levels have traditionally[0] been lower, and CBD levels significantly higher, than much of today's modern cannabis flower.

[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303871898_The_main_...

I heard this opinion so many times from new agey types who think they know so much wisdom about life. None of them are successful in any way or smoked weed in the same amounts as I or other stoner friends did.

On the hand every single person I know who abused weed (including me) by wake and baking themselves for years have stopped smoking basically because every time they smoked their heartbeat would go to 9000 and they just couldn’t feel good on it anymore (by good I mean just “not feeling like I am having a heart attack in purely physical way”)

Just to be clear it has nothing to do with paranoia, just physical effects - I don’t feel afraid, it’s just that there are no good effects anymore.

Weed never destroyed my life. I was a hugely high-functioning addict to be honest. But there’s no way I can smoke and not get my heartbeat to the moon.

So please, just stop this misinformation. You just never smoked enough of weed to get there.