Dr. K’s Guide to Mental Health explores Anxiety, Depression, ADHD, and Meditation with 150+ video chapters in a Final …
47 Comments
Speaking of physiological dependence, I have a friend who was extremely addicted to over the counter gravol (motion sickness pills) Tylenol 1s and DXM gelcaps. Over the years he built up a tolerance to the point of taking 75-100 pills a day. He would take 20-30 gravol pills at once and the effect would be almost imperceptible.
I'm on my way to quitting a half life long weed addiction and you really have helped my mindset and motivation to persist while honouring and understanding my needs, and not punishing myself for not having overcome it yet. I'm well on my way. "Stability is the absolute foundation" spoke to me strongly. Thank you so much for your advice and wisdom Dr. K!
1:23:31 This is something I think I can never thank enough. Over the last years this channel has helped me to analyze myself and understand myself as I never could have dreamed about. It has been painful as fuck. Rigorously putting all my insufficiencies under a magnifying glass to read them has made me go though such personal hell I needed to smoke weed daily to just be able to live normally. But hopefully it can give me a faint hope to ever have a life that is worth living. I don't know if Dr K (or people involved in managing the channel) would se this comment under hundreds of them. But I want to sincerely thank them all. This channel could potentially have saved my life.
41:00 I am not clinically diagnosed with ADHD but when I consume THC, it makes me focus even less. I already have a problem with binge eating, chewing helping me to concentrate and having the munchies after consuming weed isn't the best thing to me. I tend to be anything but productive though it does kind of energize me. That's what makes me stop consuming weed in any form. Sure it's fun but the side effects are too important for me long term to make it worth.
For me weed is basically a super intense, hallucinogenic, anxiety+schizophrenia simulator with extreme drowsiness that makes me depressed for the rest of the day that I use it.
I canβt comprehend how people like it so much. The only thing itβs good for is falling asleep. I can function better on LSD than I can on weed.
It also absolutely causes physical dependence and withdrawals. I used it to fall asleep for 3-4 years and when I stopped I didnβt feel right for a week or two, and it took well over a month to start sleeping normally.
Also the gateway thing is bullshit. Weed is just the most abundant and easily accessible psychoactive drug with the lowest perception of harm. Of course people interested in altering their mind will try weed first. And of course anyone who alters their mind and enjoys it will want to try other ways of doing the same thing. That would happen with any available drug socially perceived the same way as weed. Itβs not a property of weed, itβs a property of recreational drug use in general.
It would be more accurate to say something like oxycodone is a gateway to heroin or adderall is a gateway to meth. Those are actually directly correlated and a huge chunk of people using those βharderβ drugs are only doing so because they enjoy the more expensive legal counterparts.
i smoked weed for more than 10 years every day. I figured out that i might be addicted but i did not want to quit. Then something changed and i wanted to quit and so i just quit. From one day to the other, no more weedsmoking and it was acutally very easy. 6 month no weedsmoking.
CBD, running, and better sleep have improved my life so much. THC has it's place for me but I only use that once a week to once every other week, but I used THC to transition myself to not drinking alcohol. This has genuinely improved my life and made me much more productive in ways I never was before consuming THC. But, like I said, only once a week I completely agree that THC use for the general public should not be used daily.
when i was in my teens in the mid-to-late 2000's we who became stoners early stuck to only smoking weed while the people who began doing drugs later in life (17-19yrs) started doing coke because in sweden u can legally drink in bars when u turn 18. and Bars = alkohol + coke. then they moved over to or added MDMA, GHB, opiates, benzos etc. this was a sample of maybe like 30-35 people. Today, like 20yrs later the "stoners" still primary only use cannabis as their drug of choice and most of them live normal lives while the "none stoners" have either died cuz of OD's or are total junkies. And I live in a country where cannabis is 100% illegal. the "junkies" typically dont like cannabis because it gives them paranoia or they simply think there is not enough bang for the buck. 5g's go for 50-70 dollars in my country while u can get 1g of heroin for the same price.
