Marijuana is perhaps one of the most interesting compounds on the planet. It has a variety of applications, health benefits, and positive impacts on brain function.
But it should also come, just like anything and everything else psychoactive, with warnings. Too much of a good thing is a bad thing. The right amount of a good thing is a Godsend.
And that’s how marijuana is. At least for me. I can’t smoke even minuscule amounts of pot and achieve a positive result. I get anxious, paranoid, and all the rest of that fun stuff.
And that’s because, just like B vitamins, too much is too much. Just like Alpha GPC, too much is too much. And just like coffee, too much is entirely too much.
Pot is no different. You can cross a threshold where it isn’t useful, beneficial, or fun anymore. You can get to a point where it’s too much, and the medicinal, anxiolytic, and helpful elements of the plant just don’t apply.
But – nonetheless, surprisingly to some, I am a proponent of marijuana. Not in high doses of smokeable form, but to the contrary, in microdoses in edible form, or with applicable doses of CBD oil.
I don’t want to attempt to make any blanket statements, because I think that the dose depends on the person, for virtually everything.
Everyone has their highest tolerable dose, excess dose, and dose that pretty much, doesn’t do shit.
But I would say, that for folks with anxiety problems, microdosing edible marijuana might just be where its at. Let me break it down.
- Lots of folks report anxiety when they dose too high on smokeable or edible marijuana. It’s extremely common. Pot makes them paranoid, anxious, or somewhere in between. It’s quite clear that this is because the dose is too high for them. This is absolutely the case for me.
- There is such a thing as too low of a dose. It basically does nothing. Nothing psychoactive. Nothing in terms of helping anxiety. It’s basically useless.
- In between though, is REALLY where it’s at. If you can achieve a dose of particularly edible marijuana, that doesn’t negatively affect you psychologically, doesn’t provoke a nervous system response that makes you feel anxious, but achieves an anxiolytic effect, this is truly where it’s at. This is the outcome to target.
- And the best way I’ve come to achieve this outcome, is by microdosing edible marijuana, in a cookie or brownie.
- Dose range: typically, people eat a quarter, half, or whole brownie/cookie. This is not advisable. It’s actually a terrible idea for most people, unless you want to end up in a pretty shitty place for 3-5 hours with anxiety, paranoia, or related terrible outcomes. Therefore:
- What you should do: 1/16th of 1/4th of a cookie/brownie.
I’ve eaten a quarter and a half of pot cookie before, and it was not a good experience. It was terrible actually. I was in the middle of New Hope, PA, with family (yes – my family was in on it and all of us ate some pot brownies), and it hit me RIGHT as we sat down to eat dinner at this famous Mexican BYOB restaurant in the area.
Wow was I in a bad place. Working memory = zapped. Verbal fluency… zapped. Functional awareness? Semi zapped. But not great. Anxiety? FULL FORCE.
It basically just sucked. I couldn’t enjoy it, I really just wanted to go to bed and or get back to my hotel room and think, and it kept (lol) intensifying through the night.
But when I got back to experimenting with edibles, and marijuana in general as a means to induce functional benefits, using the minimum effective dose principal popularized by Tim Ferris, I found that this protocol of every now and then dosing roughly 1/16th of 1/4 of a marijuana edible, was EXTREMELY effective at cutting down that background anxiety that seems to disproportionately be present in my brain and body.
That instead of taking L-theanine, which is great, and or Ashwagandha, which is also great, that I could merely take a micro bite of a pot cookie and achieve the same, if not better results.
Marijuana is under-explored. It is under-appreciated. It is more powerful than the medical establishment acknowledges (for obvious, monetary gain and control reasons), and in super small doses, the stuff can be extremely useful in promoting good mental and physical health, via toning down anxiety.
We’ll discuss this, CBD oil, and more in the video below.