Cannabis and Anxiety

Cannabis makes you more creative, but that isn’t necessarily always a good thing. It simply floods your brain with creative thoughts. Those thoughts can be positive or negative, based on your current psychological state.

Which is why it may be a blessing in disguise that I didn’t start using marijuana until later in life, after going through the self-work to overcome my anxiety through cognitive behavior therapy and mindfulness meditation. If I hadn’t done that before, and I used cannabis in the state of anxiety I was in during my teenage years and early 20s, being high may not have been a positive experience. I did not have the knowledge of consciousness, nor the practice of mindfulness to be able to observe and control my thoughts.

Now when I’m high, it’s always a positive experience, full of artistic and intellectual creativity. I have my best, most creative ideas. Also, cannabis helps further reduce my anxiety-because I did the self-work before.

However, if I used marijuana while younger, it very well may have made my anxiety worse. Because when high, my mind is flooded with thoughts, and many of those thoughts would have been negative, fueled by the constant anxiety and depression I felt in my teens and early twenties. I had not learned any coping mechanisms yet. I wasn’t even aware of how anxiety was affecting me.

Anxiety-inducing negative thoughts were the norm for me back then, so if I got high on weed, my mind could have been overloaded with even more anxiety-inducing negative thoughts. Of course, I can’t know for sure what would have happened. It’s possible cannabis could have helped make me more mindful when I was younger and reduced my anxiety. I’ll never know.

Mindfulness is the key to a positive cannabis experience. Today, after spending years developing a mindfulness practice, marijuana makes me even more mindful and present-moment-focused. I’ve gotten into my deepest meditative states while high.

If you get anxious and paranoid from smoking weed, that doesn’t mean the weed made you anxious and paranoid. You probably already were. The weed just made you more conscious of your state of mind.

Originally published at https://steemit.com on August 21, 2018.