throwaway_weed

The chocolate bars I sometimes get are very consistent in dosage, easy to slice into even fractions, don't bother my digestion the way gummies often do, and seem to be less affected by whatever else is in my stomach at the time. However tapering has not been a good tactic for me in the past, I'm constantly tempted to bump my levels back up, so I'm just using melatonin and a little grit to get through the first few days. Luckily I don't get nausea, just a somewhat decreased appetite for a while.

Thank you

OK – well first of all congratulations on your recent success, but a word of warning. I have fully quit from cannabis before, though in my case this would be the first time it has not been prompted by some external circumstance. I have also gotten over the initial hump and felt a distinct improvement in clarity, memory etc. In my experience this can almost a high in itself – when you're swimming up to your ears in THC every day, as we have, the upsides of going without are very apparent once you get past the distress of the first week or so. I once saw a comedian very amusingly compare it to acquiring ESP: "hey, I know exactly where my car keys are!" However, after you get over the novelty of ordinary sobriety, you may find (as I have, repeatedly) that as that novel sense fades, you may get hit with a unexpected and possibly profound sense of craving, almost a deep nostalgia for weed. This I have no real insight on, it's a life challenge I suppose and one I have never seriously taken on yet though perhaps I'm starting to now. But I'll advise you to stay alert and look out for that second wave of longing.

Thank you and good luck!

Interesting. I take a protein supplement with a lot of L-glutamine which I need to fast for, as I believe is traditional for amino acid supplements, so I'd have to carve out another time of day to make sure I'd take it on an empty stomach. Is that right, is that what you do? Worth considering anyway, though, thank you

I've made a couple of other comments about exercise in here but suffice to say, I have long since deeply integrated my exercise with my cannabis consumption, it's very much part of my reward system so my challenge is not so much substituting in new exercise routines but rather keeping up what I already do without cannabis. Honestly I have known quite a lot of hardcore athletes who are also enthusiastic cannabis users, I'm almost surprised to see so many comments opposing the two, but then I have known some odd ones so who knows what's normal now. Certainly I also endorse exercise for mental health as much as physical and feel it has great benefits that way regardless of one's other habits.

Thank you

TIL about xantohumol. Very interesting, I will look into it. Thank you

Edibles are... well there's a lot more options out there than there used to be, that's for sure, and I can't claim to have tried them all, but I can't see working them into a sane consumption schedule. I don't get the feeling that I want, meaning a perceptible but minimal level of cannabis euphoria, unless I go over a certain amount at which point I'm committed to a deep if not intense high lasting some hours. I could see it as a weaning strategy if I could keep it to small amounts but when I've done this before I can never stick with trusting the half or quarter doses to do the trick and always nudge myself over the line. For all-day hikes, bike rides, etc it's my preferred method but otherwise it lacks a a sense of precise control over my levels. Perhaps that sense is something I'm hooked on in its own right...

Thank you

I mentioned somewhere else in the thread, but I'm exercising a fair amount already, and in my case the traditional reward for a solid workout is a vape session so while I do intend to keep it up I'm sort of maxed out in terms of using it to compensate. Regarding sleep – in my commuter days the insomnia would wreck me but my schedule is a lot more flexible now so I think I'm going to try to ride it out with just some melatonin. Re caffeine – somewhat maxed out there too, I drink about a pint of high-grade Colombian iced coffee a day which is at this point a well-established personal upper threshold for well-being.

Thank you

I am going to explore this possibility

Thank you

Your comment is very kind and insightful, yes there's a lot to all of this but I do appreciate you sharing your experience, it doesn't have to provide answers and you know, I think sometimes it's better not to. One conversational tactic I've found hugely helpful in developing relationships is to preface some comments, especially when the subject is loaded with emotion/anxiety, simply by saying "well here's some random thoughts and feelings from me, please understand this is not a judgement or decision but rather a brain dump" – this opens people up tremendously and rather than examining your every word in anticipatory defense, if you have a good rapport and good trust then they will listen to you in an entirely different and more receptive way, and are more likely to venture something that they might not have otherwise.

Thank you!

In my situation, being very much settled into mid-life and a whole house I only have to share with my very tolerant partner, I don't have the same aspirations that discourage heavy use. However I do think that during this time of increased isolation I've benefited somewhat from what I call the Groundhog Day effect – i.e. every day is so much the same that I can't help but notice the iterative effects of all these little choices I'm making. Even if I don't do anything about them I'm far more aware of them then I was when I was constantly mixing with other people and their other issues. I supposed that's kind of what brought me here today...

Thank you!

I have been using a Pax 2 for a few years which has stood me in good stead. Very occasionally I'll have some water-filtered smoke but not often. The interesting thing about the vape to me was that, while it was a distinct improvement from the get-go, at first I really missed the full flavor and 'bite' (into my lungs, yes) so I wound up consuming more. Eventually I brought the consumption back down some but I'm still at more like 60g a month.

I also found another challenge specific to dry-herb vapes: the chamber ('oven') holds a lot, and I didn't enjoy saving half for later since when you started it back up it naturally wasn't anywhere near as fresh-tasting. I tried decreasing the effective size of the oven but with middling results. I almost bought a Tinymight [0] which are supposed to be good for very small amounts but I foresaw just loading its tiny chamber multiple times :D

Thank you!