SO.
in my experience cannabis was not only NOT a gateway drug but it did in fact become a "factor" for not "transitioning" to harder drugs.
i Know this is just mine and like 50 other people ive known over the years experience but IMO bars and alkohol are gateways to hard drugs. Cannabis is a Gateway drug to psychedelic drugs at "worst"
Personally I always thought weed was a gateway drug because it is illegal. The thought process goes like this: you hear that weed is actually really safe, you look into it, and decide you wanna try it. You enjoy the experience. You realize "well that was safe, that was fun, but it was also illegal. So the other drugs might not be as bad as they were made out to be either, because they are all illegal right alongside weed."
As someone who is in denial about their marijuana addiction, I did not enjoy this video. You were supposed to tell me what I wanted to hear. 2 thumbs down.
I was a daily smoker for 10 years and I was absolutely physically and psychologically addicted. I developed a paranoid personality. Became extremely distrustful of anything and anyone, even myself. Wasnt sleeping. I also needed weed even to eat. I quit last february. First week off, couldnt eat, even the smell of food gave me nausea. 3 months clean, im sleeping better, having hella dreams. Still struggling with paranoia, but mind is starting to become more clear. I forgot what its like to feel sober. I still dont feel like I did before i started smoking. Before weed I was open and social and during the 10 year smoke sesh i became a shut in. Hope i can get better. Just my experience.
I smoke rarely, but when I do it's when I'm relaxing. I only allow myself to smoke once I'm done with all the things I need to do and then I'll smoke while gaming or watching something or whatever
Hey dr. K when you adress the question if weed is a gateway drug or not there is a hidden premise: there are things such as gateway drugs. Should you not first adress the concept of gateway drugs a bit further before tackling the former question?
K2 and synthetic weed like it is an actual problem.
senior year of HS i got hospitalized from Smokin K2 through a bong. The dealer my friend had didn't specify that it was K2 and i paid the price for it.
i was very green compared to my friends and that strand had me hallucinating and everything.
before i finish this video i'll say that a lot of weed smokers have this general dislike or disdain to alternative ways of getting high, like THC gummies.
IMO gummies are just a safer way of getting high, you don't have to inhale insane amounts of smoke, ruining your lungs in the process. granted, i've only smoked like around 3 times in my life but those few times was enough to steer me away from the smoking part of it.
gummies will get you just as high, sometimes way higher cuz you decided to take more than two gummies cuz you're impatient, and it's legal unlike actual weed where the laws are super confusing to understand in some states.
I see it as when you do the 2 weeks quit itβs not proof you can control itβs proof that if you truly choose to quit you could attempt it. Itβs more like if you wanted to not be addicted anymore you know it wonβt destroy you.
Honestly doc, your arguments for it being a gateway drug are extremely weak. Even your example of smoking in adolescents is far more indicative of home life a and childhood trauma. I think you're being biases.
Regarding autism being treated by marijuana. Considering autism can already be misdiagnosed as schizophrenia, I would be careful, because of the ability for weed to activate psychosis.
The dopamine talk around this in this video is interesting since I identify as autistic now in later life, and in my early 20s had what I interpreted as psychosis that weed switched on. But it was the paranoia of it and fear of it that persisted. As you describe, the actual experience happneed once on weed then since then it was every time, so I gave it up. But I was still stuck with the pressure of it for a couple years until a coma kinda cleared it up, not caused by it but diabetes which may be causal from the prolonged heightened stress.
What's interesting about the dopamine thing is, I've always had some pretty obvious autistic traits but as a kid I was happy, so it wasn't an issue then, so it wasn't diagnosed then. You could say I already had plenty of dopamine in my brain, and perhaps that's a feature of my particular autism that made it less like other people's childhood experiences. Yes I was treated a bit different and also missed out on romantic relationships, but I was comfortable and confident in myself and don't relate to much to the masking experience, at least at school age.
But if higher dopamine was a personal feature, and weed boosted that dopamine, perhaps it's no wonder psychosis showed up. Luckily I was hyper smart and mentally self-aware so paranoia didn't become delusion, as I was fully aware that paranoid interpretation of stimuli (which looked more like hallucination than what you described) was created by my own brain. But not being able to control my focus to clear my mind of it was debilitating for those years. I didn't seek any help and here I am with a world of other issues but not that.
