A few years ago, the typical stereotype associated with daily weed smokers looked a little something like this: a guy in his mid-twenties, who doesn’t have a job and sleeps on his parents’ couch. However, as medicinal marijuana has been legalised in various states in the US, we’ve seen this paradigm shift. Increasingly, cannabis is making its way into the wellness world, with CBD popping up in everything from teas and anxiety-relieving tinctures to natural beauty products.
Now, if you’ve ever smoked weed more than once, you probably know that it can make you feel one of two ways—sleepy and giggly or paranoid and anxious. While the first one may be fun in recreational situations, neither are particularly conducive to doing your best work. However, in small amounts, cannabis is said to relieve stress and anxiety and quite simply, take the edge off. It’s for this reason that a growing amount of wellness and entrepreneurial types are microdosing cannabis in their everyday lives.
What is microdosing?
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Microdosing means taking minuscule amounts of psychedelic drugs, typically LSD and psilocybin mushrooms. Rather than making you hallucinate, the effect is said to be feelings of contentment and increased creativity and productivity. However, increasingly, people are turning to microdosing cannabis to give them that sub-perceptual buzz and reduce stress and anxiety. They do this in a number of ways, including smoking the flower, vaporizing oils, eating edibles, or tinctures.
What happens when you microdose cannabis?
Those who microdose cannabis report experiencing a sense of calm, heightened mindfulness, less irritability and an increased ability to relate and work with others. Here, Anna Duckworth, a semi-regular microdoser and the editor-in-chief of Miss Grass magazine, shares her experience with Well+Good:
“By the middle of a workday, it’s not unusual for me to feel tightly wound, and that’s when a tiny hit off of a vaporizer or a few drops of a tincture can level me out and make my to-do list feel much more manageable. It makes me feel relaxed right away, it restores my perspective, and just generally takes the edge off without affecting my ability to do whatever it is I’m doing.”
What are the risks of microdosing cannabis?
Sounds amazing, right? Sure, we can meditate and practice mindfulness all we want, but who wouldn’t want an instant solution to take the edge of those anxiety-provoking work meetings, or a fight with their partner?
So, what’s the downside? Well, for starters, cannabis is still criminalised in many countries, and if used the wrong way or for a long period of time, can lead to some serious, long term health effects. Then, there’s the fact that achieving the right microdose and getting the right strain of cannabis (those that are either high in CBD and low in THC, or CBD only) could be difficult.
If you don’t know what you’re doing, it would be quite easy to accidentally take the wrong dose and end up either being half asleep or completely lit during that work meeting. Or worse, you could end up in a dangerous situation.
