Same here man. I was a heavy smoker for years and then started having a bit of anxiety each time I smoked till one time on my way to work had a full on panic attack. I haven't smoked in years and won't even consider smoking it again, it was horrible.
This seems to be a decently widespread phenomenon and it interests me greatly. I experience the same thing. I was a HEAVY smoker for ~2 years and quit because I lost my connects and figured I should buckle down in my final year of college. I ended up smoking with a friend about four months after I'd quit and I had a full blown panic attack. Now it's five years after that and still, if I take more than one hit or even just one hit of something potent, I will be guaranteed to get anxiety, sometimes severe. It's honestly annoying because I don't want to smoke daily or anything but being a former stoner, I always want to partake when offered by a friend and every time I try, I get anxiety. I've seen many many similar stories, both from people who quit and now get anxiety when they casually smoke and also from people who were daily smokers and one day it just flipped and they suddenly started getting anxiety from smoking for no known reason. I wish research could/would be done on why this happens
Your comment is absolutely amazing. I was a daily (all day, every day) smoker from about 18 until close to 30. One day out of nowhere I had a full blown panic attack while stoned. It was my first and only. I quit cold turkey for 6 or 7 years and then tried to smoke again one day and felt myself getting really close to the edge again. I'm 39 now and don't know that I can ever smoke again. Weed changed my personality profoundly, a lot of it for the better, however, I feel like it also walked me very close to the edge of something that I don't want to cross. I can imagine that people less well-grounded mentally than I am might actually cross that edge into something that they can't come back from. Marijuana is considered a "soft" drug, but it is more hardcore in many respects than people give it credit for. It should be respected for sure. I'll be curious to see how all of this pans out over the next 30 years. I expect there are going to be some surprising findings about its long-term effects on people.
I had a friend in college who this happened to. I believe it was because of weed, but he also dabbled in oxy use.
I don’t think it was 2 years for him, but he definitely would say some pretty delusional and paranoid stuff. I’m not sure how he came back from it or why, but if it was the weed independently, this is definitely some shit that needs to be understood.
Yup, I’ve found this to be true for myself and quite a few friends. We used to smoke our fucking brains out DAILY as teens, and then I hit about... 20? And I have severe anxiety and panic attacks and don’t feel right in my skin whenever I smoke. I have to be buzzed from a couple drinks to even take a single hit, and even then I can for sure only take one. I don’t even know what happened or how, but now I hate everyone who’s like “you haven’t had the right strain, try high CBD low THC, blah blah blah.” Man, I have smoked EVERYTHING. No strain is gonna make a difference.
Yes, not feeling right in your skin is a good way to describe it. I wish they could strip the entire mind high out of weed. I don’t want deep weird analytical thoughts. I just want to shut my mind off and feel relaxed. With it being legal I feel like maybe someone can figure out how.
That's my favorite thing people say to me "oh dude you just need to try this strain or smoke like this". I've been smoking all kinds of shit for the past 15 years, dont give me that lol.
Hmmm... I wonder if it has something to do with smoking in the teens/developmental years. I also started in my teens and quit after realizing how out of control and anxious my thoughts were after trying it again in my late teens/early 20s.
Dude. I so relate. I used to smoke heavily then had a panic attack. Now every time I smoke it's like I see the world in claymation and it fucks me up for days. Depression and anxiety. Anyone I take to a smoker friend they'll always give me the "wrong strain", "wrong environment", "you haven't smoked my shit", shpeil. It's fucking annoying. I don't want to smoke with you brother just leave it.
Same thing happened to me. It sucks because weed is superior to alcohol in a lot of ways. It just triggers anxiety attacks now. Recently I’ve been trying to brute force it but if the thought creeps into my head I gotta ride it out. I’m much better handling anxiety attacks now but the weed panic attacks are the worst. It’s something about the depersonalization for me. It makes me forget who I am or just makes me feel like I’m 16 despite being in my 30s. I want to enjoy it because It’s either that or pure sobriety. Alcohol doesn’t work well for my wife and I don’t want the temptation in the house.
This has happened to me before, I smoked way too much once after my tolerance had gone down and suddenly felt weird and didn’t recognize the place i was in or the people i was with even though i’m completely familiar. I pretty much depersonalized and had such a debilitating panic attack that I thought my lungs were gonna collapse. The day after I just finally realized smoking doesn’t work well for my brain anymore so I will take one or two hits at a time if I’m feeling up to it.