Well… I'm feeling it right now after writing about it, a bit. The increased focus on stimuli looking for something. So to be honest it's more managed. I've grown better at acknowledging that it's self perpetuating and to let it pass.
I find it really hard to fall asleep when I'm not high. my thoughts are all over the place and I start feeling very hot without weed which makes sleeping very unrestful when I'm sweating all night long, weaking up to flip the pillow etc. When high, I feel like it's really easy to clear my mind to fall and stay asleep (or at least I'm not really noticing the sweat or weaking up). I've also tried no screentime 2hrs before bed and doing yoga / meditation, but then I'm just lying in bed 2hrs trying to meditate and still waking up in the night. weed kind of seems like the best thing for a good night sleep for me, but when I have the drug at home, I struggle to only use it before bedtime… Would love to hear y'all thoughts on that π
as always: great content Dr. K! and thank you for your effort helping people <3
This was extremely informative and I learned a lot about my own use. I've been struggling for a while with chronic use but have fallen into many of the cognitive pitfalls you outlined in this video. I'm not ready to quit today but I'm absolutely going to work towards being in a place in my life where I can quit. Thank you for your AoE healing Dr. K you've already been such a big help in my life β€
20:01 for me it was trying weed and finding out it didnt kill me or make me go insane or kill anyone else or jump off a bridge like I was taught that ALL illegal drugs did. So if weed isnt so bad, maybe the others aren't? Boy was I wrong…putting weed and pcp into the same category is WILD
1. exposure to a number of problematic patients who deeply struggled with substance abuse;
2. believing that discussing positive or even neutral aspects of weed consumption will be received by viewers as an encouragement for abusing substances
MAY have somewhat clouded drK's judgement.
I'll be very honest, I'm about half an hour into the video,
and I am nowhere near having the impression of looking at an unbiased attempt at discussing this topic.
I also see a divide in the community between people who feel guilty about using weed,
and people who are really impatient to judge them for it.
This doesn't look like the kind of environment where you can have a healthy discussion.
Cannabis doesn't make me enjoy other things. I find it unpleasant.
It's an oversimplification to say we couldn't do research. It was possible to do research, but the government didn't give permission unless you told them you expected to find it was bad
I don't use the M-word because (1) it was deliberately introduced to conjure images of Mexican rapists in 1937 and (2) the spelling is wrong
I think it all comes down to the way a person uses it, and what they are looking for. If you need it to be more present in life then it will be beneficial, but if you need it to escape life then it will be bad for you, because then you're trying to avoid the purpose of life which is to be present.
I have a relationship with weed where I get 20 grams and smoke daily.
3 to 4 weeks later I'm done and quit for at least that time or much longer. Both sober and smoking have unique benefits.
Starting to smoke boosts my lifestyle and going off pushes me in a different way too. Pros and cons for both situations. I hate staying in one lane too long the switching back and forth puts wings into my sails and benefits my life greatly without long term negatives.
I'm happy with my approach and I have no problem with discipline in my use. Once you've figured out a healthy middle ground it can be a great influence in your life.
Speaking of physiological dependence, I have a friend who was extremely addicted to over the counter gravol (motion sickness pills) Tylenol 1s and DXM gelcaps. Over the years he built up a tolerance to the point of taking 75-100 pills a day. He would take 20-30 gravol pills at once and the effect would be almost imperceptible.
I'm on my way to quitting a half life long weed addiction and you really have helped my mindset and motivation to persist while honouring and understanding my needs, and not punishing myself for not having overcome it yet. I'm well on my way. "Stability is the absolute foundation" spoke to me strongly. Thank you so much for your advice and wisdom Dr. K!
1:23:31 This is something I think I can never thank enough.
Over the last years this channel has helped me to analyze myself and understand myself as I never could have dreamed about. It has been painful as fuck. Rigorously putting all my insufficiencies under a magnifying glass to read them has made me go though such personal hell I needed to smoke weed daily to just be able to live normally. But hopefully it can give me a faint hope to ever have a life that is worth living. I don't know if Dr K (or people involved in managing the channel) would se this comment under hundreds of them. But I want to sincerely thank them all. This channel could potentially have saved my life.
