Does Weed Help or Hurt Me? I’m Taking 6 Weeks Off to Find Out

44, work in middle management, have a family, and my wife is expecting our second child. On paper, life is good. What I’m unsure about is whether my motivation and focus still work properly without cannabis.

I started smoking weed as a teenager and used it heavily through uni — bong almost daily, plus plenty of drinking and other drugs. I only took times off when forced to by the police.

I quit bongs around 30 and never went back. Usage became less frequent. At 40 I quit cigarettes, and two years ago I also quit tobacco in joints and switched fully to vaping cannabis.

That switch changed everything. With vaping I can dose very precisely: get a light high, enjoy it for an hour or two, then be normal again in the evening. No coughing, no tobacco, no obvious health downsides anymore. The problem is that this also made weed much easier to integrate into everyday life — and easier to downplay any subtle negative effects it might still have.

Here’s the concern: for much of my life, weed helped me work. Boring tasks became interesting, I could focus deeply, see problems from new angles, and come up with good ideas. In my current job, many frameworks and ideas that led to real success were developed while I was high. I work from home and often vaped during work hours (hoping nobody would call at the wrong time).

Over time I started to believe I simply do better work when I’m high. That belief worries me.

Either I’ve trained my brain to work properly only with cannabis, or cannabis really boosts my motivation and focus in a way I can’t access sober.

To find out, I’m stopping completely for six weeks. I don’t know what will happen.

I’ll document this regularly, focusing on motivation, focus, energy, mood, sleep, cravings, and work performance — good or bad.

This isn’t anti-weed and it’s not a recovery story. It’s an honest self-experiment.

This is day zero