When I began to lurk on r/leaves [the subreddit for people who quit cannabis], a big "master post" like this would have helped me immensely when I was new to quitting, instead of having to search and find things in bits and pieces, as well as some stuff I found out only by experience, so I'm making this post in the hopes it will help someone out there. [In fact, I am posting this in part for a friend who knows someone quitting cannabis and I told them they have permission to share this with that person.]
Standard disclaimer: I am not a professional, I am only a recovering addict. Mental health - which includes recovery - is not one size fits all; if something I've suggested here doesn't or won't work for you, it doesn't mean you're a failure, it means people have different needs.
...this gets very long, roughly 4300 words.
One
Recognize that this is a process and it takes time, and that timeline is going to look different for everyone.
The Internet says it takes about 28 days for cannabis withdrawal to complete. However, this is also dependent on factors like your body weight [especially if you were using edibles, because that's fat-soluble], how often you were doing it, and how long. There is a sliding scale of dependency here. I would say that even if you start to feel noticeably better after 2-3 weeks, you should probably allow for at least 100 days for things to return to pre-addiction normal. In my case, it took about 40 days [after 2 years of heavy edible use] to start noticing big improvements, and the process was probably slightly accelerated by going on anti-anxiety medication [see further below], but I was still struggling with some things around day 60.
The other thing to keep in mind is that recovery is not linear. There are good days and bad days. Sometimes recovery looks like "one step forward, two steps back". Having a bad day, even when you're "past the point where you should be" having an easier time, doesn't mean that you're failing. It means addiction is a bitch.
There's a reason why I decided to put my "aurë entuluva" icon as my default on Dreamwidth during this time - to remind myself day will come again.
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Two
So we went from DARE-era "weed is just as bad as heroin" propaganda that put a lot of Black people in jail, to the opposite pendulum of "weed is completely harmless and nobody gets addicted to it".
Let me preface this by saying that I do believe weed has purpose as a medicine, I fully support its legalization AND the pardoning of people - especially Black people, and other people of color - who have been incarcerated on marijuana-related offenses. I do believe that most people can use weed responsibly, just like most people can use alcohol responsibly, and just because I have a problem with it doesn't mean it's bad for everyone.
Having said that, I read a for-science statistic that 9% of adults who use cannabis develop a dependency on it [and that number goes up to 17% of teenagers; I began using as a teenager (and yes, I was a fundie teenager, I was bad at being a fundie) but my heavier use was as an adult]. Nine percent is definitely not something to have mass hysteria about, but it's also close enough to ten percent of weed users that we ought not to be saying "weed is completely harmless and nobody ever gets addicted". Unfortunately, one thing I repeatedly encountered since quitting cannabis, and which I've heard reports of from countless other people in recovery from cannabis addiction, is that because of how normalized marijuana use is now, people assume that addiction to cannabis is kind of a joke, and only reserved for people like Snoop Dogg who smoke over a dozen blunts a day and still seem to be more or less functional.
So when you quit cannabis, you can expect people to act like you're either joking or an attention-seeking hypochondriac if you mention you had a problem with it, until/unless you get into graphic detail about 1. how much weed you had to use to have any effect and 2. the withdrawal symptoms you've been having. When I went inpatient and had to disclose why I was there in group settings and then got laughed at by meth users, they shut right the fuck up when I told them I was using 25mg/day just to barely function and when I quit marijuana I ended up sleeping less than 4 hours a night for most of a month, having night sweats, severe GI disturbances, etc - they couldn't say I wasn't going through "real" addiction and withdrawal then, because it was not dissimilar to their own withdrawal from meth.
[Additionally: in the 00s I was prescribed benzodiazepines daily for four years and inadvertently got addicted; when I quit benzos the experience was horrific, and I'm going to go on record and say quitting cannabis has actually been fucking worse by dint of being more of a long-term process.]
Then their question was "why the fuck would you do that to yourself?"
To successfully quit cannabis, you have to be able to answer that question of "why the fuck would you even". Not because you have to justify yourself to other people - one thing I had to learn the hard way since I quit was to stop giving a fuck about what people think, but we'll revisit that later - but because you need to answer that to yourself. ESPECIALLY if you have mental health issues and/or chronic pain, this is going to be a rough ride for you; a lot of people relapse. So you need to have a reason to commit to doing the work, and make no mistake about it, this is going to be work.
For me, I quit because it was taking more and more weed to do anything for me, which in turn raised my heart rate/blood pressure and kicked up the anxiety, so what I'd initially been using it for [PTSD + chronic pain] got worse instead of better, also I was having more and more cognitive problems [which caused executive dysfunction and creative blocks], and I felt like shit all the time, and it got expensive to keep up with the amount of weed I needed just to do a little for me and since I'm on a fixed income, I'm not made out of money. I began to see that weed was putting a band-aid on my various physical and mental health issues instead of actually dealing with them, and eventually dragged my ass into a doctor and a dentist and got the ball rolling to fix some long-term problems.
Despite how rough the first 40 days were for me, by 50 days I began to recognize new patterns crystallizing in my ability to function and cope, and it affirmed to me that I'd made the right decision by quitting.
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Three
To get the monkey off your back, you may possibly need professional help.
In my case, I ended up going on anti-anxiety medication a week in, and it caused problems, I went inpatient for a week on day 33, got off that med and on other meds, and then upon discharge looked for a trauma-informed therapist in tandem with taking meds.
"Why would you replace a natural medicine with manmade chemical garbage" is something else I've heard since quitting. Indeed, a lot of people on r/leaves are anti-medication and think that if you stop cannabis you should be chemical-free altogether, and unfortunately for a lot of us with serious problems like PTSD it doesn't work that way.
For me, it was the difference between pay out-of-pocket for something that I needed more and more of just to barely function, versus having a small co-pay for something that immediately gave me back a lot of my functionality considering how debilitating my anxiety was.
As far as talking to someone - your addiction was not created in a vacuum. If you don't start dealing with the shit that got you hooked, the why behind your use of weed to self-medicate, you're eventually going to end up back there. Some people, especially those of us with C-PTSD who have deep trust issues from betrayal, and/or those of us who have had prior bad experiences with therapists, may not ever be ready to engage with a therapist. In that case I would strongly recommend checking out various self-help books including Complex PTSD: From Surviving To Thriving by Pete Walker, and the works of Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach [trauma-informed therapists with a Buddhist-leaning perspective]. I would recommend reading these anyway even if you're in therapy, as it can help enrich your recovery. I also highly recommend the Therapy In A Nutshell channel on YouTube, which gives great practical advice about coping skills, especially with regards to the biomechanics of stress/PTSD [like how to calm down your vagus nerve and sympathetic nervous system].
Also as you're doing this, be mindful that recovering from trauma is a lifelong process, be patient and gentle with yourself.
When I first entered treatment in 2002, I was fed a line of happy horseshit about how eventually I would completely get over my trauma and live a happy, normal life. Then I ended up retraumatized - as so often happens to C-PTSD people, we smell like prey to predators - and dealing with fun new traumas. 22 years later, I am here to tell you that no actually, you never really, truly "get over it". What does happen is you learn coping/resilience - hopefully the good and not the maladaptive kind - so when you have flashbacks and things suck, you can dial it back faster and get through it without harming yourself and so on. So don't yell at yourself about "why am I not over this already?", "why am I still fucked up by this 20+ years later?" Just know that healing takes time, it goes by increments. And PTSD is chronic like diabetes, you can learn to better control it and stay on top of it so the symptoms are far less severe but don't think it's going to ever go completely away. A better quality of life where your trauma is not dragging you around in chains is possible, but anyone who tells you complete recovery and "getting over it" is a thing, is flat-out selling you bullshit.
