I smoke a fat joint and almost immediately I want to get out of the situation I am in.

Talking seems like too much trouble. I would like to joke around but I can barely laugh or think of a joke. Everything becomes a bit too intense and i'm afraid that my very presence is now negatively influencing the fun around me.

A good joint after not smoking gives me a more beautiful perspective on the world, but i'm still in fear. It is not just social, my mind starts thinking i am posessed by demons. Everything I want to do in the future starts sounding very scary. All my relationships are going to fail. etc. etc.

Why does this happen? How do i get over this. I thought i was fearless now, but i am wrong. Shrooms, DMT.. Don't scare me anymore. But this herb everyone smokes and loves.. There's something there.

It has to do with Cannabinoid receptors I am sure. Perhaps, overcoming this fear means i will overcome any fear. Any tips or pointers or thoughts?

Tear down the cannabis fear!

If you are having negative effects, stop smoking it. It can exarcebate self conciousness and social anxiety. I think that different stains are worse than others.

A lot of people smoke and it may feel that you are not part of the gang when you pass on the joint without smoking it. Your mental well being and self confidence are far more important than smoking weed.

Have a break and sort your anxieties out. Weed, like DMT, isn"t going anywhere.

Many people I know developed The Fear from cannabis. I did to an extent and as a result have grown out of regular use. Regular use of high strenggh.MJ puts me in an anxious state.
I dont know whether its adult responsibilities making us feel guilty about rendering ourselves partially inactive or deep seated subconcious fears or a moderation of neurotransmitters.
Personally it seems to disrupt my serotonin production somehow, something easily fixed by b6 supplements and halting use.
Like you say everything in the future can seem much more daunting, is this the result of over thinking? Or a brain chemical function that is reducing confidence?
It is also an underrated amplifier of the unconcious too in my opinion, it seems to bring things to the surface that have been buried.
It can make apparent previously unknown mental conditions and in your case it seems like it gives you psycosis symptoms so probably best to stop altogether or at least only smoke a small ammount when you do. Some strains nowadays have ridiculously high percent of THC.
Do you feel the fear even in a peaceful place away from civilisation?

I've dealt with this ever since I started the journey with cannabis ten years ago. It's always been a powerful and insightful psychedelic for me, but at the same time, it can spring some unfounded (although sometimes founded) paranoia exactly like you describe.

"When you smoke the herb, it reveals you to yourself". While this does hint at some of the reasons behind the fear, I don't think its the whole story since it can get out of hand and illogical/detrimental.

But anyways I guess what's most important is how to deal with it...I've found a number of things that help. The first and foremost would be to slow down consumption, and take smaller hits spaced much further out in time, as opposed to sitting down and gobbling a joint in 10 minutes. Although tolerance is also a factor of course.

The other thing that I've noticed helps is to simply center myself beforehand and approach it almost like I would any other psychedelic. Getting my head together (especially yoga + meditation) and deciding to not give a F and banish the fear going into it can help. And like dmt even just forcing a smile can do wonders.

Smoking it while on a comfortable dose of harmalas also can do wonders for removing that anxiety.

Lastly I've found that even just smoking a low dose of dmt before getting stoned is usually enough to bring down that barrier of fear, and it stays down once I start smoking the cannabis.

I haven't completely beat the negatives that it can bring with it, but these things have helped a lot in the past.

p.s. get a strain high in CBD if you can

I have to agree with everything universecannon said.

I am prone to paranoia from it if circumstantially it's hard to stay centered. For example, social situations that I know I need to be sharp, or easier situations I might walk into feeling exhausted to begin with--both are times when timing, or simply having none is best. It's almost like the 2 hour cramp rule of swimming. You just have to figure out where and when that stuff comes up for you, and then take steps to avoid it. Learn to interpret the feelings as they come up when you find yourself in paranoid thought patterns.

Prepare yourself by sleeping well, and generally taking good care of your physical and emotional needs. Use a vaporizer that gives small tokes, one toke every 5-10 minutes, stop, don't repeat for at least an hour (otherwise it can become hard to keep track of). High CBD strains are really where it's at for health purposes and well being. And always try to ritualize it as much as possible. My first time of the day is always done after some kind of centering exercise--either meditation, light exercise, stretching, whatever. Give yourself the focused breathing time to prepare. If you let it into you when your body and mind are best prepared, it lifts you; it lifts your soul. I believe if you don't respect it in this manner, you can find yourself swimming against the current without direction.

Recognizing paranoid thinking is exactly that is step one for me. Step two is asking whether or not anything nice and good can come from it. Step three is stop thinking altogether and either change activities/scene, meditate, sleep, eat, or in other words, just stop going in circles and go back to square one of basic needs.