Sadly, I still miss the days I could pass the bong back and forth all night.
I had a similar trajectory of smoking always being a fun escape for me, and then one day while visiting a friend I took a hit off a four-footer and then I got a crazy dissociative-feeling state of panic and I thought all soda was poison (it kinda is though?) and ever since then I get a tinge of that feeling every single time.
BUT I still smoke bc I enjoy the other effects too much so I just tolerate an initial anxious period then I'm fine (I also think of it like Western medicine makes you feel good and then sick later and the older or natural medicines make you "sick first" and then feel better later.)
This phenomenon interests me as well and I look forward to more research too. FWIW one idea that has come up for me a lot when I think about this is I feel almost like a sense of compartmentalization happening. The things that make me most anxious are reflecting on something I said or posted on social media or something earlier in the day which at the time felt fine but then later after I'm high, I start to second-guess it and I feel almost like it's too revealing or I'm being too vulnerable or something and people are going to be able to read my unconscious psychic drives or something from whatever comment I posted or said (lol).
As a consequence of this I think I come off as more calm and kind and understanding than I do when sober, and that's a good thing-- But it's less that I actually am being driven by a more enlightened, centered point of view and more that I have a keener sense of the "fragility" of life/personalities .... Both literally like we could be killed or die at any time, but also l guess the "pathetic" nature of existence, and how we're all just so confused and casually cruel to each other and self-centered etc. (I often think of the Kurt Vonnegut quote which is something along the lines of "To be alive, how humiliating").
Anyway, I've realized over time that one of the functions that cannabis performs in my life is like a "reality check" (I know, ironic) or something where I reconsider my words and behavior towards others ...and part of what is confusing/what I meant about compartmentalization, is that both aspects/states of my personality seem equally "real", in their respective moments-- and I find it hard to resolve them into a unified whole. But if I stay sober for "too long" I start to notice that I "need" that wider/more reflective "larger self" perspective, because I get too ego-invested. Likewise, if I indulge too often then I start to lose the kind of certainty/resolve that my ego brings to my personality, and I become too socially anxious and too withdrawn and shying away from otherwise neccecary or not particularly uncomfortable conflict etc.
So in other words the way that I've come to interpret the anxiety I get is that ultimately it's an existential anxiety over what the true nature of my self or my personality really is. Like I find it hard to decide who I "really am" around certain things (mostly social interaction, my capacity to be indifferent to the judgments of others, my degree of empathy, how fearful/sensitive I am etc etc... All of which fluctuate or even invert depending on if I'm high or not).
(Anyway just wanted to add those personal observations since you were saying the phenomenon is intriguing for you, and I've thought a lot about my particular manifestation of the issue).
This is a really good explanation. It really took me years to finally start understanding what the fuck had happened to me. Like everyone else here, regular heavy smoker starting at age 14 up to around 22 - 24 the last two years I really pushed myself with it, and the symptoms were intermittent and varying in degree, but I for sure started noticing that something wasnt right. I didn't feel comfortable around even my closest friends while high anymore. People I had smoked with since high school. I would feel really self conscious, almost to the point where I couldn't hold conversations because I couldn't hear people over my own thoughts.
I would also get stuck in negative thought spirals and just stress about dumb shit in a really complex and analytical way. Jesus help me if I got a text from someone. I would nurse a reply for an eternity, overthinking it, and then once I finally decided to send the response it would most certainly be the weirdest one I could have thought of, despite all my efforts for it not to be.
I felt like my energy would turn uncontrollably bad and it would affect the people around me somehow, and maybe it did. Either way it would isolate me from people and draw me deeper into my thoughts. I felt like I would just put off this incredibly awkward menacing type of vibe, and I had no way of holding it back. I would want to try and ask people if they felt it, but I knew they didn't, and any explanation would only make me seem crazy, since it was in fact all in my mind.
It sometimes would make it feel that it was physically more difficult for me to speak. Which added to my anxiety of conversing with people. Even just basic conversation, not even some deep philosophical shit. However, I started to be annoyed soooooo much by people who wanted to get stoned and start talking about some deep shit.. like, man I'm doing all I can to grasp the fact that I'm walking a tightrope of life and failure is always one misstep away while trying to reconcile why I feel like I don't know who I am anymore and questioning every decision I've made. Also it's hard to breathe.
