We’re at something like four days, which isn’t a lot. I’m more interested in discussing how unremarkable the drop has beeen. I actually think the cannabis was doing less than I gave it credit for, given how the last few days have gone. If it was doing more, the last few days should have gone worse.
This is a pattern with me and drugs, because of how many of them I’m almost always on. I’m almost off the Prozac as well.
It’ll take a month before it’ll do me any good. I guess the upshot is I’m also not smoking.
Cat also came home from the hospital, we’re having to switch him to a special diet, so that’s fun stuff.
Anyway back to the subject; apart from lack of buzz there is no effect, not in appetite or in sleep. Even the buzz, I wonder was that placebo the whole time? So much of the stuff in consumer products is, turns out. The power of suggestion is pretty much all there is left.
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I think your initial findings cut to the heart of the matter: in the long term, drugs don’t do much.
Short term, sure, whether we’re talking about prescription meds or recreational drugs, I’ve always felt something. But the idea of staying on a steady drip and expecting it to effect a life altering change is something that never worked for me.
(I say this as I wrestle with another night of suicidal insomnia, this time without any drugs for the past 36 hours and, you guessed it…. no difference from any night when I’m doped up.
I think the body & mind get wise to our tricks, and aside from hard stuff that causes chemical addictions, it all gets shrugged off.
Not a very hopeful thought, is it? Basically you end up where you were. Drugs provide a temporary crutch, but they can’t make you walk if your legs aren’t there.
I keep wondering, how is it that I get sleep? How is it that I eat? Because obviously a certain amount of stress and it all shuts down.
I guess it’s got to be mind over matter, that expectation put into practice along with a lot of other tricks. I do know that in the case of hunger the greatest trick available is to not look at the food, to not think about it. The same is kind of true of sleep.
It’s kind of the way the brain deals with obsessional thought; the more hyperfocused you are, the more recoil you’ve got from whatever it is. So if you tell that thing that it isn’t such a big deal, that it is whatever it is, that you aren’t going to let it defeat you, so goes the theory anyway.
This was also a form of self harm, I must admit. I can’t do a lot of my other self harm anymore, so this was my only way to try. I was really angry, and I decided to throw caution to the wind and let the consequences land where they may. It comes from a need to be master of my domain, and if I couldn’t let go, I would feel weak.
Yes, the self harm aspect of taking wild chances… To the outside observer it can look like a well-thought decision but often it’s more like “idgaf let’s see what this does to me.” I guess what matters is having control like you said.
Totally agree about trying to hard to sleep. One good piece of advice I’ve often heard (though I never follow) is when you realize you can’t sleep you should get up out of bed and do something, anything else. The reasoning is that we start to associate the bed with failure to sleep. So the longer you toss and turn and obsess over every tick of the clock, the more it’s establishing a pattern based on the bed being your torture device.
The other side of the coin is probably what you described: if you manage to get into a good sleep pattern based on a particular strategy, then that strategy establishes itself as what works. Mind over matter.
Back to your original observations about the efficacy of drugs, maybe it really was a placebo effect like you suspected. But whatever it was, it set a good example.