41:00 I am not clinically diagnosed with ADHD but when I consume THC, it makes me focus even less. I already have a problem with binge eating, chewing helping me to concentrate and having the munchies after consuming weed isn't the best thing to me. I tend to be anything but productive though it does kind of energize me.
That's what makes me stop consuming weed in any form. Sure it's fun but the side effects are too important for me long term to make it worth.
Doc you doing content like this also subconsciously get people to go to therapy irl. I watch your vids before I go to get more bang for my buck!
How bad is caffeine addiction?
For me weed is basically a super intense, hallucinogenic, anxiety+schizophrenia simulator with extreme drowsiness that makes me depressed for the rest of the day that I use it.
I canβt comprehend how people like it so much. The only thing itβs good for is falling asleep. I can function better on LSD than I can on weed.
It also absolutely causes physical dependence and withdrawals. I used it to fall asleep for 3-4 years and when I stopped I didnβt feel right for a week or two, and it took well over a month to start sleeping normally.
Also the gateway thing is bullshit. Weed is just the most abundant and easily accessible psychoactive drug with the lowest perception of harm. Of course people interested in altering their mind will try weed first. And of course anyone who alters their mind and enjoys it will want to try other ways of doing the same thing. That would happen with any available drug socially perceived the same way as weed. Itβs not a property of weed, itβs a property of recreational drug use in general.
It would be more accurate to say something like oxycodone is a gateway to heroin or adderall is a gateway to meth. Those are actually directly correlated and a huge chunk of people using those βharderβ drugs are only doing so because they enjoy the more expensive legal counterparts.
I just realized at the end of the video that this was streamed on 4/20
I want HighTierHuman/LowTierGod to actually have a conversation with HealthyGamerGG and see where this leads.
little bro smokes 2-3 times A DAY. still a teen. terribly sad. not very close, donβt feel like i can help. just makes me very sad for his future
i smoked weed for more than 10 years every day. I figured out that i might be addicted but i did not want to quit. Then something changed and i wanted to quit and so i just quit. From one day to the other, no more weedsmoking and it was acutally very easy. 6 month no weedsmoking.
CBD, running, and better sleep have improved my life so much. THC has it's place for me but I only use that once a week to once every other week, but I used THC to transition myself to not drinking alcohol. This has genuinely improved my life and made me much more productive in ways I never was before consuming THC. But, like I said, only once a week I completely agree that THC use for the general public should not be used daily.
THANK U SO MUCH FOR THIS LONG VIDEO THANK U DR K π BLESS
when i was in my teens in the mid-to-late 2000's we who became stoners early stuck to only smoking weed while the people who began doing drugs later in life (17-19yrs) started doing coke because in sweden u can legally drink in bars when u turn 18. and Bars = alkohol + coke. then they moved over to or added MDMA, GHB, opiates, benzos etc. this was a sample of maybe like 30-35 people. Today, like 20yrs later the "stoners" still primary only use cannabis as their drug of choice and most of them live normal lives while the "none stoners" have either died cuz of OD's or are total junkies. And I live in a country where cannabis is 100% illegal. the "junkies" typically dont like cannabis because it gives them paranoia or they simply think there is not enough bang for the buck. 5g's go for 50-70 dollars in my country while u can get 1g of heroin for the same price.
SO.
in my experience cannabis was not only NOT a gateway drug but it did in fact become a "factor" for not "transitioning" to harder drugs.
i Know this is just mine and like 50 other people ive known over the years experience but IMO bars and alkohol are gateways to hard drugs.
Cannabis is a Gateway drug to psychedelic drugs at "worst"
Personally I always thought weed was a gateway drug because it is illegal. The thought process goes like this: you hear that weed is actually really safe, you look into it, and decide you wanna try it. You enjoy the experience. You realize "well that was safe, that was fun, but it was also illegal. So the other drugs might not be as bad as they were made out to be either, because they are all illegal right alongside weed."
