wagons roll, what do you do with your time?

[alwayslean]

Well I'm trying to detox again. I've posted here before but those attempts like all others ended in failure. I generally reach the 2 week stage, then justify a spliff by telling myself I can just have one occasionally at social gatherings. This somehow deteriorates pretty quickly back into the stoner lifestyle.
After breaking through the first day its pretty easy. But I feel a mounting sense of frustration and boredom. I suppose a key thing is to use my time. I wonder what sober people do? Seriously everyone criticizes stoners for being lazy but how many non-stoners are really into sports or arts or whatever? I have so much time when I don't smoke. So for my future self, and anyone else, Here is a list of things to do with your time:

1)Write. Everyones got a novel in them.
2) Cook food. roll pasta, roll sausages, roll rolls.
3) Make new friends. I do not agree with the common advice that you should ignore stoner friends. Just hang out and don't smoke. After the first movie you will actually feel like leaving. Potential friends are everywhere. Meet everyone you can.
4) Troll facebook. Send death threats from Osama bin-laden. Get IP banned.
5)Study. Something, anything.
6)Sport exercise activity.....
7) Work or apply for jobs
8)Learn computer stuff, programming, site design, hacking...
9) Art, drawing photos
10) learn a musical instrument.

Not to mention keeping the house clean and laundry. Everyone is welcome to add to the list.

[man with no name]

Hi alwaysclean.

Funny suggestions you have there, but I somehow don't think that a death threat will faze bin Laden.

1) Learn something from a central character in a book that will stimulate and expand your imagination and fill you with a sense of warmth and wonder. Hint, Hint...check my signature for the clue to this book.

2) You are not a human doing. You are a human being. In the end it's not what you do but what you are that is most important. Don't give up.

3) At least you're not in jail.

4) Give yourself time for your interests to change after quitting substances. They will. You can tell alot about a person simply by their interests. As your intelligence level improves, your changing interests will reflect that! Trust that something will and has to replace the void quite naturally. You'll find interst and pleasure again in simple things like just watching tv for example. Be patient with yourself and don't try to build Rome in one day. You can burn it down in a day but you can't rebuild it in one.

5) Love yourself and forgive yourself. Nobody knows the love and goodness in your heart so don't judge yourself by the measuring sticks of society. To somebody you are very valued and significant for who you are and without you, that person wouldn't be the same. Think on those people who love you unconditionally and never judge you.

6) Try if you can, to add one single day to your life by being anxious. Good luck with that. Your life is more than possessions.

7) and finally, try to help someone else, a neighbour, a friend, a complete stranger for that matter. Step outside yourself for awhile. Nothing takes our minds off of ourselves like when we focus on helping others.

I think alot of the battle is inner.

[forever quitting]

Hey alwayslean

Its really hard quitting, i have had several attempts myself (lost count). Im six weeks and four days clean today (12 weeks was the longest before) but this time it is definitely different. You say about always justifying having a joint - im the queen of that! for the last however many years in my quitting journey, i always managing to talk myself into, just one wont hurt, its my birthday, its christmas, its new year, im on holiday, im camping etc etc, truth is you cant be a social smoker when it has been a problem in your life and im guessing it has been a problem otherwise you wouldn't have tried to detox so many times. I think this time, finaly accepting that i wouldn't be able to smoke again and the fact that i was messing up my life, affecting my job/relationships with partners/friends/family etc made me all the more determined. I agree with you that you shouldn't give up hanging about with stoner friends - some of my friends are brilliant mates and its not just the smoking we had in common, we have been friends for years - it does take a lot of willpower though especially if they smoking some sweet the drug as for what sober people do - its the same as us but just using their time more wisely and they have a lot more time to do stuff as they not sitting stoned procrastinating all the time - they are actually doing something! your suggestions for boredom are funny, how many of them have you actually tried?!

Anyhow good luck with your quitting journey and dont worry if you cant do it this time, there'l come a time when enough is enough - it did for me anyway

keep strong

FQ

[Cannabis Rehab Admin]

Hi alwayslean and welcome back.

