The whole anxiety thing is exactly why I never tried pot, even with everyone telling me it would help calm me down. Well, that and another friend who became depressed by it–something that happens to her with other (legal) drugs that we’ve both taken.
As for the pop in your head causing anxiety: I feel for ya. Odd sensations in my body often triggers anxiety in me. I hope going off pot helps you with this!
Well, its almost the end of Day 2. My anxiety symptoms (pressure in the chest, etc.) are pretty much gone now. I’m still getting the occasional urge to fire one up, but for some reason it seems to be easier to squash it than before. As I expected, the insomnia is pretty bad. I was up all night (posting here), but got a little sleep today. I tried not to get too much and, as a result, I think I’ll be able to fall asleep tonight. My appetite is still down, but not out. I suspect it’s either from withdrawal or just from not eating as much while all this stuff has been going down.
BigT, that’s probably a good idea. I’m sure everyone is different but, in my experience, if I was anxious about something, smoking usually made it worse. My sympathies to your friend.
Did she quit? If so, did it make her feel better?
I’m also one for whom smoking doesn’t relax or cure: my friends would smoke to alleviate a hangover; in my case it just made it worse. Similarly with headaches, and definitely no way did it relax me - just made me antsy.
Just a bit more about my experience. There were several few reasons I finally knocked the dope on the head:
I found that every time I smoked I would have fun for about 20 minutes then become very introspective. This would usually result in some kind of paranoia. If alone it would be along the lines of “what am I doing with my life, where am I going? OMG is this the right path for my life to take?” If with others it would usually be “these people are all laughing at a joke I don’t get; maybe they’re laughing at me! Maybe I’m tolerated here just as a figure of fun” - a kind of desperate, embarrassing insecurity, that didn’t occur when I wasn’t high.
My short term memory, which has always been bad (it runs in the family), got much, much worse. So much so that I was starting to forget really simple things, especially at work. The worst incident was kinda work related: some visitors - friends of my parents - came to stay with me for the weekend. I told them to come and meet me at my office and when I’d finished work we’d all go back to my house. They duly arrived about an hour before I was due to finish work, so I put them in an empty meeting room with a cup of coffee, then went back to work and completely forgot they were there. I got engrossed in what I was doing and left them there for two hours before, passing the meeting room, I saw them sitting there, looking incredibly bored and pissed off. It shocked me that I would forget something fundamental, that involved inconveniencing other people, that resulted an embarrassing outcome.
The feelings of paranoia started to extend into my non-high life. One day after a particularly smoky night I went into the office and my boss said “I can’t do the meeting this afternoon - can you represent the department?” I said sure, and went into this pretty high-powered meeting with a load of million- and billionaires. As I sat there my head started going “OMG what are you doing here. Who are these people?! You have no right to be here!” My brain did a somersault (presumably my first ever panic attack) and it felt like the room was spinning. When it came time for me to speak I couldn’t get the words out. I eventually stumbled through but it was worrying.
The final straw was none of the above disturbing phenomena, though. It was that one day I was walking down the street and thought to myself “oh maaan, I’ve totally got the munchies”. Then I realised I wasn’t high, and in actual fact I was just ‘hungry’. This seems pretty trivial, almost amusing, but it shocked me that my perspective on life had altered so much that I assumed “high” was the default position.
So that night, when the joint came round, I took it, held it for a while (because I didn’t want my friends thinking I was a pussy) then passed it on. I did this for weeks and nobody really noticed.
The sleep thing fixed itself after about a week and the hyper-vivid, multifarioous dreams went back to normal. The memory came crawling back - to a fairly poor level even now - after a few weeks. I still have a bunch of insecurities that I didn’t have before I smoked regularly, but they could just be a facet of my personality, exacerbated by THC, that I was destined to develop anyway.
A few months after that, however, was the bhang lassi incident that convinced me that I never, ever want to take any serious mind-altering substances of any kind, ever again as long as I live.
Years later I do still have a smoke every now and again, usually at a party when I’ve had a few beers and I think “maybe it’ll be different this time”, but with rare exceptions I usually regret it.
jjimm, I can relate to a lot of what you said there. Well, except the bhang lassi incident. I suppose its good that I never tried drinking it, that must’ve been really frightening.
Well, time for the obligatory update. 
The insomnia seems to be clearing up. These random little heat waves, as I like to call them, still pop up every now and then.
I was hit with this random, light to moderate sadness for about a half-hour or so yesterday. Before that, I got a paranoid idea in my head and instead of squashing it, I kind of dwelt on it a little too much. Eventually, I shook the idea and not too long after that was when the sadness hit. I just remind myself that these are most likely withdrawal symptoms. (Disclaimer: No suicidal thoughts were apparent. If that starts happening, I will get help.)
The cravings to fire one up have been at their worst so far, worse than days 1 and 2 anyway. I just try to occupy my mind with something else and not dwell on them when they strike. It seems to help and they eventually pass. Well, I can’t really think of anything else at the moment, but I will update when there is more.
Heh, if you think the effects on appetite, sleep/dreaming, and anxiety are bad, just try simultaneously quitting the smoking of weed AND cigarettes after ~20 years of daily and fairly heavy use of both.
Just the vivid dreams alone were worth it, though.
My recommendation is to find some physical activity/exercise to positively channel the new found levels of energy you’re going to have. That will definitely help combat any insomnia.
