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I'm currently on day 3 of my break from weed. I'm going to document my little journey into sobriety here on my blog.
Disclaimer: This is purely personal experience and not meant to define how sobriety from cannabis should look or feel.
The History
I didn't smoke weed until I was 22. I knew I enjoyed it more than alcohol by the end of my first college experience (2014), but it was still illegal at the time.
After graduation, I moved to Nevada and ended up staying there. After about a year, I was able to get my first job in the cannabis industry. Nevada had legalized medical cannabis years before, but it wasn't until 2015 that the dispensaries started to open. I managed to get in as an inventory specialist for a cultivator/producer (wholesale only) in 2016 and it was the only time I was ever excited to go to work. (Turns out, working in cannabis is still work btw!)
During that time, I started smoking weed pretty much every day. At the beginning, I smoked that heavily to intentionally bring up my tolerance just so I could start differentiating the high from different strains and products that I would get as free samples in exchange for reviews.
Overall, switching away from alcohol to cannabis has been a positive experience. I used to binge drink in college, and my family has a history of alcoholism. I now can just have a beer because I crave the flavor (I still don't get this little weirdness of adulthood), but I don't get drunk anymore because I can't handle the hangovers.
Tolerance Breaks
Since then, I've taken multiple tolerance breaks (typically a month long) and had a few periods where I would only smoke on the weekends. These breaks were how I discovered a pattern.
- First day without weed is the hardest, but these are purely psychological cravings.
- Between days 1 and 2, my stomach starts to get weird, but this wears off in a couple days. Sugar cravings decrease significantly (I usually end up losing a pound or two during month-long tolerance breaks)
- Day 3 is where the mental speed kicks up for a short period of time. This is the part that I still don't understand, but it's like my brain runs at 1.5x speed for a few days. This is the point where the cravings disappear because I'm enjoying this natural high.
- Side note - when I was only smoking on weekends after a month-long break, this lesser amount definitely showed me that I would get minor brain fog the morning after smoking that I don't notice when I smoke every day.
The last break lasted about 10 months (Nov 2020 - Aug 2021) because I quit my last cannabis job and was working as a temp for a non-cannabis company. I wanted to be able to pass a drug test if I needed to. Once I decided to go back to school and got a job on campus, I smoked every day from the end of August to Christmas Eve.
Even though I was smoking, I still managed to get a 4.0 in my first semester back to college (somehow).
This Time
I quit cold turkey as of Christmas morning. I had been planning this cut off for a few weeks.
Here's my reasons for sobriety this time around:
- Spring semester is going to be ridiculously math heavy, and I want to be as clear-headed as possible. After that, it's all upper-level classes and I need to be able to retain the information.
- I cut my income significantly when I went back to school, we're too broke. My husband is also planning on taking a break as well for this reason, but he'll be starting after our anniversary at the end of January.
- I had both a nephew and niece born this year. Even though I do not want kids myself, I still want to be a good influence on them as they grow up.
- I don't really need to and I like myself better when I'm not smoking all the time.
Ultimately, I'm not sure how long this break will last. I'm not committing to never smoking weed again, but I kind of want to try and make it a whole year. Last time, hitting 100 days was so satisfying.
Thanks for reading!
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