10 things that will happen if you smoke a lot of very strong Weed.

Here are 10 things that will happen if you smoke a lot of Weed daily with a THC content higher than 6%...

1. Your vocabulary will be appropriate to your chronological age of when you started smoking weed. For example, if you started smoking at 14, you will speak like a 14-year-old coming over as very immature to people you communicate with. You will find difficulty finding the right words to express yourself. The ability to think abstractly or to engage in contextual linear thinking will gradually disappear. This can lead to not being able to understand what people are saying, which in turn will increase feelings of being misunderstood and loneliness.

2. Being able to think logically and solve problems, correct mistakes, and crucially think before answering questions will go the more you engage in heavy, daily smoking of high-strength Cannabis. This brings on magnified feelings of being inadequate and unsuccessful.

3. Your flexibility of thought (Psychomobility), meaning your ability to hold attention and focus when speaking to other people fades. You constantly change your opinion because chronic Weed consumption changes your mental capability in problem-solving and social perception, leading to increased feelings of being misunderstood.

4. Memory. The big one. Your working And short-term memory will diminish fast if you continually smoke over 2 grams per day of Green with a THC content of over 6%. Forgetting meetings and remembering to remember important tasks go. Also, your understanding of time will distort the meaning of what you thought was a long period of time is only actually a matter of minutes. This brings on massive impatience and agitation.

5. Analytical Synthetic Ability! Now that’s a mouthful! In plain English, it stands for your ability to form points of view and to know what your morals and values are. You cannot see the bigger picture or be able to sort out information. This leads you to believe you are different and unique.

6. Psycho-spatial ability is to be able to exist and operate in time and space and not be able to distinguish the correct date and time of year. You will find difficulty maintaining routines and forget your Social position in your Peer group and beyond. Your structure, living day to day causes you to feel you don’t fit into Society.

7. Gestalt Memory. As you continue to smoke Cannabis heavily, the weed begins to attack your sense of direction and being able to comprehend what you see. It also affects the ability to be able to put a name to a face and your actual social relationship with them. This in turn makes you feel you live in your own little world, which you probably do anyway.

8. As your Cannabis consumption increases as does your resistance to it, your personality actually begins to fade away. You become a shadow of your former self, unable to question or engage in critical thinking in regard to your increasingly erratic behaviours, You can’t reason or solve problems and most critically your brain stops developing. This means that if you started smoking heavily on Weed with a high THC content, your personality freezes in time, so as a twenty/thirty-year-old you act and behave as a teenager! I know many people in my personal life who are just like this but are now in their mid-fifties. They have no sense of responsibility, lack any ambition, and are living back with their Parents, still getting stoned, not wanting to work for a living but instead just want to lie about getting stoned and listening to music which funnily enough is from the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, back to the time when they first started smoking Cannabis! They are living in a time capsule all created by daily, chronic Cannabis consumption.

9. Negative feelings will start to be magnified which in turn will be compounded by the lack of concrete feelings which through time will turn into acute anxiety and panic attacks and also feelings of loneliness, boredom, and detachment. The only solution the chronic weed smoker thinks is available to them is to actually smoke more weed to stop or mask the unwanted feelings they are experiencing. Their hope is for the feelings to disappear, but sadly they don’t instead just reinforce smoking more cannabis.

10. Finally, because your short and long-term memory is acutely affected, a lack of flexibility in your thinking leads to being only able to remember times when you were stoned. Very little information is stored in your long-term memory. When you try to remember times from your past, it all becomes fragmented, which in turn affects your sense of Identity and who you really are. Ultimately this leads to you forming a new Identity, one of a heavy, daily Weed smoker, a Stoner. This becomes a constant process meaning the more and longer you smoke Cannabis, the stronger your new Identity becomes. You literally become a different person unable to relate to your past or even your present circumstances.

I would like to make clear that I am not against using Cannabis, far from it, however, like any substance, if you overdo it there are consequences.I just wish I had been made aware of the information stated above as I started smoking weed, well, actually it was hashish, but I thought it was completely safe. It is in my humble opinion but only until your brain has fully developed which is not until we reach our mid-twenties. Sadly, as I have mentioned in a previous article, I have witnessed at firsthand how smoking very strong Cannabis, say with a THC content above 20%, at a young age, can for some individuals cause some very serious mental health issues, specifically Paranoid Schizophrenia. I know there is conflicting evidence about Cannabis causing Paranoid Schizophrenia but I genuinely believe that with the ever-increasing levels of active THC in hybrid stains of Cannabis, it is causing more and more mental health problems with heavy users. In effect, it is actually a totally different type of drug from what was available, say thirty years ago.

In my Hypnotherapy Edinburgh clinic, I am beginning to see more and more people who are looking to stop smoking Weed as they believe it is having an adverse effect on their lives. By utilising what I have learned by helping people overcome Nicotine addiction not to mention Alcohol and Cocaine, I now apply it to helping people quit Weed. If you think you may be smoking too much cannabis and it’s time to stop, please feel free to contact me at andy@andymacarthur.com and I will be only too happy to give you some hard-won advice on how to stop smoking weed.

Andy MacArthur is a Clinical Hypnotherapist based in Edinburgh, UK, who specialises in helping people recover from Addictions and the anxiety and pain that comes with it.