Holy crap that must’ve been rough. With any luck, the cigarettes will be next on the chopping block for me, but right now I better not bite off more than I can chew.
Speaking of vivid dreams, I took a nap today and had the first one. It was really odd. It seems that some sort of disaster took place in the dream world. Not sure what but I had the feeling it was something pretty big. Like zombie apocalypse or worldwide pandemic big. I was lost in some sort of building for awhile. Finally I got out and wandered around. (can’t really remember this part of the dream so well).
This is where the dream got vivid. Stuff looked way more realistic than a normal dream starting at this point. Somehow, I wound up in the backseat of a old 40’s or 50’s era red tow truck. (I doubt tow trucks really have backseats but what can you do?) The driver was this old, disheveled looking, nearly bald, overall wearing hillbilly/redneck kind of guy. But his most distinguishing feature was that he had no eyes. (Eyelids open, eye sockets looking just as I would expect them to look, red and wet). How I could see this, I don’t know, since I was in the back. I wasn’t worried though, and he seemed nice enough. At some point, we decided we needed to head East and did. The road we were on was a combination of roads that my brain combined that all head North in real life. But in the dream, it was East for some odd reason. At some point in the journey, I remarked how good he was at driving especially since he had no eyes.
He was not thrilled about this. Not that he said anything, but somehow I just felt it I guess. He was about to turn around (himself, not the truck) when the road changed. It was a two-lane road, and the correct lane all of a sudden looked like someone had taken a jackhammer to it and left all the chunks right in place. This side of the road was also flooded with water. I pointed this out even as he changed into the wrong lane to avoid it. (No other cars or anything anyway so no big deal there). Then he turned around and tried to poke out MY eyes! :eek:
At this point I realized it was a dream and managed to wake myself up. I wasn’t scared or anything when I woke up, but damn that was pretty wild!
I suppose a quick update before I retire for the night wouldn’t be out of order. The M.J. cravings have become fewer, farther in between, and less severe. The insomnia is still hanging around a little bit but that is getting better as well. The challenge now is to get my sleep cycle back to normal. During these troubles, it seems to have completely flipped around. There haven’t been any crazy dreams since the last one. I’m thinking that I haven’t seen the last of them though.
I know I’m not out of the woods yet, but I think it’s going to stick this time.
Great news! Sleep will come back I promise. Just take the normal insomnia advice (fixed routine, only use the bed to sleep in, get up for a little while if you can’t sleep then return). Well done. 
Suicidal thoughts are not necessarily cause for alarm, unless you think you might act on them. I have suicidal thoughts most days (or fantasize about how much of a better place the world would be if I’d never existed), and I’ve never attempted nor would I.
Not to threadshit, but I know you said you don’t have insurance. Just because you have a bad thought doesn’t mean you’re going to automatically run to the nearest bridge and jump off.
Best of luck!
rachelellogram, I wouldn’t consider that threadshitting, just good advice. Thanks.
Also, thanks to jjimm, your experiences have been helpful in my journey.
I will continue to update this as necessary, but I think the worst of it is over, so the updates will probably not be as often. I still haven’t had any crazy dreams like the one I reported earlier, but I’ve been having regular ones now. Sometimes, they start just before I drop off to sleep. At first, I thought I was hearing things, but this apparently is normal. It’ll take some getting used to, but its just nice to be sleeping at night again!
I feel a little warm at the moment but my GF and I are in the midst of a little pregnancy scare at the moment too, so I’m guessing anxiety related to that is the cause. Possible TMI ahead. I know with birth control, combined with coitus interruptus way before the “finish,” combined with only doing it a couple times in the last month or so means that the odds of this are really poor, but she’s having some weird pregnancy-like symptoms. I’m hoping it’s just anxiety, related to what I’ve been going through these last few weeks. I’ll be relieved when/if this passes. With my new found anxiety issues, I think I’ll be done with this stuff. It’s just too easy to worry about! Sorry if TMI on this one.
Day 12 is about to draw to a close, so I think I’ll update for anyone still following along. My sleep has returned to normal. Starting around the day of my last post, I took a couple Benadryl caplets at night to help finish off the insomnia. The last two nights, I have not needed them in order to fall asleep. Hell, my sleep schedule is probably better now than it has been in years! I’ve been getting to bed early and getting up early. It’s weird when noon rolls around and I’ve already been up for four or five hours. The crazy auditory dreaming that was happening right at the point of falling asleep has stopped as well. That’s good since when it would happen, it would wake me right up.
As far as the anxiety, I’m not really sure. The crazy symptoms I reported earlier have not come back for the most part. The pregnancy scare continues, however, and if I really get to thinking about it, that little “spot” acts up a little. Not as bad as before, but now I’m convinced that it is an anxiety symptom. Strange, but it’s a good reminder that I am worrying too much.
I have another thread where I speculate that I have depression. I’m not entirely sure if it is resulting from quitting weed, or if it has always been there and the excessive weed smoking was a form of self-medication. I will be getting this checked out in a couple weeks so I guess I’ll find out more about it then.
The “pop” in the back of your head–you’re sure it wasn’t a bot-fly larva?
Hmm…I had to do a little research for that one. It appears that bot-flies are native to Central and South America. I am from Michigan, and have never been south of the border. Plus it appears that there should’ve been a lump in that spot from where the larva would be hanging out. There was no lump in that spot. So, I’m guessing that isn’t it, unless it’s some sort of mutated bot-fly that burrowed through my skull as well! :eek: