Hey, remember me?

In a week it’ll be 2 months since I stopped smoking green. In that time I’ve observed a couple concrete changes.

For one, the goal of my experiment/approach is that I tend to feel overall better. My mood seems to have less aggressive swings. The lows I was getting to seem to have been filled up with dirt. It’s possible that the raised floor of my emotional well being isn’t a permanent fixture and I’m in a state of not being down. Also, I did, as I did with dieting last year change to variables at once. I stopped smoking and I started doing 13 minutes of mindfullness meditation a day. I’m not perfect. I’ve smoked, maybe 3 times in this 2 month span? Maybe more, I should keep track. As I’m writing this I revisited this paragraph cause I realized I had smoked on Monday evening of this week … but I forgot about it. That’s not great. But at least, it was 2:1 CBD. This, isn’t perfect. I’m not going to beat myself up over it. But blanket that was perhaps crushing my stability seems to have been lightened. I’m finding it easier to ignore the random pull to feel that way again. But before I talk about that.

For second, I’ve tried to fill the hole with hookah. I’ve picked up smoking hookah a bit more regularly. Once every 2 weeks. It’s the craving to do something that releases that tension, the winded up feeling that creeps over time. This, is not perfect, also hookah these days honestly is fun for the first couple drags and then I just feel like shit.

For third, my diet clean up a bit without at will power or effort from me. The instances of over indulgent eating, I’m careful to use this term semantically instead of binge eating. Why? Well, binge eating is described as being unable to control one’s eating. Reading descriptions of people who suffer from this disorder, where they open a bag of chips, or a ice cream container, or a jar of peanut butter and can’t physical stop themselves from finishing the item is not something I’ve ever experienced. I more just had 5 slices of pizza instead of 3, and maybe added in a bowl of ice cream or some chocolate candy with dinner. The desire to overeat, the desire for icecream or something sweet has mostly faded completely. I’m back, more to my natural state of, spicy-sour-acid please, everything else is a whatever flavor.

For fourth, my brain, or rather my default mode network, would like for me to smoke again. Every now and then, my brain serves me up the image/sensation of how good it felt to smoke, eat way too much food and settle into some youtube or anime. This, to me, in the weakest display is proof of a psychological addiction. I feel the pull of “hey, don’t you want to feel like this again”, “you’re stressed why not settle in like we used too” “Hey remember how it shuts your brain up, you could use that”. I mentioned above of how I’ve kinda replaced smoking with hookah to some extent. Now when I see a smoke shop my brain serves up “hey smoke shop, probably some new tasty hookah flavor in there? Let’s go in and look around”. Wow brain, could you be any more boring and predictable? I’ve so far been able to ward off the draw for green. But, I’m not doing this through will power. Every time my brain has served up these images, I serve up my own image. I focus on how bad I’ve felt. How I would get so incredibly wound up I would find myself freaking out and having to engage with Jesse in a wild way to try and get myself to calm down. How awful I would feel the day after, and my brain would be foggy. How even towards the latter end of smoking, I would then keep searching for a way to make the sensation last … just a little bit longer. I find myself sometimes at the end of a night or beginning of one that “man, I could use a way to shut my brain off” or “I kinda wanna putz, might as well feel good also”. These thoughts suck. So I focus again on how awful I have felt and my belief that hey, weed was part of it. Or I focus on the scary thing, that I discussed in the other post. In doing this I’m seeing 2 things happen. 1) I’m worried about my discipline to say no in every situation. I’ve really committed that this change for me is the best. I avoided a 4/20 party, in part of that. I just didn’t want to put myself in an environment where it would be harder for me to say no. 2) I feel courage brewing in me to be more bullish about my decision. I’ve felt a sense of “Aw shucks, I guess I’m lame and can’t do this thing anymore”. But I’m starting to feel the kindling of “Actually, I feel a lot better right now, and I don’t want to go back to feeling the way I did”. No matter how much “relief need”, my brain throws at me, I’m starting to believe it’s just not worth the risk, the danger, etc.

Either way, It’s May. I think I’ll write another update in June. We’ll see how things are doing then :)