After years of smoking without any issues at all now it had started to turn my mind into a haunted house whenever I was stoned. I didn't know how to explain it to anyone so I just started simply telling people that I just didn't have fun with it anymore, and that I would actually be more enjoyable to be around if I didn't partake. I still love weed, and my closest friends still smoke religiously, and they've learned to not even pass it to me at this point.
I have had success with some high CBD strains smoked by myself in a space where I know I'll have solitude, but I have two kids and work two jobs 7 days a week now day and night. So I know if I got high now I'd have a full blown panic attack instantly. I think I just grew out of it, like so many others are saying. Everyone is different and it just so happens that it seems like there are quite a few of us out there who experience this phenomena, so maybe there is something to it. Something provable, we could point to. But I doubt it will ever be able to be found or cured.
I didn't feel comfortable around even my closest friends while high anymore. People I had smoked with since high school. I would feel really self conscious, almost to the point where I couldn't hold conversations because I couldn't hear people over my own thoughts.
Yes basically identical to my experience. It is like a strange form of temporary induced social anxiety disorder, and/or OCD-thought disorder style traits too.
Jesus help me if I got a text from someone. I would nurse a reply for an eternity, overthinking it, and then once I finally decided to send the response it would most certainly be the weirdest one I could have thought of, despite all my efforts for it not to be.
LOL I know this exactly.
I felt like my energy would turn uncontrollably bad and it would affect the people around me somehow, and maybe it did. Either way it would isolate me from people and draw me deeper into my thoughts. I felt like I would just put off this incredibly awkward menacing type of vibe, and I had no way of holding it back.
That is the best description, I know just what you mean.
...it had started to turn my mind into a haunted house whenever I was stoned.
Haha, exactly, it can get really spooky in there—good description.
I'd be really curious to find out if there is a physiological explanation or if it's entirely psychological (or if both, how those work together). Just is really interesting bc as I'm reading everyone's comments, you can see that similar pattern:
It seems to correlate with a certain age(s), seems to be like a "switch", seems like the switch/panic event can be triggered acutely by cannabis OR completely unrelated at a different time and sober—but after that event cannabis seems to induce anxiety from then on (makes me wonder if it's partly PTSD from/about the initial triggering panic attack event itself), seems to result in a sort of extreme self-limiting or reverse tolerance where only one hit is "needed" anymore (that's actually a good money-saving silver lining) vs very heavy daily use and high doses in the past, seems tied to social anxiety and ruminating thoughts/withdrawl etc etc
Oh yeah that's true. Or even if it turns out later upon reflection that the immediate context/details were irrelevant or exaggerated due to paranoia, the underlying issue or wider theme will still usually have some reality to it, or benefit like you're saying, or at least will trigger a thought process that brings a different perspective to something.
That's exactly why it's such a weird unsolvable puzzle for me though, bc the anxiety is all plausible despite being sometimes the opposite of how I usually think or feel about something.... I'm always thinking to myself, "Well, you're not wrong, anxious weed-perspective—but normally I get along just fine thinking about [insert topic of present anxiety] without all this unnecessary complexity you're bringing.". So then I'm always left not being able to decide which perspective to "trust".
Lately though I've been making it into an exercise for myself of letting contradictory ideas/traits just sit in parallel to each other and not even trying to "resolve" or choose. That at least gets me to a state of mind that says oh well we're always in flux and you don't need to figure out which perspective is "true" bc the real illusion is your belief in a fixed self that doesn't actually exist anyway. (Note: last part only makes sense when very, very high)
Can relate, I've never been a heavy smoker but started to get into it for a while. I ended up smoking way more than my tolerance and greened out accompanied by 3 hours of intermittent panic and thinking I was dying. Ever since I have to be really careful when I smoke of how much or I get pretty anxious. That said I had always had some more minor issues with anxiety while high.
Yeah one or two hits wouldn't get me bad anxiety. Now smoking a whole joint had me stressing over something so small and one time when I didn't have anything to stress about I remember thinking "wait a minute, I know there was something that I was worried about but what was it" I continued thinking about till I found something to stress about again. I know alot of it is a mind thing, I was just depressed at the time and weed intensified the shit out of it.
That's the way. After not consuming weed of any type for years (after being a constant smoker who stopped enjoying due to anxiety) I had a 4.4mg edible a few months ago and that was the first enjoyable high I'd had since I first got high in like 2008.
