My usual relationship with pot is this: I quit for some days or weeks after I finish a bag. The initial clear-headedness is welcome, but then I suffer from pity memories that come up. Small injustices, embarrassing moments, moderate angst about the future, wonders of why I don’t live a normal life, doubts and such. My mood deteriorates by the day and then I find myself cranky and wanting to get away from my life situation.

Then I go buy some pot and I have great sense of meaning, I “remember” why I’m doing what I’m doing, and I make peace with my memories, and my mood brightens and my quality of inner experience is sharply improved. Smoking after a break, I often can’t deny that it is psychological medicine for me.

But, as pot is not sold in small quantities, I want more of my medicine and I indulge a bit too much. Things become hazy, the drive to move forward is replaced by complacency, and then I get a vague sense that I am narrowing my consciousness, that I am avoiding facing reality, that the conclusions that I reach while stoned are simply states that don’t carry on to the sober me.

Some days ago I was watching a video of Daniel Schmachtenberger and he mentioned the importance of sleep in mood. He said that sleep was the number one thing to address in mood disorders, and mentioned a lot of important things happen during sleep: memory consolidation, clearing of toxins in the brain, etc. He highlighted the importance of good sleeping conditions: a dark, quiet room at the proper temperature; and I saw that I didn’t meet a couple of these conditions.

There is a very bright light from a street light lamp which is quite far away, but it is bright enough to bother me. My room is often populated with mosquitoes, which are a pest in my neighborhood because of the river. But since I’ve lived here in my youth, I know how to sleep so that they cause the least disruption to my sleep at the cost of probably breathing too much CO2.

I addressed my sleeping conditions by putting a curtain on my window, and I kill the mosquitoes before going to bed, and this time I feel like my mood is not deteriorating and my life narrative is in good shape. It is strange how we become used to the most crippling conditions and then we medicate in order to counter these conditions. If my theory proves correct, the reason why pot can have such an effect on my mood is—at least partially–due to the fact that it allows me to sleep better under non-ideal conditions.

Furthermore, I seem to ascribe exotic reasons to my perceived shortcomings when I haven’t addressed the fundamentals. I see this clearly in my sister too, and it is obvious to me, but not to her. When I point it out she protests, it can’t be that simple. But the reason I notice this is because I have this phenomena in my own shadow.

Let us get the basics right, and then everything will fall into place.