[0] https://tinymightvape.com/

All the sedentary screen time (I am a SWE, surprise) is an ongoing prompt to indulge in little side rewards, and it makes good sense to substitute relatively innocuous ones. I used soda and cigarettes heavily early in my career which would scale up along with whatever project I had going on, so when it was crunch time I would consume horrific levels of these. My main challenge now is that I've cut out so much, I don't even eat candy anymore, so my options are limited, but perhaps it's worth a temporary trade-off just to get away from the substance I find most irresistible.

Thank you

Haha "the same level of mundane as before" but healthier and less expensive seems like a very worthy goal. Thank you!

I will look into these, thanks! I have found that I feel my best when I'm taking some vitamin supplements. Very likely a placebo effect but hey, if it works it works... Also I am taking some melatonin to hopefully help with the insomnia I tend to get when going off cannabis.

I knew about that subreddit but for whatever reason hadn't thought of it recently. Maybe I'll spend some time in conversation over there soon.

Thank you!

Yeah, as regards weaning, as I touched on in another comment, playing a game with myself about how much less I'd try to use today seems more wearisome than just stopping entirely and dealing with the feels. When I've weaned before I've usually snapped back even harder into frequent use.

I think it's possible that my own best strategy for feeling OK about it all is just to commiserate with other HN users :D so thank you and everyone who is commenting

Yes, and I often recommend it to people trying to make similar life changes, but I already cycle 6-10 hours a week and do plenty of other stuff, yoga etc. Not only do I feel like I'm already fully utilizing the benefits of a physical regimen, since I had been very much in the habit of combining that with vaping sessions it's now yet another thing that I have to get used to doing without enhancement. This one hurts, really. Scratch an athlete and you will find someone very strongly opinionated about their optimal personal chemistry. Sometimes this manifests as a strict adherence to sobriety but at least as often (in my experience) it's a schedule of substances which ranges across the spectrum from licit to less-than.

Thank you

Yes, you are right in many respects which are already familiar to me and my own long-held feelings about cannabis. Indeed I spent much of my life feeling like its relative benevolence was a reality that I needed to make more people aware of, if only to help destroy my (USA) culture's characterization which is widely employed as an pretext to jail people. At this point there is nothing external that has a strong influence on me either way. I simply am tired of it, and at the same time disturbed by the fact that I seem to have such a hard time controlling the habit.

I do also get 'brain fog' to an extent, but in my case it is far less of an impediment to thinking through abstract problems in depth, it's more that I simply get slower to come to a decision about anything, even simple matters. A compounding effect with ADD perhaps. As with many aspects of my cannabis use (and I suspect it goes this way with many drugs and many people) it seems to naturally enhance some of my specific strengths and also to equally naturally reinforce some of my weaknesses. I was known as a bright but inattentive child from very early on and none of my childhood friends were ever surprised that I grew to love cannabis.

Thank you!

I have done exactly as you suggest but it's tough. It's the early part of the day that's so challenging. I have perhaps built up my morning coffee + cannabis routine into too much of an idealized mental state. I really do love the initial sense of being up early, checking messages, getting ahead of my day's work, all while perking away on my hippie speedball flow. Doing without it feels, at least for a while, like disdaining technicolor Oz in favor of staying in black-and-white Kansas. I can fight through this for a while to re-establish a less frequent & early schedule but without anything reinforcing this routine I find it irresistible to slip back into the early morning 'treat'. The only thing that makes me want to not do that is the fact that once I break the seal, the rest of the day will feel increasingly bland. So in some sense it feels easier or at least more realistic to plan for no weed instead of constantly checking in with myself about whether I've reached the magic hour yet.

Thank you!

I'm meh on mushrooms, and most psychedelics. My relatively few experiences with them were neither enjoyable nor productive, in terms of personal insights. I contrast that with MDMA which I've used even less but found far more therapeutic and transformative. Mushrooms give me high anxiety, especially now in mid-life, perhaps because the people I've known who evangelized them most passionately (some quite brilliant) have for the most part not aged well in ways that I see as deeply linked with their drug use. It's just my personal experience, I don't think they're wrong for everyone and can see many comments on HN and elsewhere testifying to their efficacy but for me it's not a good option.

Thank you

I certainly find with cannabis that the mental struggle is far more significant than any physical dependency, to the extent that it even exists (and I can distinguish it from my overall mental state). Indeed I've dropped much more chemically addictive substances with greater ease.

"Tolerance break" is not a term I've come across before, but it's a great description of at least part of what I'm after. I have taken similar breaks before, and currently have none around and no plans for getting more. I'm not dead set on quitting weed entirely, I don't see it as intrinsically bad, I just have found that if I have it in the house I'm liable to consume it by increasing degrees until I'm back to being high almost all the time. My biggest trigger is simply being awake and looking forward to another fairly predictable day. Perhaps I should be trying to inject more unpredictability into my daily routine? This goes against everything I've fought for in establishing a halfway comfortable middle-class existence, but perhaps it deserves investigation.

Thank you!