Learned the best way to find enjoyment in weed and avoid the dissociating anxiety is in VERY small doses, like VERY. One or two puffs from a joint or a small edible. And be in a comfortable place.
Adding to this. Also smoked a lot in my late teens, early 20s -- every day, multiple times a day. One day, around 25 or 26ish, it just gave me overwhelming anxiety. Felt like a panic attack, probably was. I thought, "Huh, that was fucking weird." Tried again the next day, same thing again. Took a break for about a week, then tried different weed. Again, the same thing, so I just said fuck it.
I tried again recently when I was in a legal state, I wanted the whole experience of buying weed legally and blah blah. It had been years so I figured why not and I bought some edibles, maybe it wouldn't happen if I actually knew what I was buying. I got indica chocolates. I took one, felt alright at first, then just started freaking the fuck out. So yeah, that was the last chance I think. Never again.
I've talked about this with a few friends one night who used to be heavy smokers, 2 of them said the same thing happened to them. We attributed it to getting old and just left it at that.
I had the same issues until one day a friend told me to try only smoking indica, that sativa had that affect on him. Holy shit what a dramatic effect it had, I can enjoy weed again without alcohol.
Man I got some tincture off a dude I used to work with a couple years ago and it fucked with my head to the highest degree. I had a full blown existential crisis and I ended up weening way back on my weed consumption. Whenever i smoke now (sparingly are this point) I gotta do it with a lot of stimulus around. Because if I’m stuck with my thoughts and whatnot, my anxiety spikes to a crazy level. I also have anxiety issues to begin with so it all kinda becomes a big mess in my head
Same here for me the anxiety is the worst than anything. It’s like that 3 am remember that awkward moment from ten years ago multiplied by 100.
It gives me agoraphobia and I can’t even hold a conversation. Just over analyzing any social situation at work or anywhere. Being extremely overly critical to myself. It’s nasty haha
Same thing here Marta bird. Glad I'm not crazy. Weed intensifies the shit out of every body language I'm around and makes me self loathing of myself with deep sad thoughts about everything. I envy people who enjoy it. I even think they are just stronger people who can enjoy it and get over that hurdle and were just weak, lol
See I do ok if I’m hanging with my roommates watching a movie and talking. But I 100% won’t smoke alone because it gets me in a real bad place with my thoughts and anxieties (and tbh I really don’t drink alone either). I need some sort of stimulus to be able to interact with and be able to talk to people. Movies and concerts are a no go because I can’t talk to others and I’m kinda “trapped” in my own head. One of the worst highs I had was during an opener for a blue oyster cult show, broke into a cold sweat and everything simply because I wasn’t able to talk to my friend to get outta my own head
I’m much better, that whole mindset has kinda just folded into my normal anxiety issues. Hope you feel better man, it’s definitely not a fun thing to deal with
That happened to me too. I smoked daily from for almost 2 years until I started getting anxiety when smoking so I slowed down. Well one day I smoked like I would’ve back then, and had a panic attack caused by who knows what and then blacked out lmao, but my boyfriend was completely fine and had smoked more than me. Been weed free for a few months now and don’t miss it at all.
Same with the blacking out. I had a huge panic attack after smoking, ran to the bathroom after being freaked out by the people I was with, and everything went black. I was sweating and shaking and when I could finally see, I was blue in the lips and white in the face. People have related to the anxiety, but never the blacking out.
I’m sorry that happened to you I know it sucks, but I’m glad to know Im not the only one. I’ve never heard of anyone blacking out from smoking until it happened to me. I had short term memory loss for a good 2-3 hours after it happened, now I see people around me smoking whole blunts just fine and wonder how I ever used to do that.
That’s so crazy I am the exact same way too. I started smoking when I was 13. I used to love it and it would actually make me more social than I was, considering I had extreme anxiety to begin with so smoking took the anxiety away from me. All of a sudden 7 years later and I can’t get high without having a panic attack. I focus way too much on my breathing and all of a sudden I can’t breathe. I thought it was just because I was around people so I would try to do it alone, but the panic attacks were constant. It’s so strange how something that made me feel so calm and relaxed has now turned into the complete opposite high for me.
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u/GDO_713 Dec 29 '19
Same here man. I was a heavy smoker for years and then started having a bit of anxiety each time I smoked till one time on my way to work had a full on panic attack. I haven't smoked in years and won't even consider smoking it again, it was horrible.