How Marijuana Was Great for My Anxiety and Why I Stopped Using It

"When solving problems, dig at the root instead of just hacking at the leaves." - Anthony J. D’Angelo

This is an account of my experience using marijuana as a device to help my anxiety, why I’m glad I had it, and why I no longer need it.

This story isn’t an advocation for or against smoking pot. It’s a story to shed some insight into how and why it helped certain ailments and my journey to lasting change without it.

How Smoking Pot Helped My Anxiety

For most of my life I was a closet anxiety sufferer.

That’s mostly because I didn’t have a label for how I felt until I was thirty.

My anxiety brought insomnia, tension headaches, stomach problems, and social anxiety in addition to the swirl of bees that lived in my chest.

One symptom that drove me nuts was incessant queasiness. In my twenties I dated a guy who smoked pot, so I gave it a try to see if it would help my stomach. And it helped. A lot.

Then I noticed it helped me fall asleep.

It helped with my ADD by letting me focus on my work when I was coding (nerd alert!) or doing something creative.

It helped my social anxiety by loosening my worry and fear over other people’s judgments.

When I felt anxious, upset, sad, or angry, it dulled the negative emotions down and helped take the edge off, which sometimes was enough to give me the space to get some perspective.

It eased my tension headaches.

It gave me something to do on boring days.

It made doing chores less laborious.

I came to rely on it. If we were running low, I would start to get anxious. If I ran out, I would have anxiety attacks. I felt like I needed it to get through the day.

I went from occasionally smoking to smoking morning, noon, and night (and in the middle of the night when I couldn’t get back to sleep).

I told myself that this was perfectly acceptable. It was my medicine. I needed it. It was a way of life. That it wasn’t like I was smoking cigarettes, so it was totally fine.

Pot helped.

But only in the moment.

Why Smoking Pot Didn’t Really Help My Anxiety

What pot didn’t do for me was fix my anxiety. It didn’t make it go away; it just eased it a bit temporarily. It wasn’t helping me get to the root of my problem, and that’s why I needed to keep going back to it.

It was helping the symptoms of anxiety, not the cause.

Anxiety caused stomach problems and tension headaches. Pot helped with that.

Anxiety made my mind jump all over the place when I tried to sleep or focus. Pot helped slow the erratic surge of thoughts.

Anxiety made me nervous around other people. Pot took the edge off.

I didn’t like how any negative emotions felt in my body, so I jumped to numb the feeling in the quickest and easiest way I knew how. Smoking pot.

It became such a habit that the idea of not having this crutch at my immediate disposal caused me stress.

Day after day, year after year, the anxiety was still there. So I kept needing my crutch.

That is, until I decided I wanted to walk on my own. I reached the realization that I wanted to solve this problem, not manage it.

That meant I needed to get to the bottom of it. ... read more

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