I Thought Weed Helped My Anxiety. It Was Causing It.

I have two kids under five. My evenings, by the time they’re both asleep, look like the aftermath of something. Toys everywhere. A sink full of cups. My brain still running at the speed it goes all day, processing everything I didn’t have time to process while it was actually happening.

Weed was what I did to land. A few hits after bedtime, and the noise in my head would settle. I could sit on the couch and watch something without my thoughts pulling me in seven directions. I genuinely believed I needed it to relax. I’d built a whole story around it: I have anxiety, and weed helps my anxiety, and so this is basically medicating myself.

I believed that story for about three years.

The thing I didn’t want to look at was this: I was anxious all day. Not panic-attack anxious. Just a low hum of dread that was always running in the background. I blamed it on the kids, on work, on the state of everything. I had good reasons. But I also noticed that by about four in the afternoon, the hum got louder. And by six, when the kids were hardest to manage and dinner was still not made and everything felt like it was vibrating, I was really not okay.

Then I’d get them to sleep and smoke, and the hum would quiet, and I’d think: see, this is what I need.

What I didn’t understand was that the hum itself was partly withdrawal. My brain, by late afternoon, was already in a mild version of the state it goes into when it’s not getting what it expects. The anxiety I was treating in the evening was at least partly caused by the weed I’d had the night before. I was managing a problem I was creating.

I figured this out not from reading about it, but from an accident. I ran out one week and couldn’t get more for five days. I was miserable for the first three — irritable, restless, sleeping badly. But on day four, something unexpected happened. The afternoon hum was quieter. Not gone. But quieter. I got through pickup and dinner and bath time without that feeling of being about to come apart.

I told my husband what I’d noticed. He looked at me like I’d said something obvious. “I’ve thought that for a year,” he said. He hadn’t said anything because I’d gotten defensive before when it came up.

He was right. I had been defensive. Because as long as the weed was medicating anxiety, it was justified. If it was causing the anxiety, the whole story collapsed.

Quitting properly took me about six weeks to commit to. Not because I was physically dependent in a dramatic way, but because of the evenings. Those first few weeks without it, the landing didn’t happen on its own. I sat on the couch and my brain kept running and I just had to let it run. I’d drink tea. I’d read. I’d go to bed earlier than I wanted to.

Around week three, the landing started happening without the weed. Slower, but it happened. My brain, given enough time without the chemical shortcut, seemed to remember how to do it itself.

The anxiety is still there. I’m not pretending the weed was the whole cause. I have two under-fives and a job and I live in the world — there are real reasons to be anxious. But the hum is different now. It doesn’t build through the afternoon the same way. I get through dinner without feeling like everything is about to break.

What bothers me most, looking back, is how clean the logic felt at the time. Anxiety: yes. Weed: reduces anxiety. Therefore: weed helps anxiety. It was completely circular and I couldn’t see it because I was inside the circle.

My youngest is eighteen months old. She’ll never know me the way I was for her first year. That’s something I’m still making peace with.

But my older one, who is four and notices everything — she told me last week that I’m more fun now. She said it the way kids say things, just as a fact, while she was drawing something. I didn’t make a thing of it. I just said thanks.

If you want to understand what was actually happening in my body during that time, this breakdown of weed and anxiety explains it better than I could.