Hi all, some of you might have read my comments on other people's posts, but today I was asked directly what the secret is to staying on track of your personal goals and rules surrounding weed. It got me writing out most of the things that I've shared in little bits under other people's posts before, and I figured I'd share it here, for all to read. Hope any of this is helpful to anyone.

Firstly, my advice is personal, and it might not apply to some of you. For example, I cannot speak about chronic pain, as I have no experience with it. However, I do think there are pieces of advice that can apply to anyone that reads this. Just not all - please bear this in mind as you navigate your own journey! We're all different after all :)
It'll be a long one, but please read it all through - it's a mostly coherent personal backstory with bottom lines, and not just flat out tips.

For what it's worth: Im a guy in Europe, nearing the 30s, and started weed around 18 years old.

I used to have a lot of discipline honestly. Always on time, playing sports, doing homework, acing tests, eating healthily. Queue my daily weed habit and all of that went to shit during college. I recall four periods in which my smoking habits changed, I'll walk through them as I address the things they've taught me on separate occasions.
Assuming daily use was the baseline to reduce clutter text, I started smoking daily to deal with the boredom of college and the loneliness I felt at the time. I met my partner during this time, over 7 years ago, and then eventually tried tapering my use to cater to her preference of me not being a dumbass addict, right?
Addicts often need an all-time-low for them to wake up. And who's best to provide you with a fat reality check than your partner, your best friend, or your family? Don't ignore them when they get the courage to speak up about your use... They're worried for you. It's not at attack on your person!

Over 2 years I would go down to 5/7, 4/7, 3/7... but I would still come up with retorted excuses to make it one more. Just one more time. And every time I did that, I self sabotaged my integrity a little, I broke down the wall of trust I had built for myself in the past by simply disregarding the thing that I told myself and my partner that I would do. In practice, I simply lost control to my addiction every time I slipped up. The desire for control was there when I was sober, but I was never making the decision to smoke more while being rational - I always used the excuses of "long workday, stress, lonely" or whatever - emotional moments where rationality is very difficult to practice, especially for addicts.

That control was hard to win back, but certainly not impossible!

The second change was when I knew I was emigrating to an illegal country where weed was illegal. I vowed to myself (this is important - not to my partner, but to MYSELF!) that I wouldn't go looking for weed there. So naturally, I was gonna "say goodbye" by absolutely abusing the shit out of it for the last month before the move - my partner moved a bit earlier due to work, so there was no social control left either. I went all out and got back to my old habit as soon as she left.

When I arrived in the new country, I didn't really have any withdrawal symptoms apart from 3 bad nights of sleep, pretty lucky. The completely new environment with new challenges and new inputs - but most importantly, my own vow of not smoking weed here - is what made the (temporary) sobriety a breeze. I honestly barely noticed my abstinence after a couple of weeks. I started new hobbies, I started socializing more, and I looked into the dopamine addiction patterns that are often paired with addiction. I was no longer bored and lonely, which were my main reasons to abuse weed. I eliminated my triggers by improving my life basically.
In short: I improved my life. Not because I wanted to please someone else, but because I finally decided enough is enough, fix. Your. Shit. Get that ambition back. Develop those interests you love. Experience life's inputs without a fuzz or buzz. Life behind the clouds can be so frigging cool, but when you're sedated all the time, it just becomes this noise. The noise you gotta overcome or even shut out, to get high. You aren't necessarily living much anymore. It's more getting through the waiting period that sits in front of your next smoke. I felt like a zombie doing that.

This taught me that in order to control our use better, we need to create an environment in which we will thrive afterwards. We cannot expect to be happy sober if we still endure the things that would otherwise push us into getting high. Stress at work? Get high. Depressed? Get high. If you use weed to self medicate for these things, you will only treat the symptoms of the underlying issue, temporarily. And this dynamic creates the need for chronic treatment of said symptoms, otherwise they resurface. It'll be hard to break the cycle.

To control your weed use, you need to take these triggers away. Get that therapy. Find new hobbies to destress. Start exercising daily. Learn new things, start meditation, practice mindfulness, and journal about your feelings. This is what I mean by creating an environment in which you can be successful. If you fail this, you will be pushed straight back into the habit by your environment. This is why it's often difficult to reduce your use when your partner doesn't share the same view.

The fourth change happened when I moved back home. The elephant in the room was of course - how will I handle weed now? I pretty quickly came to the realization that I wasn't all down to quit forever. I know I enjoy doing it with my best friend, and every now and then I enjoy doing it solo. But not daily. Not weekly. Not biweekly! Because all of those would just lead me to the same vicious cycle of "surviving until the next hit". It would be doing my partner a huge disservice with that in the sense that I will go back to being a dopamine zombie and not really registering life as it comes at me fast. I'd be a shitty partner, no, a shitty person (this is not an attack - this is me judging my previous behaviour).

I settled for monthly. NO. EXCEPTIONS. Not a single one. The first month was peanuts. Had lots to do, was never alone, had new stuff to do (aced my drivers license this time around). As I said: An environment that supports the monthly smoke. Not one that puts pressure on it.

