Guide

How to Tell if Your Habit is Unhealthy

This is a guide written for stoners, but it applies to a lot of habits.

Knowing your limits is important any time you let something have access to your pleasure centers, from smoking to gaming to joyriding the micro-g waves in the Kupier Belt. Or whatever you kids are into these days.


Compare your habit and its impacts on your hobbies and activities. Start with just one hobby. You could use anything, a task or a chore or whatever, but we'll use biking.


Assume you are sober, which of these thoughts is most likely?

  • "I want to go biking." - This is healthy, obviously.
  • "It would be fun to get high before biking" - This is still pretty healthy.
  • "I won't go biking without getting high first" - This is a little bit less healthy, but still OK. A person who uses cannabis for medical relief might be at this point pretty often. But so could someone looking for any excuse to get high, which isn't healthy.
  • "I'll go get high and see if I still feel like biking" - Here your need to get high has almost fully replaced your hobby of biking, which isn't healthy.
  • "I used to like to bike, but now I'd rather just get high" - Unless you've become too frail to bike, this is very unhealthy. You should really consider taking a break and checking in on sober life for a bit.


Now, there's some nuance to it. Hobbies change on their own, you don't need to jump to blame weed for every change in your behavior. But if you look close at the motivating factors of your decisions, you can usually see if weed is playing a part.


There are lots of good people who live good lives stoned most of the time.

You can live a good life that way. But there are lots of people who make getting stoned their whole life, and they aren't particularly interesting or fun people to be around.


The last thing I want to point out is that daily users have high tolerance. Even if you use cannabis regularly, it's good to take a break from time to time to bring that tolerance down and enjoy a full-bodied high.

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