Fun fact about Alcohol: Alcohol is one of the few drugs that the withdrawal can kill you if you just go cold turkey.
god, this channel is empowering me to fix my own life. thank you Alok, from the bottom of my heart π
Informed Consumers
Much Respect π
Thank you for answering some of my questions
As someone who is in denial about their marijuana addiction, I did not enjoy this video. You were supposed to tell me what I wanted to hear. 2 thumbs down.
I wish I could smoke because it really helped me being less bipolar and calming down but I get psychotic from it, paranoia and stuff
I was a daily smoker for 10 years and I was absolutely physically and psychologically addicted. I developed a paranoid personality. Became extremely distrustful of anything and anyone, even myself. Wasnt sleeping. I also needed weed even to eat. I quit last february. First week off, couldnt eat, even the smell of food gave me nausea. 3 months clean, im sleeping better, having hella dreams. Still struggling with paranoia, but mind is starting to become more clear. I forgot what its like to feel sober. I still dont feel like I did before i started smoking. Before weed I was open and social and during the 10 year smoke sesh i became a shut in. Hope i can get better. Just my experience.
You are such an amazing person for so many reasons π
Weed does have physiological WDs. One example is appetite and nausea.
I smoke rarely, but when I do it's when I'm relaxing. I only allow myself to smoke once I'm done with all the things I need to do and then I'll smoke while gaming or watching something or whatever
Hey dr. K when you adress the question if weed is a gateway drug or not there is a hidden premise: there are things such as gateway drugs. Should you not first adress the concept of gateway drugs a bit further before tackling the former question?
By the same metric sugar is a gateway drug or coffee or any damn thing you put in ypur mouth.
K2 and synthetic weed like it is an actual problem.
senior year of HS i got hospitalized from Smokin K2 through a bong. The dealer my friend had didn't specify that it was K2 and i paid the price for it.
i was very green compared to my friends and that strand had me hallucinating and everything.
STAY AWAY FROM K2!
1:06:11 – 1:07:28 lol wasn't expecting him to start talking about gang stalking in a video about weed.
before i finish this video i'll say that a lot of weed smokers have this general dislike or disdain to alternative ways of getting high, like THC gummies.
IMO gummies are just a safer way of getting high, you don't have to inhale insane amounts of smoke, ruining your lungs in the process.
granted, i've only smoked like around 3 times in my life but those few times was enough to steer me away from the smoking part of it.
gummies will get you just as high, sometimes way higher cuz you decided to take more than two gummies cuz you're impatient, and it's legal unlike actual weed where the laws are super confusing to understand in some states.
I see it as when you do the 2 weeks quit itβs not proof you can control itβs proof that if you truly choose to quit you could attempt it. Itβs more like if you wanted to not be addicted anymore you know it wonβt destroy you.
Video starts at 8:58 (pin this before your editor fixes it)
Honestly doc, your arguments for it being a gateway drug are extremely weak. Even your example of smoking in adolescents is far more indicative of home life a and childhood trauma. I think you're being biases.
My Grampa got KRUNK and set his families house on fire. I'm assuming and DURP was a CLOSE TO OD amount. He died age 100 years 2 months old. I still limit my consumption A LOT after 151 proof Rum consumption maybe was close to OD amount or was just dehydrated before consuming(lol) even though my last liver enzymes test was normal indicating ok liver function!π©ππ±π±π±π±π±π±π±π±
A bad reaction to weed? Just stay away like RUN from sativa strain and stick with /to indica ROFLWAFFLE!! Had panic attack on sativa but indica FELT GREAT but luckily not addicted possibly mostly because musical instruments cause the same feeling for me!π©ππ±π±π±π±π±
Regarding autism being treated by marijuana. Considering autism can already be misdiagnosed as schizophrenia, I would be careful, because of the ability for weed to activate psychosis.
The dopamine talk around this in this video is interesting since I identify as autistic now in later life, and in my early 20s had what I interpreted as psychosis that weed switched on. But it was the paranoia of it and fear of it that persisted. As you describe, the actual experience happneed once on weed then since then it was every time, so I gave it up. But I was still stuck with the pressure of it for a couple years until a coma kinda cleared it up, not caused by it but diabetes which may be causal from the prolonged heightened stress.