Professional help here isn't just for mental health issues, but for physical health issues. Finding a good doctor and working out a treatment plan with her for things like perimenopause and severe PCOS symptoms has been helpful to me - treating the root of the problem rather than just using cannabis to mask the symptoms. You may have to try a number of different doctors who will take things like chronic pain seriously and be willing to prescribe something like a biologic for arthritis, but the good news is there are a growing number of doctors - especially female doctors under 40 - who are more compassionate and willing to listen and help rather than dismiss everything as "all in your head".
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Four
Learn how to meditate, and practice it when you feel your anxiety kicking up. [Even if you get medicated for anxiety, it is a volume knob, not an on/off switch.]
With the caveat that the point of meditation is not to be calm and Zen-like all the time, it's more about taming your brain so you learn how to de-escalate when you get triggered and so on.
Even if you can't touch spirituality/religion with a ninety-foot pole, meditation is not specific to any one religion and is something everyone can do. There are different forms of meditation, it's not just about emptying your mind and thinking of nothing. In fact, some forms of meditation involve things like a body scan and paying attention to what you're feeling and where. Learning to just notice your breath and slow it down is also a form of meditation and it helps.
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Five
Sleep is going to be an issue for awhile.
My experience, and that of many others on r/leaves, goes something like this:
-Struggle hardcore with insomnia the first few days to first few weeks when you quit cannabis. I struggled for about 40 days after 2 years of daily edible use up to 25mg a day [also, I'd been using cannabis off and on since I was a teenager in the late 1900s].
-Once you start sleeping again, your REM sleep comes back with a vengeance and you are going to dream a fucking lot. Some of these dreams will be disturbing - some of these dreams may be revisiting any trauma you have, because your brain is doing this to try to process and heal [which is why I strongly recommend getting a therapist and/or reading books on trauma]. Some of these dreams will just be cracked the fuck out.
-When you start dreaming again, you may have a sleep pattern that looks like this: sleep 4-5 hours, wake up, not be able to get back to sleep for 1-3 hours, then you have your second round of sleep and the dreams are typically more intense and WTF here.
-Most people report this calms down somewhere around 100 days, though some super heavy users have reported 25 weeks.
Sleep hygiene is your friend. Try to take a couple hours to wind down before bed, avoiding stressors and just getting your brain to relax. Eating tryptophan-rich foods and taking supplements like magnesium in the evening can possibly help.
Here is the silver lining: when your REM sleep comes back, if you are a creative person at all and experienced blockages in the addiction, your creativity may probably also come back with the dreams. My synaesthesia also started to return around the same time as the REM sleep.
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Six
Find some form of exercise, no matter what your mobility level.
It's a cliche that people in 12-step programs who don't hardcore get religion tend to turn into exercise fanatics. Addictive personalities need to replace one addiction with another, and from the perspective of harm reduction it's probably better to replace a drug/alcohol addiction with spirituality or becoming more health-conscious.
However there's also some science to the exercise thing besides addiction replacement. By the time you have a dependency on cannabis, your natural cannabinoid receptors are fucked and need a hard reset. The endorphins you get from exercise help speed along that process and retrain your brain to make its own drugs.
Obviously if you're mobility-challenged like I am, exercise is easier said than done. I need a wheelchair for getting around someplace like my synagogue or a mall, but I can walk short distances, so every day where the weather is reasonable I make myself take a short walk around the yard outside and spend some time sitting out there communing with nature, getting fresh air and sunshine and looking at the happy little trees and happy little squirrels. If you can't even go for a short walk but you can do stretches or something like chair dancing, I would suggest that.
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Seven
Aim to drink at least 64 ounces of water [8 8-ounce glasses] a day, if not more. Fruits and veggies are important here, so is getting enough fiber and protein. Even though you might start craving junk food during this period of time, consuming too much of it is going to make you feel worse as your body is literally detoxing from drugs. Smoothies are really good here if you have a hard time making yourself eat fruits/veggies, just load it into a blender and you'll have something sweet and tasty.