Paranoid thinking has paid off for me in some rare situations in which I wound up predicting terrible outcomes correctly before they happened, but observing this pattern over and over again makes me realize I can only predict bad things out of paranoia. Therefore, it becomes the bringer of bad things, and as such, a vicious cycle is born. I prefer not to live in that cycle, no matter how clever and victimlessly-exploitive I think I am capable of being. The pain of living in that headspace does not pay off. Good things don't come from it. It's better to stay in the light, and take care of yourself so you can stay there as much as possible.

Sounds interesting, right?


I get what you are saying, and it is probably useful advice for SWIM but these things are not an issue for me. I am indeed sensitive to different strains, i prefer light home-grown weed as opposed to dutch government stuff, which is usually fairly potent and GMO'd. It often smells like poison to me.


Yes, i had a long break from marihuana. I recently had a fight and brought up the subject of fear in relationship to my father. When i was young he was fairly agressive and scared me to such an extent that whenever he got mad I had an intense fear. I was just a kid and I did not literally think that he would kill me, but it was more like a primal fear of life and death. I froze whenever he got mad. That stuck with me, and i brought it up with my father. We got into a huge fight and now i am not afraid of him because i can probably physically handle him. Long story short, I was almost in tears and sat down outside and hallucinated a cannabis plant in my closed eyelids and that got me interested in trying it again.

______________

@DMT,

I have started cannabis consumption at the young age of 14. It was quite euphoric at first. Slightly psychedelic. My first joint I was so paranoid and tired that i just wanted to sleep. So it already touched a part in my psyche that was already sensitive to paranoia at that age. Mostly it was the fear of my parents finding out that I was high, though. Later, when i relaxed into it i started seeing people as Giants. It was very euphoric at that point. Later still i developed such a fear that borders on psychotic experiences. Hearing voices in the wind, very self-conscious, vast fear still of people noticing that i am high. Which, come to think of it, still sometimes happens when i mix Cannabis with shrooms. Unfortunately, because there are others who really enjoy the combo. I can talk for ages about different combinations and their effect on me personally but i think it is vastly different for each and every nervous system in which a substance is introduced.


It is likely intertwined in a way. I personally think it is unresolved trauma but i can really get into the Serotonin theory. Although i am not sure how Cannabis would effect the Serotonin system. I have heared that it increased Melatonin, (1000x more melatonin levels than normal when under the influence of cannabis). Since Melatonin is afaik synthesized from serotonin in the pineal gland. Perhaps it depletes Serotonin in this matter.

On another note, MDMA is a speed for Serotonin. Me and my friends found out that smoking Cannabis during MDMA high will greatly reduce Jaw-clenching. It sounds like a very healthy combination in my opinion, since the increased levels of melatonin kind of balances out the abnormal release of serotonin from MDMA.

Indeed, what MDMA does for me is release tension and fear. Too much of this results in so much energy circulation that basically i can not handle and am forced to do qi gong movements or dancing to control these feelings. It released tension in my chest. And basically what i get from smoking weed is an intense feeling in my chest. I think i am a rather extreme case for this one because the tension is ridiculously tense. Very deep breathing becomes a neccesity because otherwise it feels like my chest is going to explode.

I get the same thing with smoking cigarettes tho. Perhaps i am just very sensitive to Carbon-Monoxide in my system. But I am sure there is more to it.

Combinations with Cannabis are very interesting. After mushrooms I was almost able to consciously enter a lucid dream after smoking a single hit of cannabis. I am however not certain what role it played but i suppose that it did help.


To be honest, i have not tried it away from civilisation and it is likely impossible. I can go to the forest but there I start fearing rapists and robbers etc. so it is very hard to avoid civilization altogether. Last night i started lying in bed though, and the sounds around me made me paranoid. The internal feelings i got inside my own psyche where those of demonic posession and a very peculair frequency buzzing tone which i have not encountered before. It had a very evil vibe to it.

_____________

@ Universecannon,

Cannabis+DMT was my first encounter with DMT and it was amazing. But I definitely fear the combo intensely. Same for mushrooms+cannabis and coffee. Those three things combined resulted in a very paranoid trip and almost train wreck experience.

That aside, you have given me some good insight and ideas. That's exactly the respond I was looking for. For some reason I could tell immediately that you haven't overcome this fear completely because your advise is kind of oriented in the trend of "supressing damage" rather than healing and transformation. But one has to start somewhere and I think serotonin regulation, yoga and stuff are a good place for me to start. Perhaps especially fortunate for inducing the visionary state that Cannabis has to offer in which I love to spend my time in (when it aren't demonic Visuals lol).

