How I overcame panic attacks & anxiety from cannabis

*It wasn’t letting me post this in the weed Reddit*

As someone who has been smoking weed for a very long time now around February and march of this year I randomly started to face anxiety and panic attacks after smoking weed and it annoyed me a lot because it just felt like such an unnecessary waste of time and I did a lot of research and found it was common for people to have these symptoms after smoking weed either for the first time or even for people who have been smoking for years. So I like forced myself to overcome it and it worked so I’m going to list down below what helped for me. Please know this is only in attempts to help others and I don’t mean to make it seem like everyone is having the exact same types of issues from weed.

What helped me overcome them was a few things and some are going to seem very obvious but a lot of people may need to hear this because in the moment when you are high your thoughts can be different.

1. Understand that tolerance plays a factor and how much you smoke weed - this is usually common in newer smokers, or long time smokers who come back from a t break and try to smoke a lot. they smoke lots of weed before they’ve built a tolerance or after they’ve taken a break and when they get high their body isn’t used to it and they start to panic. Usually people would just quit after that and there is nothing wrong with that at all but I personally just wasn’t going to let that happen so to help with that make sure you aren’t smoking too much weed in one joint or session. Get a scale to measure how much weed you smoke to play it safe. You don’t have to smoke a lot of weed to be cool it’s all ego with those big blunts or joints. Find what is perfect for you. but I’ll get into other factors that can help.

2. Overthinking can easily cause panic - learning to control your emotions, breathing patterns, thoughts, and focus have been the most crucial and helpful factor in getting rid of these anxiety and panic attacks. Recognizing that it’s just weed and knowing that nothing bad will happen helps a lot. For me, something I’d always struggle with is breathing with my chest and breathing short breaths. It’s important to breathe in through your nose and fill your stomach (not chest) and out through your mouth…I would breath short when I panic and then I’d check my heart beat with my hand right over my chest and it would seem fast and it would put me in an infinite panic loop lol. checking my heart rate from my radial pulse(wrist area) instead of on my chest helped me know how fast my heart was actually beating because when I put my hand over my chest I could never tell the rate it was beating and it seemed fast. Also I’d check my heart rate from my radial pulse while I was sober to know how fast it usually was then I’d compare it to my pulse when I’m high and that helped me realize my heart rate never sped up like that in the first place and that it was all in my head from overthinking. This could be a personal experience but the main takeaway is just not letting yourself overthink and learning to properly breathe to either stay calm or calm yourself down after panicking.

3. Being able to do the things above without thinking too much or it seeming like a therapy session & making sure you’re hydrated- the information I gave above is a little out of order but after like 2 or 3 sessions of me just focusing on breathing correctly and not overthinking it all came like muscle memory when I would get high after. I also listened to calming audios with I think the ocean or some nature background while some guy would talk and give you things to think about and picture while telling you how to breathe and reach a calm state. I listened to them for those 2-3 sessions of learning to stay calm when high I mentioned earlier and they are pretty helpful and I found it on Reddit. Staying hydrated is also a no brainer but just making sure there is nothing to bother you when you’re high like being really thirsty helps

4. Paranoia - I didn’t have any issues with this in recent times but around the first time I started to smoke I’d feel paranoid so I thought I’d add this, this is going to sound like shit advice but just telling myself that feeling paranoid was a choice helped me get rid of it so fast also examples 2 & 3 I gave above can be very helpful.

Overall just understanding its all mindset, learning the skill of being able to calm yourself down at any time, and being smart of how much you smoke or take will make the biggest difference.

Please ask questions because I feel like I didn’t organize this very well or explain everything fully and would also like to hear thoughts.