I'm not going to bullshit you: one of the almost-universally reported symptoms of cannabis withdrawal is severe GI distress early on. I'm not saying this to alarm you and make you run screaming back to addiction, I'm saying this to prepare you because I went through this myself [complicated by the fact that I'd been on a course of antibiotics prior to Major Dental Work Part One and it trashed my gut]. My GI distress was so bad the first few days of cannabis withdrawal that I thought I was going to fucking die. The best thing you can do for yourself during this process and ESPECIALLY during the early stages is eat whole, nutritious foods, even if your comfort instinct is to do otherwise. Your gut will thank you later.
[Another caveat: eating any food is better than eating none at all - if you lack access to nutritious food, then by all means eat what you have. But if you can, try to get stuff like bananas, berries, leafy greens, avocado and work it into your diet.]
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Eight
Do things that give you a hit of dopamine.
My mother made me feel like I was completely incompetent and crap at cooking, so getting more into cooking from scratch for a gluten-free diet felt like an accomplishment each time I successfully made something that didn't suck. I also gradually got back into writing after months where my brain was hijacked by health anxiety [and anxiety-in-general], and making some art.
If you set small, manageable goals for yourself - like writing a fic, or redecorating a room or whatever - and give yourself little things to look forward to do every day, it will go better for you, because you won't be stuck in "everything sucks and I want to die" mode as much as your brain chemistry reboots.
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Nine
Avoid people, places, and things that stress you out as much as possible, you need to baby yourself right now.
Sometimes it's unavoidable - for example, if going to the dentist stresses you out but you need dental work done that you can't put off [take it from me, don't fuck around with your teeth], you have to do the thing. But if there's anything you can put off or cut out of your life that's doable, now would be a good time to just... let go. Here's the thing: you're going to be stressed out ENOUGH during the first 28-60 days of your withdrawal, you don't need to add to that. You don't have to go around telling everyone in the world "so hey, I'm quitting weed and I hate your guts and don't want to interact with you while I'm hating life," but you need to look out for number one here.
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Ten
Avoid news/politics for a bit, as much as you possibly can, especially if you belong to one or more marginalized groups where the current state of the world is impacting you harder than others.
The news on Dump, I-P, rising antisemitism, and anti-trans legislation literally started making my blood pressure shoot up 10-15 points. I am only reading my Dreamwidth friends page occasionally because a lot of my friends post news stuff unfiltered/without a cut, to further limit my exposure to stuff going on in the world and abroad that triggers me and which I have no fucking control over. [I would strongly encourage you, if you are not already in the habit of using the cut function with a trigger warning for news/politics posts, especially regarding wars, systemic racism/misogyny, anti-trans legislation and/or hate crimes, to start doing so - not just for me but for other people reading you who might also have political PTSD. I need to get better about doing this myself, not that I post politics super often anymore.]
That doesn't mean live in a bubble and be completely unaware of what's going on. It does mean curate your exposure. I recommend Jeff Tiedrich's blog if you want to pay attention to US politics in a more, um, holistically therapeutic way. [Having said that, there are days when I can't even read that; I pretty much only check news 1-2 times a week and that will likely continue through the 2024 election.]
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Eleven
Begin learning the art of giving less fucks about what non-essential people think of you.
There is a common misconception that most people who get addicted to anything are selfish, horrible people who don't care about anything or anyone but themselves and their fix. While it's true that a lot of hard drug users turn into this during the throes of their addiction, I've found in my own experience and that of interacting with dozens of addicts over the years and reading addiction forums that many of us start off as very sensitive people who give too many fucks. Those of us with C-PTSD who are using marijuana as a band-aid often fall into either the Freeze or Fawn subtype of C-PTSD [or a combination of the two], we don't want to Fight or we had the Fight broken out of us so we "turn on, tune in and drop out" to avoid harming other people [or perceived harm to others] with our method of coping.