I have had some really strange experiences with Calea Z and Cannabis, btw. It is just the intense fear that is very hindering and also very prominent in that experience as well.

i used to have a crippling paranoia/anxiety on weed.

my friends just told me to smoke past it... so i did.

i just kept smoking until it went away..

since then i have been seemingly immune to it (after years of smoking), even after resetting my tolerance.


your experience may vary

I may be unusual in this matter, but my anxiety and paranoia associated with Cannabis usage was more prominent when my tolerance was low; coincidentally, at the same approximate time, I was required to hide my Cannabis usage to a further extent than I do now.

If you desire to smoke Cannabis, but sometimes get discomforting chest feelings, try to sip water and see if that makes any difference (that helps me avoid chest discomfort quite a bit).

Also, I recommend whole-heartedly attempting to chillax into the experience; settle down & flow with it. Try to find your comfortable Cannabis mind-state and melt into it, releasing your anxiety.

I can definitely relate to having an intense fear response from ingestion of cannabis. I had an insatiable appetite for cannabis for about 5-6 years, and I never had a single panic attack from smoking it that I can remember. But a few years ago I decided to cut my usage down to smoking only once daily before going to sleep, to treat insomnia.

After a few days of this routine, I started having panic attacks when I would smoke. This made my usage counterproductive, as the anxiety would make it even more difficult to sleep. So I stopped all together. I was not in a great mindset at the time, and I think that may have had a role in my response. I have smoked very small amounts maybe 3 times in the last 2 years. In this time, I have made tremendous progress in growing mentally and spiritually. I have decided that I am going to give occasional cannabis use another shot some time in the next couple of weeks. I think the key to productive cannabis use may simply be approaching the experience with mindfulness.

A few of the other things I am going to try are:

Edibles - I never had much experience with them, but I have heard from many people that the effects are more physical than the mental experience brought on by smoking the flower.

Sativa-dominant strains - I have also read in many different publications that indica strains tend to create more of an anxiety response.

Very small doses, administered over the course of 30-45 minutes

If anyone has any other advice or questions about my little "experiment", feel free to share them. I will post my conclusion some time in the next few weeks.

Infectedstyle: Good luck. I hope you figure out the root and the remedy of the problem. But if all else fails, not smoking might be your best option.

Oh, I meant smoking the cannabis during/after the dmt comedown. Not combining them. Its completely different this way for me.

Combining them together from the get-go has been nice for me at times, if done carefully, but its also led to anxiety-based experiences... and at one point it even imprinted that fear from cannabis onto dmt, and that association was somewhat difficult to break. Smoking cannabis on the come up of lsd or mushrooms can be a recipe for a trainwreck for me as well...but on the comedown its usually fine.

for a good time

Please realize that all toughts are yours,
regain your brain

Its triggered psychotic breakdowns in me 3 times, when coming up strong on a psychedelic I sometimes get this crazy idea that I need weed/hash to relax me and chill me out and I smoke and I lose it. Those 3 times it was complete insanity which involved me wandering the streets like a madman waiting for impending death it was all triggered by weed/hash. I only smoke very occasionally now and if Im taking a psychedelic I try to make sure ive completely came down before I smoke weed as for me its pretty dangerous, in a literal sense. Everyone's different of course and friend of mines was saying his friend has similiar issues with weed, he can smoke it and it triggers psychotic behaviour. Im not the BBC propoganda machine that says weed causes schizophrenia but for some people, and I can understand it it probably can expose pre-existing problems. Thing is though people go oh you dont smoke weed sometimes and its like oh your a lesser man or something, looking down on you as if your not right in the head or cant handle it or whatever but then you mention lsd or the like and your the crazy one, I must be the real man eh pfffff people annoy me lol Id happily take psychedelics but see with weed im like no thanks most of the time! Funny when I was younger I smoked a lot as well, always go through phases with it but its usually off rather than on.

I had never experienced the freaky deakies with any substance until after I'd had a couple of really scary trips with mushrooms and ayahuasca. It's almost like I opened a door and now I can't close it. I didn't think this would be the case with cannabis, but if I have had a tolerance break of over a month or more, going back has to be very slow, or else the freaky deaks will spring on me. It's completely irrational. I think it's some sort of psychological connection made when suffering some form of existential psychedelic trauma before. I just have to be more careful when easing back into something now, a minor inconvenience.

For those who have it - did you guys develop the fear after some bad trips or was it caused by something else? Was it always there or did it just start for no apparent reason ?

