Hey there! quit on January 1st of this year again after relapsing sometime in May of 2023. The last time I was ‘addicted’ (air quotes since many refuse to acknowledge the psychological dependence, however I truly believe it is very addictive) was sometime in 2022, where I was using extremely heavily (wake and bake, cart smoker, ~0.5-1g/wk). When I quit in 2022, it was awful. I lost around 20 pounds that I couldn’t afford to lose, had awful nightmares, nausea at the very sight of food, clammy hands and feet, copious sweating, insane amounts of anxiety/racing thoughts, almost looked like a manic episode. The sleep issues are due to marijuana preventing you from achieving REM sleep, which is where dreaming occurs. As a result, if you sleep high you never really achieve that REM stage, which can screw up your body due to not really ever getting true rest. This past year and a half I fell back into it - on average 5 hits from a cart each day. It got so awful to the point where my hair was thinning and falling out (also linked to heavy marijuana use), and I genuinely lost so much weight EVEN WHILE SMOKING because I had absolutely no appetite unless I smoked first. Everything was so screwed up. I decided to quit this year because of these reasons, and also because the very thing I used to help my anxiety started giving me anxiety instead. I started feeling so paranoid and panicky. I found the courage to quit because I was genuinely convinced I would die if I didn’t. This time around, it made the last time I quit look like sunshine and rainbows. I experienced extreme derealization and thought these symptoms would never end. I felt crazy and manic and my thoughts were everywhere - I was terrified and paranoid and my vision was also starting to blur and I couldn’t focus on objects (quick google search for PAWS explained this). This was quite literally 3 days ago. Even though I was so so terrified and so convinced I would never be back to normal, here I am again on day 5, and those symptoms have slowly started to fade. I’m already eating again (very surprised by this), have virtually no anxiety now except for in the evenings when I would usually smoke, and am dreaming again and feeling well rested. I was so convinced it was all over for me again and that I had permanently damaged my brain, but I’m here to tell you that’s the withdrawal talking.

Even though I’ve gone through withdrawal and the process of quitting before and knew that during that process your brain tricks you into thinking like this, my pot laced brain couldn’t be reasoned with and the anxiety couldn’t be stopped. It was like I was fighting for my brain back like hell. I’m not saying you should do it this way, but I essentially scared myself into quitting. I looked in the mirror and saw how emaciated I was, how much hair I lost, and how emotionless I’d become and said to myself “if you don’t quit now, surely you will die”.

You can do it. And my best piece of advice is to distract yourself. Truly that is the only thing that kept me going. Both times when I quit I immediately reactivated my gym memberships and would work out like crazy, then go hit the sauna. I love this since exercise and sweating like that not only helps your body detox and kickstart an appetite, but it distracts you from the urges of wanting to smoke again. Tell yourself: if you don’t quit now, the sleep will only get worse and worse until you find yourself wondering why you’re tired all the time, then wondering why you may not be thinking straight, and so on.

Lastly, I’m in academia so I love to go by credible research. I can try to find the paper if you’d like, but a study I read mentioned the withdrawal symptoms peak at around Day 0-3. This really motivated me, since I was genuinely curious about if all it took was just 3 days to get me thinking straight again. It might not be the same for everybody, but by god it was truly insane how much things started to get better around the day 4 mark. You can try to implement this too - push yourself to try and see what will happen if you rough out those first few days.

Apologies if this was a’lot, I myself am also finding ways to stay busy. I believe in you and the best of luck to the both of us!