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

Present, But Not Really There

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.

Why I Quit, and the First Two Weeks

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.

Week Four: I Just Stayed With It

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

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.

What the Files Showed

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 Cost Nobody Sees

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.

If you want to get through the restless first weeks with a plan, our Cannabis Detox Program guides you through all three phases, Release, Resilience and Clarity.