The second month had an event I hadn't prepared for at all. My partner went on a weekend trip with friends, while I had already done my monthly smoke. It wasn't unplanned - it was just an oversight. The first night was doable, I just filled it with getting pretty tipsy and gaming with my friend. The second evening I already heard the voice from 3 pm onwards. "she doesn't need to know". Over and over again. "it's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission" again and again. I did attempt the getting drunk and gaming cycle again, but at midnight my friend logged off. And then I was sitting with my thoughts in silence. It became insanely hard to say no.

I decided to tell my partner how I felt right there. This was already the first step to recognizing the problem. Naturally, deep down the addict in me was hoping she'd enable me. But she didn't; she was still awake and basically just acted as my grounding wire, my mirror, my diary. And that, I have come to realize, is so tremendously important.
The next day I realized I had won. I had put my self integrity, my partner and my relationship, above some stupid desire to smoke one extra time that month. And that was power I didn't know I needed. The control was coming back!

As addicts, we can often not be objective about most things that affect our smoking habits. Addiction fucks with your mind enough to warp opinions, twist emotions, if it benefits the sole action of getting high. This also means that it will actively oppose changes that negative affect your use frequency.
This is why introspection is so important, preferably when you are not high, or when you're sober for a bit. We need to ask ourselves critical questions. Who are we underneath it all? What do we like? What are we good at? What do we want in the future, what kind of job, where do you want to live, what kind of healthy habits do you want to have? And does being a stoner help you get there at all?

Additionally, journaling helps you talk down cravings. See, I view cravings similar to emotions. First, emotions are triggered by our environment. Second, the type of emotion evoked is often taught by repetitive behaviours. As humans, we have the insane ability to not react out of impulse only. Sometimes, if we must, fight or flight, sure, but we get to think about shit, before we commit (wow, rhymez).
Say you get insanely angry for whatever reason. It is pretty normal to then not channel that anger into physical violence right? Instead, we take a breath, and we might ask ourselves "why do we feel this emotion right now? What in this environment triggered it?" and then follow up by "It makes sense that I am triggered by this, because of x and y. If it makes sense, then why would I worry so much about what it does to me?" and just watch the emotion dissipate. This act of slowing down time, breathing, is enough to actually ground yourself. Look at the facts, not at the feelings.

Now replace emotion with cravings in the paragraph above, and you've just discovered the biggest tool you got for impulse control.

After that second month, I never struggled again. I no longer feel the anxiety of "maybe an excuse will turn up?" I no longer feel paranoid when I do smoke up, and I no longer loathe myself when I get high. I will smoke one day, and not think about the next for 2 or 3 weeks. Then I check my agenda, and see sure enough there's a good date for a smoke day next month or whatnot. I even skipped 2 months this year, 1 month last year, and it doesn't affect me.

I think what I've also learnt from this whole time period, is that change will never happen when you don't go out of your comfort zone. And, sure enough, weed addiction makes us complacent as fuck. It doesn't make us lazy per se, but it lowers our standards, it makes us okay with doing absolutely fuck all. The bare minimum to get through. No life improvements. No healthy habits. Just the bare minimum to survive until our next high. Escaping this cycle will only happen IF YOU STEP OUT OF IT. Step out of the comfort zone. Fear a little. Hurt a little. Learn a LOT. And repeat that. Put a step further and further every time. Build up your trust by teaching yourself it's okay to feel uncomfortable sometimes - that's just life! But most of it makes us a better person for it :)

So to summarize:

- If you want to change, change for YOU, not for someone else, or something like a job or whatever. You must want to change for YOU. You must want to have a better quality of life than you do, and you must actually want to do something about it. And in order to change, you need to get out of your comfort zone. This will make you uncomfortable at times, but it will teach you so much.

- Try not to use weed as a band-aid for things in life that you can actually fix without it. Easier said than done, I know, but fixing those problems will in turn reward you with a weed experience you probably haven't experienced before!

- You need to create a supportive environment for yourself. Eliminate triggers as much as you can, and surround yourself with people that support you, instead of enabling you.

- Plan for success. Create a ruleset that you can follow, one that uses clear and non-interpretive meanings. Don't use "few" or "maybe" or "when I feel like it" - your addicted brain will abuse this rhetoric when shit hits the fan.

- Take time to really check in with yourself during a break. Ask important and critical questions - reevaluate your opinions on important matters, and check in with yourself about how you want your future to look. Additionally, ask your loved ones for their opinion on your use! They can provide valuable insights.

- Addiction will warp your sense of self a LOT. It will change your emotions, your reactions, the way you think. Addiction does not want you to quit. Addiction does not want you to taper. It's not you that wants to quit sobriety, it's the addicted brain. You writing this message is a cry for help that escaped the control of the addicted brain, and should be viewed as the starting point of your journey for control over your use <3

- Being addicted will make you come up with excuses to get high. A lot of it is just bullshit reasons your brain tries on you to get you to fail. It wants you to get high, it doesn't want you to reduce your use.

- Ground yourself when you feel like emotions are surfacing and impacting your decision-making. This can be done by venting/writing, by focusing on your breathing, or by analyzing the situation by asking yourself why you feel that way.

And please - discuss! This is a personal story, but I enjoy reading and discussing how others have managed to create a somewhat healthy balance with the devil's lettuce :)