3 Steps to Help You Stop Being Addicted to Marijuana

Are you addicted to marijuana? You probably didn’t think so until you decided or were told you had to quit but weren’t very successful at stopping your pot smoking habit on your own. You need help! Being addicted to marijuana is not only illegal because it is a drug but that it also has negative effects on your social and family life. Fortunately, there are many programs and tips that are available to you if you are serious about kicking your weed addiction.

Mental Preparation

The first thing you need to do is prepare yourself mentally for this journey. How your prepare yourself mentally is going to be one of determining factors of successfully you can stop being addicted to marijuana.

You are going to have to mentally prepare for all of the mental and physical signs an symptoms you will have to deal with while trying to quit. You are going to encounter symptoms of withdrawal that you are going to have to deal with. These could be minor or strong depending on how strong your addiction to marijuana is.

You are also going to have to deal with cravings. You need to mental prepare for situations and how you are going to handle any cravings that will arise from your quitting. What are you going to replace these cravings with? Are you going to exercise, eat, sew, read, or anything that keeps your mind off of the cravings. Having yourself mentally prepared to deal with all of the emotional effects of quitting is going to make you just that much more successful when trying to quit.

Make a “Stop Smoking Plan”

Isn’t there a famous quote, “Without a plan you cannot succeed”? This is true if you are trying to stop being addicted to marijuana. You will need a plan. You need to sit down and plan everything out. Make a list of things that you know you need to do and of things you know are going to happen. Then use this list to come up with ideas and strategies for handling these different things or situations on your list. It is important for you to know how you are going to handle certain things when they arise or you might slip and fall back into some unhealthy habits. You plan is what is going to lead you to success in your fight against your battle with weed.

Social Influences

The number one reason many people fail at try to quit smoking pot is they do not have the support from their friends. The reason behind this is many of their friends are users also, so they try to influence them to not quit and keep smoking weed. This is one of the toughest areas to correct when trying to stop being addicted to marijuana. The reason is you risk losing your current friend and family. The only way to stop smoking pot and clean yourself up is to surround yourself with people who support you and do not use the drug. You might have to make very difficult decisions on avoiding your friends and family members that smoking or you might even have to make an even more difficult decision of complete cutting off contact with them until the clean themselves up so you don’t relapse back into smoking pot again.

Being Addicted to Marijuana Can Ruin Your Marriage

Does your spouse use pot? If they do, do you know what kind of effect that being addicted to marijuana is going to have on your marriage? I am sure there have been times that the two of you have argued about smoking pot. An addiction of any kind can put tremendous amounts of stress on a marriage. Many marriages where one of or both of the partners involved use drugs are going to fail. Why do they fail? They fail because there is going to be a lack or trust, communication, and respect all three things that are vital to a successful marriage.

If you or your spouse are addicted to marijuana, there us going to be a lot of distrust in the relationship. The is especially true if only one person is using weed. To many time you see people lying about their habit to there spouse. They might tell them they are quitting or haven’t spent any money pot for a while. When your spouse finds out the truth and that you have been lying, this lack of trust growths. It will continue to grow until they can no longer believe a word that comes out of your mouth. Many problems with trust revolve around money with the addiction. Smoking weed is an expensive habit and when you start spending more money than you have and miss work to smoke weed, you are going to lie to your spouse about this.

Just like having a lack of trust, being addicted to marijuana also creates communication problems. If you are smoking pot, you will have a had time communicating thing to your partner while you are using. The continued use of weed is going to affect you short term memory. While you are using, you might have to tell your spouse something important but you can’t remember or because you are so high that you don’t even care. Things will start being forgotten like picking up the kids, paying the bills, going to work, etc. This is a recipe for destruction.

The final reason being addicted to marijuana can ruin you marriage is the lack of respect for your spouse. This is the most important thing in any marriage. Mutual respect for one and other. How are you supposed to show your spouse respect if you are addicted to marijuana and you know they do not like that. It is a giant slap in the face. Not many marriage are going to last long if they are missing respect. If you respected your spouse, you would do whatever it took to kick your addiction to smoking weed because you know it would make your spouse happy and show them that you respect them.

As you can see, anyone who is addicted to marijuana is going to have a very negative effect on their marriage. This can be devastating to not only your marriage but to your children as well. Smoking pot is going to ruin your marriage eventually. It is only a matter of time. If you truly love your spouse and your children then you need to find a way to quit smoking weed so this doesn’t happen to you! Truly, is it worth the risk?

Can You Get Addicted to Marijuana?

As far as real drug addictions go, does marijuana really qualify as being a true addiction? Some people debate the idea that it could be a real addiction because there are generally no physical consequences when stopping the use of the drug. But on the other hand, a lot of people seem to depend heavily on smoking weed every single day of their lives and in this respect it seems like the drug might very well be more addictive then we once thought.

So what is the real truth here? Is it addictive? Or do people just fall into the patterns and the lifestyle naturally and want to keep getting high? Where do we draw the line and say that this behavior is real addiction?

Let’s think for a second about what real addiction is. We can look at the medical definition, the definition in the dictionary, what behaviorists believe addiction is, and so on. For the purposes of our discussion, we are going to define addiction as this: when someone has lost the power of choice regarding their behavior. That is real addiction and almost no one would argue that someone in this state of being is not addicted. If they have truly lost the power to decide whether to take or leave a drug, then that is real addiction.

Does this happen with marijuana use? Yes it does. Most people who try marijuana get high a few times and then move on with their lives. The same would go for thousands of young people who try alcohol or other drugs for the first time in their life. It is just another experience for them and they move on and don’t really think much of it.

But for a small percentage of people out there, they try a drug such as marijuana and they are hooked. They are off to the races. The drug lights up their life and they get excited and passionate about it. They obsess over it and want to do it all the time. This is addiction. What typically happens next is that the person will start to slowly restructure their life so that they are living a lifestyle that involves heavy smoking of marijuana. In other words, they drift away from friends who do not smoke weed and start making new friends who do use marijuana all the time. They start to focus and plan their activities around smoking weed and planning and scheming for ways to buy and get more of it. This is the obsessive element that accompanies any addiction. It happens with marijuana and this is just more evidence that it is an addictive drug.

Now of course, there are some who content that weed is not really addictive because there are almost no physical side effects when you stop using it suddenly. This is actually not true in heavy smokers and some people do experience signs of a withdrawal that include sluggishness and fatigue. But also, it is obvious to me that smoking weed is very addictive mentally and many people use it on a daily basis in order to escape their reality. Another way to say it is if you are relying on marijuana use on a regular basis in order to make it through your day, then that is basically using the chemical instead of coping with real life. This is an immature way to live and if you cannot walk away from such a pattern very easily then you are probably addicted to the drug.