Why I Smoke Less Cannabis Now Than I Did When I Was Younger

Why I Smoke Less Cannabis Today than I Did when I was Younger

When I first started smoking weed, I couldn’t get enough of it. I would wait all week [I was in school] for the weekend to light up all night long. My consumption rates during my late teens and early twenties remain steady. I did stop smoking for a good 2 years early in my twenties, but after that kept on smoking like Chong himself.

As I got older, I started having standards when it comes to my consumption practices. While I didn’t might smoking a shitty bag of weed [if there wasn’t any around], I preferred to spend more on concentrates or primo buds.

This continued till I was about 30 years old. It was soon after I turned 30 that I started noticing that I stopped “waking and baking” all together. I might still do it on a Saturday, but during the week I remain clear headed until night time depending on my to dos of the day.

Over the past few months I also noticed a significant drop in my consumption rates. Where I used to consume between 5 and 7 grams of reefer per week, nowadays I’m closer to 2 and 4 grams per week. Sometimes an entire day goes by without me even thinking about smoking weed.

I thought for a long time on why this occurred and realized, I just didn’t need to smoke as much as I used to. Don’t get me wrong, I love to smoke weed…especially if it’s top notch chronic with that meaty smoky aftertaste.

However, even then I only take a hit or two and go on about my day.

So What Happened?

Why did I suddenly reduce my cannabis consumption rates? It wasn’t that I felt guilty or was pressured by other people to stop smoking. On the contrary, my family and friends are quite supportive of my habits to the point of partaking.

The change cannot be attributed to any external phenomenon. The process was completely internal. For years I have managed to maintain a healthy relationship with cannabis consumption. I was careful, only smoked well grown marijuana and didn’t do stupid shit when I’m high.

However, I also learned when to smoke and when not to smoke. I learned how to utilize the euphoric and self-reflecting attributes of cannabis to my favor. If I needed to write a lot for a client of mine, I wouldn’t smoke weed. However, I get totally baked when editing a video or building a website because it helps me work through the tedious actions I usually abhor. Things like scanning code within the website is so much more efficient while high.

Over the past few months, I was forced to buy shitty weed because I lived in the pacific jungle, which only had one supplier. As I kept trying to smoke this weed, my desire to get high reduced significantly. The weed was dry, tasted like pesticides and didn’t get you high for more than 15 minutes at a time.

The pleasure exchanged dropped, and suddenly I wasn’t too interested in sparking up. Furthermore, I was busy in the area for those six months and didn’t have enough time to smoke up and just chill.

While my story isn’t the story of everybody, I know for a fact that many of my hardcore stoner buddies from when I was young went through similar transformations. As you get older, life changes dynamically. You don’t always have time to just chill out. Responsibilities are always lingering around.

People tend to self-regulate their consumption when they know they have something important to do. I think that this is one of the major factors why people level out their consumption over time. You learn how to use cannabis effectively. This can only happen over time.

Nonetheless, the result is that you smoke less simply because you have more important things to do. Under prohibition, you would never know if you’d be able to find quality weed after your last purchase The legal market creates the perception that if you need cannabis, “just run out to the store”.

These factors make hording or needing marijuana not important. This shift in attitude reduces the level of anxiety associated with black market purchases.

This isn’t to say that some people will continue with high consumption rates, but in my case it actually came as a shock. I woke up one day and said, “I don’t need to smoke weed today” [I did, but that’s another story].

I think people need to realize that cannabis consumption, over time levels out. People become familiar with the feeling and know when and when not to smoke.

In my case, I only smoke marijuana when I feel like it…it’s not about waking and baking for me anymore. Don’t get me wrong, those times were great…but I got a lot of shit to do…so I’d rather smoke a victory bowl after I completed all my tasks for the day than to start off in a haze every morning.

Let me know if you naturally reduced your consumption habits in the comments below.