It was always there ever since the first time I smoked, long before I took other psychedelics...but some rough LSD experiences did contribute to it later.

But even before all that, weed affected me very differently than those around me, and each time (unless I had heavy tolerance) was a trip, with intense epiphanies, insights, pangs of paranoia and anxiety. The first time I smoked I was plunged into a very intense psychedelic trip with it which ended with me falling asleep and then being stuck in a body-less hyperspace loop for eternity until I woke up the next day in a state of shock. That first experience was still in some ways one of the more intense trips I've ever had, despite it just being cannabis. I don't know why it affects me so intensely but it definitely has its ups and downs...Or should I say, highs and lows

Funny you say this as each time this has happened to me its basically the same loop/ideas/thoughts that involve my death, as if its the same experience and it's totally irrational. Its happened like 7-8 years apart, exact same thing/experience each time triggered with cannabis just before the peak of a large dose of mushrooms. I had previously had a terrible time on acid when I was pretty young, which was caused by local gangs looking for me with knives and paranoia got the better of me but that didnt seem linked to these three experiences. After that first bad acid trip I continued to smoke weed heavily till 22-23. Actually thinking about this and this is the first time ive ever thought about it like this maybe that first bad acid trip is playing a part in it, but for me its the cannabis now that can possibly trigger such things and is to be avoided with psychs.

When I smoke weed now its usually small amounts and usually its enjoyable, its funny because when I dont enjoy it, once the initial paranoia is over with I really enjoy it and think man why dont I smoke more often, but then I dont. My friends and parents smoke fairly regularly but my brother and cousin are just like me with it, go through phases and more off it than on it. Just a big no no when it comes to combining with psychedelics after horrendous experiences!

I think i know exactly what you feel. I have smoked during my high school and university time until i had two very scary experiences that kinda put me of the cannabis for couple of years.
Funny i get smacked around in shroomland and come back for more while on cannabis...no thank you Perhaps it has something to do with actually learning from my shroom trips and with cannabis not really.
There has been couple of experiences like a year ago while in Amsterdam that where opposite and mostly positive. I suspect that stuff that i can get here at my place sucks in comparison to stuff in Amsterdam...who knows. I still take puff here and there when mood is right and good people around but that's it.

I can relate to that fearful feeling and racing thoughts that seem to go on in a loop, after smoking herb but I am biased towards smoking anything because I started using the herb through a vaporizer (which never gave me much paranoia) so most of the time I prefer that way of ingesting (especially in combination with a waterpipe).

I second vaporizing because with that method most of the carcinogenic byproducts generated by combustion are avoided and the dosage is easier to control because less is needed (micro puffs can be taken to ease in the experience) and there is no "rush" (pun not intended) to ingest it all at once as opposed to a joint.

Smoking instead of vaporizing can partly generate paranoia because the bigger micron size of smoke particles (vapour particles have a smaller micron size) is prone to acitvating a fight or flight response if your blood sugar level is low and/or you have a low tolerance.

Another trick would be to take small hits and breath deeply between each hit to supply your brain with more freh oxygen and help it metabolize the smoke.

I read this information at the FC forum if I am allowed to I can post the link to the thread where someone extensively cited studies about micron size of smoke/vapor and some of the causes of herb induced fight/flight reactions.

Please do, that sounds very interesting and is useful information.

I was thinking something was up with burning the weed. Have you ever had the "Red eye effect" on vaporized marihuana?

Funny how it affects people differently. Some people have no problem with it at all.

With vaping I sometimes had red eyes though never as extreme as with smoking or edibles.

http://fuckcombustion.co...ers-or-ingestion.10625/

The first posts are more about how in the thread openers opinion vaporizers can be used in a way that your body release less adrenaline so you don't get a rush that causes in his experience the "ceiling" effect (you can't seem to get higher at one point).

Post number 15 onwards is where some studies are cited about micron sizes of different particles.

This information really changed my relationship to herb because I understood more and more that due to having a fast metabolism it is a must for me when having a low tolerance to eat carbs (or at least drink some OJ) before each smoke session in order to not get easily stuck in loops.

I've found that if an acute panic attack is coming on, just focusing on deep, regular breathing will help me power through them. It's a trick I picked up SCUBA diving actually: if things get too intense under 50 feet of water, just breathe in on the count on three and out of the count of five.

Breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth (your body associates inhaling with you mouth with gasping and difficulty breathing).

Before I started doing that, I would have panic attacks most times I smoked: it started with a racing heart-rate and spiraled down from there. Now I still get the tachycardia, but I can just sit back, focus on my breathing until things have stabilized, and then I got back to socializing.

Blessings
~ND