Quitting Weed: I Had No Idea It Was Ruining My Work

I used to have a theory that I did my best work slightly stoned. Not blasted, just enough to loosen things up. I designed logos and brand identities, and the work I was proudest of, I was convinced, happened when I was in that state. It took me a long while after quitting to look back at the files and realize that was almost completely wrong.

My name is Tom. I’m 29, I work as a freelance graphic designer, and I smoked every day for about four years. Not all day, mostly evenings, but also before client calls when I was anxious, and sometimes in the afternoon when a project wasn’t clicking.

The creativity thing was my justification. Designers talk about it. You see interviews with musicians and artists who credit the plant. I genuinely believed it was part of my process.

What I didn’t see was the pattern underneath. I’d start a project, get a few loose ideas flowing, then spend the next three hours going in circles. The ideas felt good. The execution was often a mess. I’d send work to clients that I’d been excited about the night before and then cringe slightly when I looked at it sober the next morning. I told myself that was just normal imposter syndrome.

Looking back at actual files, I can see it differently now. Concepts that should have taken a day took three. Revisions piled up on projects where I should have landed it faster. I billed by the hour for client work, which meant I wasn’t losing money directly, but I was losing time I could have used for better things. I was slower than I thought I was, and I had no idea.

The part that bothers me most is the client relationships. I was present in meetings physically, but I wasn’t always tracking properly. I’d miss small things that were said. I’d need to re-read email threads I’d already read because I couldn’t recall what I’d agreed to. I thought I was just bad at admin. I wasn’t. I was just not fully there.

I quit because of something unrelated to work. I’d had a rough patch personally and decided to clear my head. I expected withdrawal to be brutal on my focus. It was, for maybe two weeks. Restless, distracted, couldn’t settle into work at all. I powered through slower projects and gave myself that time.

Then something shifted. Not dramatically. Nobody writes songs about it. But around week four, I sat down to work on a brand identity project and I just stayed with it. I followed a thread through from brief to concept to execution without bouncing around. I finished a first draft in one sitting. I hadn’t done that in years.

The creativity question is the thing I get asked most when I tell people I quit. Was it hard to be creative without it? Honestly, the opposite. The ideas I have now are less numerous in that first half hour, but I can actually do something with them. The divergent thinking stuff, the flood of associations, that still happens. I just don’t disappear into it for three hours anymore.

I looked back at some client projects from my last year of smoking versus my first year after. The difference isn’t dramatic in terms of the quality of the visual work. But the revision count is different. The turnaround is different. I’m producing the same level of work in less time, which as a freelancer is the whole game.

There’s also something about morning hours that I hadn’t had access to in years. I was never a morning person while I was smoking. My brain was foggy until early afternoon. I’d have coffee, wait it out, eventually get into something. Now I’m often doing my best work before 10am. I don’t know how to explain what I was leaving on the table every morning for four years, but it was a lot.

The thing I tell people now is that the cost of daily weed isn’t always obvious. It’s not dramatic. Nobody fired me. I didn’t have a breakdown. I just quietly underperformed for years while telling myself a story about creativity. That’s the part that’s hardest to see from the inside. For more context, read about the benefits of quitting weed.