BudWarrior
Filling Out
Saw the below Reddit post and I thought it was an interesting conversation starter.
I am wondering about the ups and downs of our consumption;
I am wondering about the ups and downs of our consumption;
- Frequency and Volume of consumption
- Usually two to three times a day, sometimes 5 or 6, sometimes none
- Usually 0.2 - 0.03g a time, usually around 0.15g, sometimes two to three times that
- T-breaks or moderating periods
- Only seems relevant to us if we have a tough period that needs extra medicating, but then we want to avoid higher usage when we feel better later
CONTENT WARNING
The point of the below Reddit group is addiction or stopping, by people who feel out of control or don't understand their own needs. So it is not relevant to how you should see your own well managed medication.
The point of the below Reddit group is addiction or stopping, by people who feel out of control or don't understand their own needs. So it is not relevant to how you should see your own well managed medication.
Earlier this year, after a long t-break, I reevaluated what kind of relationship I want with cannabis. I know that getting high is addictive, so I can’t just go by my gut. And doing it too often not only robs it of pleasure but also doesn’t serve my life goals in the long run. That’s why I need a moderation system.
And by system, I mean a Set of Rules for cannabis use. I’ve previously posted about the set that I’d built for myself over the years, and as many people validly pointed out, the rules had grown rather extensive and complicated. This feedback gave me the impulse to start from scratch and explore what other, simpler systems, could emerge. And I’m glad I did.
I started from the basic thesis that in my experience, the most taxing part of moderating weed use is, well, the actual moderating. As in, knowing that it would be possible to get high but still having to actively control and optimize use. There’s something about the possibility of getting high that makes my brain want to constantly play chess against itself.
To simplify, I’ll differentiate between three main weed usage patterns here:
T-break – I abstain completely.
Controlled use – I get high occasionally, but moderate my use so as to not overdo it.
Laissez-faire – I get high as much as I want, as often as I want, without feeling guilty.
If my goal is to minimize moderation, then it’s clear that I need to minimize the time I spend in the “Controlled use” pattern. After all, that’s the only one that actually requires moderation:
When I’m on a T-break, I don’t need to moderate because the answer is a clear “No weed.”
When I’m getting high to my heart’s content, I also don’t need to moderate, because I’m off the leash. (I mean, I still want to avoid green-outs and get my must-dos done, but otherwise… it’s a bacchanalia).
So I need to consciously split my time into patterns #1 and #3, avoiding #2 entirely.
To this idea, I added an earlier constraint that I don’t want to be high more than ten percent of my life. (This number totally depends on each person’s unique situation – different strokes. I could imagine that it will undulate for me too over the years.)
For me, this means that if I spend 36.5 days a year as stoned as I want but abstain for the remainder, then I’ve hit my ten percent goal and basically eliminated the need to moderate my consumption.
However, there’s another dimension to this problem: knock-on effects. After spending a day high, I’ll have a foggy brain for a day, or even two. (These effects are due to e.g. altered sleep patterns that take a while to stabilize again.)
To avoid the time spent in this fog, I reasoned that it would make sense to cluster the weed days so that I’d get less of this post-weed fogginess. (The duration doesn’t seem to scale linearly in relation to the days consumed before.)
What I opted for was that each month, I have three days in a row of Caligulaesque free-for-all cannabis consumption, abstaining completely for all the remaining days. I did this for 3 months and must say, it worked rather well.
Knowing that I could get as high as I wanted, without feeling guilty or second-guessing my use, made those three days very enjoyable. And productive too: each month I allocated one of the three days to professional projects (I sometimes find a high perspective useful there). Another day I devoted mostly to being outdoors, hiking, biking, swimming, etc. These are fun activities sober, but I tend to derive a childlike enjoyment from them while high.
However, I still found it a bit tiresome to have to start a t-break every single month. After all, the beginning is usually the hard part, and this method translates into 12 T-break beginnings in a year.
So in the summer, I decided to make the split even more extreme: I took a 3-month T-break, and then at the end of August, let myself get high for nine days in a two-week period. I loved it.
The sober summer was enjoyable, active, and memorable. Giving up weed felt relatively easy, and I think it’s because I didn’t have to moderate – I was abstaining completely. Plus I knew there was something extra special coming up afterwards.
Then, in early autumn, I cleared my schedule (more or less), and for nine days in a two-week period, I let myself hit the DHV as much as I wanted. Again, some of those high days I wanted to invest into work topics, some went into hiking, and some went into exercise. But some just went into guilt-free chilling, music, and meditation.
Obviously, it was great, and when it was over, I didn’t even mind going on a T-break again – I’d gotten my fill of being high (at least for the time being).
In summary, I’m cautiously optimistic about this direction. There are drawbacks too, of course, such as the tolerance increase during the intense usage, and the inability to just get high occasionally to, say, get a new perspective on a project or relax. Still, I think the system has potential for me. I’m sure it will continue to evolve through experimentation, but for now, I’m updating my Rules for Cannabis Use to these simpler commandments:
Rule #1: I may engage in three back-to-back calendar days per month of guilt-free, high-as-you-like cannabis consumption. Otherwise, complete abstention.
Rule #2: When possible with regard to work and holiday schedules, I cluster the days even more.
E.g. take a T-break all summer long, followed by 9 days of highness
Rule #3: I always do the day’s meditation sober.
This helps get more out of the high.
Rule #4: Social situations.
If someone offers me weed in a social situation, I can choose to indulge, but this is deducted from the next period of use so that the total number of high days in a year does not exceed 36.5.
What do you think? What pros and cons do you see with this approach?
(My updated stack of rules can always be found here. I also sometimes post there about my usage strategies and experiences meditating with weed.)
As a final note: I know that frequent, long T-breaks may not be the right way for everyone. For whatever reason, they seem to work for me, especially if I “make them into a thing” by adding other quasi-Stoic elements, like early morning wake-ups, workouts, meditation, abstaining from alcohol, etc.That said, we’re all different in how this plant affects us, and I’ve never been a heavy user for longer periods than a week, so you may be facing a very different ballgame than me. I wish you the best of luck in yours
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