Great list, I am glad to see you are keeping your sense of humour, I am sure you will do it this time, it doesn’t matter how many times it takes you will always be welcome.

Take care and please keep us posted

Good luck and all the best.

[alwayslean]

That wagon did not get far.

I need to stop getting stoned. Or more accurately, I do not need to get stoned, there is no necessity to. All reasons that I create are bullshit. Tomorrow, and at many other points in the future, I will concoct a reason to roll a joint, it may be stress, boredom, depression, happiness, success, failure, companions, solitude.....for some reason i will feel logically compelled to make a doobie. Even though I know full well that I could equally have given the exact opposite emotion or situation as a convincing argument to twist up a reefer.

It definitely seems that the part of my brain dealing with verbalizing thoughts has betrayed me. The me that sits here now typing this and making the decision will be vetoed by a bullshit argument. Its entirely psychological for me I really don't get the physical withdrawal others here suffer. I just end up convincing myself that I actually want to smoke.

Will this time be different? or will I roll as soon as I wake up tomorrow?.

[abiogenesis]

Hi alwayslean,

Actually this "psychological" thing, -which is based on one's physical neurology- is the thing which needs the most attention. People mostly think that it's the severity of the withdrawals that make the quitting hard, but it's not in my opinion. If it were, relapse rates should have decreased drastically after a few weeks, but that's not the case in fact. As you experience, the problem lies on the fact that our thought process is corrupted by the addiction itself. By the time, we gain control over it but we should put a real effort on it to recode our brains. Which starts with becoming aware of the real problem in my opinion. It's not an ordinary psyhological thing that you experience, it's based on the profound changes in your neurology caused by the prolonged use of the weed. So, you shouldn't see the part that betrays you as you; it's a real literal neurological disorder and your fight is against this. And as long as you're not aware of this, the rationalizations will never go away. Reasons and mechanism behind these are very well studied by the scientists. I don't want to repeat myself 100th time about the same thing all over again, therefore I strongly suggest you go through the thread "useful websites", and please spend some real time on the documents and information on addiction. I believe that we should start to work by changing our perspectives and putting full commitment on it. Addiction is something which is a very very powerful thing for most people, and an ordinary effort against such a powerful thing can never succeed.

It's really something very sorry for all of us, one way or in another our lives started to turn around this the drug problem, but if we don't save ourselves, our whole lives can last in this circle. So, the problem is very very serious, I don't wanna discourage people, but simply encouraging them has no use in my opinion. You can encourage a person as much as you want, who is standing against an army, but without the necessary equipment, he can never go through the battle field and reach the piecefull lands behind. He should be aware of all the possible weapons of the army and he should develop all the defense mechanism against it. This doesn't happen very easily, it can take many attempts before we don't get shot in the field, but if we are improving our defense mechanism with each failure then we can succeed at the end. Otherwise, walking through the same field unguarded, will always give the same result.

I also suggest you to go through the following thread and the article there;

http://www.forummatters.com/forums/s...-the-challenge!

All the best and take care,

[HomeGrown]

alwayslean,

Alwayslean I'm glad you haven't given up. I sounds like you are having a very tough go at it.

I have found in my own personal experience that when I try to give something up I spend all my time focused on the thing that is now missing in my life.

I learned pretty quickly that I couldn't quit alcohol or cigs just for the sake of quitting.

I needed a reason to stay sober. For alcohol it was actually easy. I wasn't sleeping right any longer so I cut back on drinking to the point of being able to sleep. I didn't quit drinking, I started sleeping better.

Do the same with marijuana. Find something that you want to do, but can't because of your marijuana habit. Then start doing that thing. Immerse yourself in it. Don't even concern yourself with quitting.

For example suppose you always wanted to learn King-fu (example). There is little likelihood that you would get very far if you were alway's high. If you immerse yourself in Kung-fu you may very well find that it becomes more important that marijuana. You may find that you just naturally cut down and or quit all together while you focus on the new task...learning Kung-fu.

