The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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My “medical cannabis” prescription was approved. I’m not a huge stoner but I don’t like feeling like a criminal and, while the penalties for possession in the UK are very low (as far as I understand it you just get a warning and the cops confiscate it) I think it’s embarrassing to buy drugs like a sixteen year old when you’re approaching thirty. I also want to avoid smoking if I can avoid it but the vapes available on the UK illicit market are pretty much all dangerous synthetic cannabinoids where you have no idea what’s in them; the only way to get safe vape oil is legally.
The process was very straightforward. You have to have tried treatment for whatever condition (anxiety, ADHD, back pain, Long Covid, whatever) before, so I said I needed it for ADHD because the medication had not satisfactorily resolved my symptoms. This was indeed true. They checked my medical history (I think this is to detect schizophrenics who can’t have it), had one consultation and then approved it.
Interestingly, while my ADHD diagnosis consultation to get lisdexamfetamine cost £900 or something like it and took an hour, the medical weed one only cost £200 and took like ten minutes. After this you order what you want from an online store and it gets delivered to your house.
One interesting thing I’ve found is how few people in Britain even know that legal weed is a thing here at all. On the subreddit it’s common to see stories of police raiding people’s houses or even of people being fired before those involved are informed of the person’s prescription. It’s been legal since 2018 but is only available privately, not on the NHS.
I think weed is particularly dangerous for young people because it kills motivation. That said, as a gainfully employed adult, I find it strictly preferable to alcohol for most occasions because of the lack of hangover and lack of calories. Booze is more fun, almost always, but I’ve been more alert, have found waking up easier and have done more in the morning since replacing drinking at dinner with it (on perhaps 4/7 nights a week).
It's really interesting to me that someone could post regularly on this board and yet still enjoy cannabis. I'm envious of your mental robustness tbh.
A strong plurality of people posting here could fairly be called "anxious overthinkers" - the board is a bilge pump for excess thought, and eg expressing any worry whatsoever about AI risk (whether the worry is grounded in real things or not) ought to be a criterion for anxiety diagnoses.
I smoked a fair amount of weed in my teens/early 20s, took plenty of other recreational drugs, and a near-universal thing I've heard from peers with a similar profile is that around age 25, they started to find weed disagreed with them. Specifically, it makes them/me really unpleasantly anxious. Weed to me now is solely a tool I would use if for some reason I wanted to give myself a panic attack. Maybe I'm a little more dramatic in my dislike than normal, but it's very normal to find weed unenjoyable from mid-20s onward.
So what's your secret? Youthful brain? No prior history of smoking? Iron resolve?
I actually would quite like to like weed again, and agree with the demerits of drink that you outlined - so if there's One Weird Trick you can share, please do so.
I never smoked much weed as a teenager, I typically refused it even at parties unless very drunk, certainly never smoked by myself or just with a few friends, so maybe I had a puff or two 3-4 times a year between the ages of 15 and 18? Between 18 and 25 I pretty much didn’t smoke at all, so I only really started as an adult. I’ve also never smoked cigarettes or mixed tobacco and weed (which is how most British people consume it), but I’m not sure if that has any effect on this.
The only time I’ve ever experienced the anxiety spiral was on one of the few occasions I tried cocaine as a teenager. I get moderately anxious (palpitations etc) on very high caffeine doses and once or twice on ADHD medication, which I no longer take (as discussed in last week’s thread). I suppose that makes a recommendation difficult. Do you find the anxiety sets in very quickly? Does it happen after a small amount of THC or only if you get stoned?
I’m an extremely neurotic person. The last time we did one of those five factor personality quizzes on the friday fun thread I was literally 99th percent neuroticism, so I’d say I’m pretty anxious. But weed calms me down, clears out my head, makes me think of ‘nothing’ (or just what I’m doing in the moment, whether it’s watching TV or making dinner or talking). I do think it’s different to alcohol or LSD which have a much stronger happiness effect (I’ve never been a sad drunk), weed doesn’t make you happy. But it does clear my head. What’s your experience?
I stopped because after a while it started making my heart beat really fast. It always elevated my heart rate somewhat, but initially it was more like 90-120 beats per minute. Later on I would take one puff and it would immediately go to 200-250 BPM. That just doesn’t seem healthy from a cardiac standpoint.
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