What to Do If You Get Lost

Everyone has their own story about the strange experience of using cannabis. In my case, there is too much marijuana cake. Someone told me to eat only half, and like a rookie idiot, I put it all in my mouth. It went off after about an hour, or so I figured it, when I was running through Brooklyn park, thinking that I was being chased by evil fairies. Then I went home, thought about calling 911, instead got my roommate to look after me, spilled water on my bed and dreamed all night that I was on the boat. In the morning I was fine.

Weed is great in the right doses, but too much can exacerbate your anxiety, make you feel paranoid, and completely scare you. The good news is, it’s mostly in your head: no one has ever died from a cannabis overdose, which is medically impossible. As the National Cancer Institute points out : “Since cannabinoid receptors, unlike opioid receptors, are not located in the regions of the brain stem that control respiration, fatal overdoses of cannabis and cannabinoids do not occur.” Cannabis won’t permanently damage your liver, kidneys, or even brain, and while taking too much can temporarily raise your heart rate, the most it can do to you is to make you nervous.

For more tips when you’re too high, watch the video below:

That being said, your head can be a scary place. And the bad news is that once THC enters your system, there is little you can do other than get over it, which is often uncomfortable. So what if you accidentally smoke or swallow too much? And how can you keep yourself from making the same mistake in the future? Here are some tips.

Preparation is the best policy

Obviously, the best way to deal with overgrowth is to not get there at all. For example, if you have low tolerance levels or are new to edible products, try a small dose (Leafly recommends 10 mg, although if you are truly a beginner, you probably want to swallow even less, something closer to 5 mg. Or 2 , 5 mg). If you don’t know how much herb is in what you are eating, either skip the edible or take a small bite (half a gummy bear, a quarter of a cake, half a popcake, etc.) and wait an hour or two before taking more if you think that this is not enough. Don’t be Maureen Dowd .

It’s also a good idea to create a safe and comfortable place for yourself before you get high. Be with people you like and trust, and perhaps avoid large crowds if you think they will stress you out. “If you are stimulated or in an active environment, if you tend to be paranoid or anxious, those feelings will worsen,” says Lifehacker Dr. James Lathrop, a nurse practitioner who owns a marijuana store in Seattle. … He suggests making sure you have a quiet place to rest in case the high gets too high for you. “The best thing to do if it gets too intense is to lie down and hopefully lie down in a familiar situation,” he says. “If you are going to take large doses of marijuana, do not plan to be in the club, in the cinema or on the street.”

And the best thing to have on hand before experimenting with edibles is cannabidiol or CBD. “The best remedy for the unpleasant side effects of too much THC is CBD,” Dr. Joe Cohen, a holist cannabis physician who runs Holos Health in Denver, Colorado, tells us in an email. Of course, everyone reacts differently to CBD, so as Leafly points out, this is not the right cure for your problems with too much weed.

Lathrop agrees. “If you were planning on taking a high dose of THC, you will have a more pleasant experience with CBD,” he says. “This CBD will calm this anxiety and paranoia a bit.”

Of course, if you’ve eaten a whole marijuana cake, you don’t have CBD and suddenly your heart rate goes up and you can’t feel your face, all of the tips above fall out of the window. In this case…

Do not worry

The most important thing to remember when you’re too stoned – issomething thatyou do. Will. No. Die. “People think they’re going to die, and there are cases documented on the Internet where people think they’re dead, call 911 and say, ‘I’m dead,” says Lathrop. But this is not the case. “Nobody has died from a marijuana overdose. You won’t be the first, ”he says.

Sometimes people get particular stress right before reaching the peak because they don’t know how much they have swallowed or how high they are going to eventually climb. But even if you have a real blast of THC making its way through your bloodstream, it will find its way out, usually within 24 hours. You may feel that you will never be normal again, as if you screwed something up in your unique body chemistry, and now you will have to spend the rest of your time on Earth with a permanently broken mind, but you will not. …

“In fact, it has happened to a million people a million times. “This is not the end of the world,” Todd Statzer, director of integrated pest management at Colorado – based Urban-Gro , tells us. “It won’t hurt you physically. It can make you feel paranoid, but if you sit back and relax, it will go away in a couple of hours. “

Don’t google: “Help, I’m too pumped up”

While there is a good chance you have made it to this article, and although I am a calm voice of reason, the Internet is full of fearsome forums with violent stories about people getting so hot they tried to rip out their eyes. out. These stories are useless and won’t make you feel better in the moment, although you’ll love laughing at them later when you’re sober.

Ask your friends to tell you about it, but don’t listen to them if they cheer you on.

When the voice in your head is too high to tell you to relax, it is helpful to ask a friend or two to confirm that you will be okay in the near future. But if the people you are reaching out to are the type of people who find it funny to be rude to you, ignore them. “I’ve noticed that many times [nervous] it’s peer pressure, like, ‘Oh, you’re in big trouble right now,’” says Statzer. “Others need to be reminded to let him float on the wave.”

Try to reduce the high

While CBD oil can be an effective home remedy for high highs, there are other methods you can try to get you back to earth a little faster. “For some reason, showering will help lessen the effect,” says Statzer. “Another thing you can do is take a couple of teaspoons of sugar and put it in an 8 ounce glass of water. Sugar actually helps counteract THC. ”

Statzer also thinks eating a little is good. “When you eat anything, especially edible, it will go through your liver and kidneys, and then it helps to process that THC through your system,” he says.

Some other suggestions received from friends and strangers on the Internet include 1) exercise, 2) drinking plenty of water, and 3) sniffing black pepper, whose properties bind to the same receptors in your brain as cannabis and when ingested / inhalation. together can create a calming effect.

Distracted

From my own experience, I’ve found that the more time I spend alone with my thoughts of the weed in my brain, the more anxious I become. This seems to be a fairly common occurrence, and if you, too, find your own stoned head too tense, it mightbe a good idea tofind a distraction to guide you through the worst of the heights . “It’s about relaxing yourself by playing music or something that you find soothing or completely engrossing in your mind,” says Statzer. “It will take a while for your system to go through.”

What scares you may not be the same thing that calms me down, but I find it very comforting to watch gentle comedies such as Developmental Delay and Family Guy , especially if I’ve seen these episodes several times and won’t get nervous. for the final. My friend and I once watched almost an entire season of Kid Nation , a rather flawed 2007 CBS reality show that threw a bunch of kids in a ghost town in New Mexico and forced them to create a resilient society. We were very pleased.

Go to bed

When all else fails, the best way to get past the high high is to sleep. “The best thing to do, and what people need to be prepared for, is to go to bed,” says Lathrop. “Turn off the light, maybe put on some nice music and go to bed.” Sure, so it’s best to grab edibles or heavy smokers in a location where your bed is easy to reach, but in fact, any sofa, bed, or hard wood floor will do. “You really want to sleep well,” says Lathrop. Then, when you wake up, you will be sweet and soft and ready to screw things up again.

This story was originally published in 2018 and has been updated with new links and a new headline photo on October 21, 2020.