What's interesting about the dopamine thing is, I've always had some pretty obvious autistic traits but as a kid I was happy, so it wasn't an issue then, so it wasn't diagnosed then. You could say I already had plenty of dopamine in my brain, and perhaps that's a feature of my particular autism that made it less like other people's childhood experiences. Yes I was treated a bit different and also missed out on romantic relationships, but I was comfortable and confident in myself and don't relate to much to the masking experience, at least at school age.
But if higher dopamine was a personal feature, and weed boosted that dopamine, perhaps it's no wonder psychosis showed up. Luckily I was hyper smart and mentally self-aware so paranoia didn't become delusion, as I was fully aware that paranoid interpretation of stimuli (which looked more like hallucination than what you described) was created by my own brain. But not being able to control my focus to clear my mind of it was debilitating for those years. I didn't seek any help and here I am with a world of other issues but not that.
Well… I'm feeling it right now after writing about it, a bit. The increased focus on stimuli looking for something. So to be honest it's more managed. I've grown better at acknowledging that it's self perpetuating and to let it pass.
I find it really hard to fall asleep when I'm not high. my thoughts are all over the place and I start feeling very hot without weed which makes sleeping very unrestful when I'm sweating all night long, weaking up to flip the pillow etc. When high, I feel like it's really easy to clear my mind to fall and stay asleep (or at least I'm not really noticing the sweat or weaking up). I've also tried no screentime 2hrs before bed and doing yoga / meditation, but then I'm just lying in bed 2hrs trying to meditate and still waking up in the night. weed kind of seems like the best thing for a good night sleep for me, but when I have the drug at home, I struggle to only use it before bedtime…
Would love to hear y'all thoughts on that π
as always: great content Dr. K! and thank you for your effort helping people <3
Never done any weed or the likes myself but this was very interesting nonetheless!
This was extremely informative and I learned a lot about my own use. I've been struggling for a while with chronic use but have fallen into many of the cognitive pitfalls you outlined in this video. I'm not ready to quit today but I'm absolutely going to work towards being in a place in my life where I can quit. Thank you for your AoE healing Dr. K you've already been such a big help in my life β€
20:01 for me it was trying weed and finding out it didnt kill me or make me go insane or kill anyone else or jump off a bridge like I was taught that ALL illegal drugs did. So if weed isnt so bad, maybe the others aren't? Boy was I wrong…putting weed and pcp into the same category is WILD
Weeβd better not dude.
Il go ahead and suggest that
1. exposure to a number of problematic patients who deeply struggled with substance abuse;
2. believing that discussing positive or even neutral aspects of weed consumption will be received by viewers as an encouragement for abusing substances
MAY have somewhat clouded drK's judgement.
I'll be very honest, I'm about half an hour into the video,
and I am nowhere near having the impression of looking at an unbiased attempt at discussing this topic.
I also see a divide in the community between people who feel guilty about using weed,
and people who are really impatient to judge them for it.
This doesn't look like the kind of environment where you can have a healthy discussion.
Cannabis doesn't make me enjoy other things. I find it unpleasant.
It's an oversimplification to say we couldn't do research. It was possible to do research, but the government didn't give permission unless you told them you expected to find it was bad
I don't use the M-word because (1) it was deliberately introduced to conjure images of Mexican rapists in 1937 and (2) the spelling is wrong
I think it all comes down to the way a person uses it, and what they are looking for. If you need it to be more present in life then it will be beneficial, but if you need it to escape life then it will be bad for you, because then you're trying to avoid the purpose of life which is to be present.
Weed is over glorified and can cause issues.
This has been hugely helpful, but now I'm wondering what Dr. K's opinion is of psilocybin mushrooms.
I have a relationship with weed where I get 20 grams and smoke daily.
3 to 4 weeks later I'm done and quit for at least that time or much longer.
Both sober and smoking have unique benefits.
Starting to smoke boosts my lifestyle and going off pushes me in a different way too.
Pros and cons for both situations.
I hate staying in one lane too long the switching back and forth puts wings into my sails and benefits my life greatly without long term negatives.
I'm happy with my approach and I have no problem with discipline in my use. Once you've figured out a healthy middle ground it can be a great influence in your life.