How cannabis can be used as a tool for personal development

This article originally appeared on Cannabis.net and was republished with permission.

Most people are looking for ways to improve themselves. They go to the gym, read books, watch their diet – all with the aim of advancing their personal development.

For many years cannabis was viewed as detrimental to personal development as the establishment claimed it was doing “slow” or “lazy” or “unmotivated”. While cannabis can produce these effects in some people, many others have discovered that marijuana, when used properly, can be a wonderful tool for self development.

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In this article, we’re going to take a closer look at the different ways you can use cannabis to accelerate your personal development. Please note that the following are just suggestions on how to use everyone’s favorite plant to outdo yourself.

Dealing with stress

Stress is not bad, but worse stress is! What is the difference between good stress and bad stress? From Summa Health:

Good stress is short-term, inspires and motivates, bundles your energy and increases performance. However, bad stress is the kind that makes you tired, nervous, and harmful to your health. Bad stress or stress can lead to anxiety, confusion, poor concentration and decreased performance.

In other words, managing stress properly is a key aspect of personal development. If stress is gripping your mind, whether you have an upcoming deadline, paying bills, or even suffering from relationship stress, cannabis can give you a moment of calm to reevaluate your relationship with stress on your own.

Many people use cannabis to relax at the end of their days. In this way you can disconnect from the day’s activities and have space to relax. However, it is important to note that smoking would be detrimental to your personal development at any sign of stress.

You want to weaponize stress, use it to move you forward, and let go of it when it starts to stifle your progress. There is a delicate balance between the two, but with enough practice you will learn to deal with stress and not let it work against you.

EXPERT TIP: Don’t smoke cannabis at the first sign of stress; stay stressed for as long as possible. Become aware of this and find out how you can naturally transform it into “positive stress”. When the stress gets too much, light a joint. If it’s late at night, any strain that induces a body high is preferable, and you should be working with more cerebral stress throughout the day.

Find positivity in negative situations (change self-talk)

Being positive doesn’t mean ignoring the negative. On the contrary, people who want to actively improve are constantly looking for their shortcomings to see how they can improve their performance. However, the difference between looking at your inadequacies and dropping the negativity depends on your attitude.

Negativity is a loop. When you start drawing your attention to a “negative thought or emotion” and paying your attention to it, you tend to reshape your brain just to look for negative things. It is, as Robert Anton Wilson said: “What the thinker thinks, the examiner proves!”

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In other words, your mind is prepared to look for supporting evidence for any premise you have made. When it comes to “negativity,” the mind will find things to prove that position. If you make yourself a victim, make yourself smaller than the situation, insult yourself for your shortcomings, etc., then cannabis can be used as a powerful disruptor.

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It’s difficult to just “stop being negative”, so a little euphoria can go a long way. Cannabis gives you some “altered” moments that allow you to break your mental cycles.

Again, it is important to use cannabis sparingly. Some people rely on cannabis to break negative mental cycles, but in the area of ​​personal development you will always want to use tactics that are derived from internal mechanisms. For example, if you focus on your breath, you can also create enough mental space to switch your inner gears of perception.

In the event that you are stuck in a negative feedback loop, smoking some cannabis can give you a quick break from the mental cycle.

Dreaming and being

In the world of personal development, it is incredibly important to establish the “you of the future”. You need to have a goal to work towards. This means that you need to use your creative powers to envision a future in which you will have achieved all of your goals.

Who are you then? What are your habits What is your emotional state like? What do you do daily All of these questions (and more) form a picture in your head of what “success” looks like. However, some people either find it difficult to use their imagination on this action or they are too exposed to their current situation that it becomes difficult to even imagine a better future.

RELATED: Smoking Marijuana Can Increase Entrepreneurship

Fortunately, cannabis can help here too. If most cannabis users can agree on one thing, it is that cannabis allows your mind to wander into unknown realms of the imagination. You start to think differently and you can use this to your advantage.

If you are having a hard time envisioning a future in which you “kill right away!” Then you can use cannabis to fill that void. Just light up and smoke as much as you need to get good and high.

Make sure to let go of all restrictions and then just start using pen and paper to write the future that you would be very happy with. The future, which you call a “baller”.

If you’ve done this, read it again when you are sober. See which parts are really addressing you, then try to introduce yourself for that person. Call this future self into your present and begin to act as “they” would do things.

It’s like Einstein said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same mindset that we used when we created them.” In other words, your problems cannot be solved by the way you are now or Thinking in the past, but by the way your future completed self engages with it.

Cannabis can help you call on that future self to begin dealing with the problems you are facing in the present.

Bottom line

There are many more ways we can use cannabis to improve our self development. The three techniques discussed above can definitely help you achieve higher states of performance.