As you come back from addiction, you have to not merely prioritize yourself and your well-being, you have to stop fucking apologizing for it. There are few things like sitting in a room full of meth addicts who start laughing their asses off when you say you're here in part because of cannabis withdrawal, that will make you toughen up and say "you know what, fuck you, I know who I am and what's going on with me, you don't, piss off."
After years of fandom bullying that traumatized me and arguably contributed to my addiction [and the severe anxiety spiral when MJ stopped working], I finally got to a place where I could say, "Cringe at me and talk shit all you want, you literally don't matter, you're just pathetic losers who have nothing better to do."
There are comparatively few people in your life whose opinions do actually for-real matter, and those people should be reasonably accepting of you and your quirks and foibles and give you breathing room to be yourself.
Learning to stop giving fucks is a process. I haven't mastered it. But it is nonetheless an important step in avoiding relapse, so rejection, humiliation, and the other slings and arrows of outrageous assholes don't send you back the way you came.
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Twelve
Get ready for the feelings you haven't been feeling because [at least for awhile] cannabis made you "comfortably numb", as the song goes.
Once again, I'm not going to bullshit you: this is one of the hardest parts of the withdrawal and the part that usually makes people relapse [along with the sleep]. If you have ANY kind of trauma, you can expect emotional flashbacks. Sometimes you may just cry for no reason, especially if you get on an anti-anxiety med and your body begins to send "you're safe" signals which... sets off a vulnerability response. The daily fucking crying sessions started to be a thing with me, however crying is also GOOD for you, it flushes toxins from your system and will help both with the withdrawal process and in general. Usually after a good cry I would feel more relaxed later; I poured out my endless, layers-of-onion grief to Hashem.
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Thirteen
Give yourself little rewards for getting through each week of sobriety, like a nice meal/dessert, or watching a movie/TV show you've been meaning to watch for a long time. For example, after Week 1 I made a batch of gluten-free cupcakes for myself and my roommate. Do this within reason - you don't want to replace the cannabis addiction with food addiction, shopping addiction, etc - but treating yourself within moderation is a good way to gently goad your brain into cooperating with the new normal.
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Fourteen
Try to practice gratitude. Even if a lot of things suck, learning to enjoy the little things - like seeing a butterfly on a walk, or savoring a tasty meal, being fully present as you get a hug from your cat - will help with uncoupling from the catastrophizing "everything sucks and is going to suck forever" that tends to present itself with the withdrawal.
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Fifteen
Speak affirmations to yourself. "I am safe enough right now." "I am going to be OK." "It is OK to sleep. I will be safe in my sleep." "You're doing great." "I can do hard things." I
f you are religious/spiritual and you pray, prayer can be comforting here. I started praying a lot, to the point where I look like a semi-frum kind of Jew doo doo doo, doo-doo doo-doo. During the first 60 days I also listened to a recording of my rabbi singing Mi Sheibeirach more times than I care to count.
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Sixteen
Watch calming shows, or things that evoke a sense of pleasant childhood nostalgia. Bob Ross is such a help here. So is Mister Rogers. Soothing music also helps - I was listening to a lot of Enya, Clannad and Enigma when going through withdrawal.
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Seventeen
If you need to hermit away from people for a bit that's understandable [especially if you have interpersonal trauma of any kind and your autonomic system perceives even safe people as a threat when your anxiety is kicking up] but you should keep connected to at least 1-2 friends during this time to have someone to confide in and support you through it. If you can get someone in meatspace to give you a hug now and again, it will help a lot. If you have pets, your cat/s or dog/s can be such a valuable source of comfort during this time. My cat Shams, who was already pretty permanently attached to me, started keeping vigil and sleeping on my pillow when I was going through withdrawal.
[If you don't have pets, I recommend not getting any until things have stabilized enough that you can responsibly care for one. Some people can "power through" the withdrawal enough to make themselves feed/etc a pet, but if you feel so much like hammered shit that you just want to sleep all the time and don't have anyone else to help you care for a pet, hold off for a bit, yeah?]
_
If you got through this entire post, I wish you strength, and the best of luck.