I know plenty of others here will disagree with me, but its important to realize that marijauana is actually not the deamon....plenty of people use it responsibly. the deamon is our over exaggerated habit to it. That same mentality that makes us addicts though is also the same mentality that will allow you to completely immerse yourself into something new.

Hey you've tried other way's what do you have to loose?

[Cannabis Rehab Admin]

I know this may sound super cheesy but I find that helping others gives me more of a buzz now than any drug I ever did, sorry to go all bono on you although personally I prefer the anonymous approach, I can’t think of anything worse than been famous god knows why so many people these days crave it, sh*t I am digressing again aren’t I, but anyway it really has gave more meaning to my life than anything else I have ever done and believe me I have done my fair share of naughty things, but none of the negative shit comes close to the feeling you get from doing the positive.

[alwayslean]

This is alwayslean I can't log in for some reason

Update: after making the above post I got stoned the next morning. Eventually I quit, I was clean for three days until today, and I just got stoned again. I'm not sure what will happen for the rest of the week, However I can pretty much
guarantee I won't smoke for the next 3 weeks because I'm going on a trip. So things are looking fairly good....

Its completely true about doing things where I can't get stoned. Working for example. However at some point I always end up at home alone late at night, where both work and Kung Fu are out of the question, I might go with creative writing. Good deeds also sound like a good idea. BoFo can we get some kind of subforum for people to discuss the wonderful proactive things we're doing whilst sober without going all off topic? Otherwise it's all negativity and CannabisRehab.org feels like a depressing place to virtually hang out.

To be continued...

[Cannabis Rehab Admin]

Hi alwayslean

Sorry for my late reply I meant to reply when I first read you last post but got side tracked and forgot, I just realised I forgot just now while checking your thread, the old memories still a bit sh*t I am afraid. Sorry to hear you have been struggling to stay on the wagon of late, that trip sound like a pretty good idea I look forward to hearing how you got on when you are back.

Activates that don’t complement getting stoned can be the key, working and sport are great for this. I could set up a sub rehab group dedicated to these kind of things, the only thing is it might not have much of a theme other than it been for people who are doing them to help them stay of the pot which is kind of a theme I guess but it would be pretty general, the last thing I would want is people to get down because they are focusing on their addiction too much, perhaps a better thing to do might be for people to create a separate thread if they feel they want one dedicated to what it is that keeps them on the wagon or maybe for them to incorporate it into their own personal thread which deals with all the elements involved in their journey to get clean, perhaps that would help to inject more positivity into this particular forum, although I think there’s already a fair amount of that too it’s just this issue can be a dramatic experience in which we all share the downs as well as the ups, that’s kind of the nature of the support group beast I guess, we have to be there for the bad times as well as the good, it is better when people start their own threads as it has the personalization of a blog combined with the interactivity of a forum, perhaps we should try to encourage this a bit more, I might do a sticky about it, the way I see it is if it’s something that is helping you stay clean then I don’t really consider that to be off topic, in fact as discussed in this thread it’s one of the most important things of all that is a part of this journey, so I think the best thing is probably for anyone who wants to go into greater detail of their personal journey and what it is that keeps them clean, I think it is probably best if they create their own thread which we will try to keep dedicated mainly to them.

Anyway I hope you are enjoying yourself at present I am sure we will hear from you when you get back.

Take care, all the best and speak soon.

[alwayslean]

I can'y believe this thread is still here!

Well 4 years on I still have not quit. The reason I came back here was I was supposed to quit today. Last week I only smoked a few tiny joints and was generally sober. Yesterday I was totally out of weed and intending to stay that way. Unfortunately last night I had the weirdest dreams I can remember. It freaked me out so much I convinced myself I needed some weed and went out scoring this afternoon.

What the hell am I doing with my life? Why do I keep tricking myself into consuming this herb? Whats it all about? I know it's not really that hard for me. I quit for two weeks last month while staying with my parents, but as soon as I got home I smoked again. It's mental.
Now I'm in the weird situation of wanting to quit but having a load of weed, which it would be stupid to throw out.