Want better grades in college, Smoke Weed!

For decades we’ve been told that stoners are lazy, unproductive and don’t contribute much to society. The scientific term for “stone laziness” was “amotivation syndrome.” The concerns of this apparent cannabis-induced laziness were that students would underperform in school, the rate of dropouts would increase, and of course, the lack of productivity in the job market.

Now that recreational cannabis has been legal in places like Colorado and Washington for a decade, we can see that none of the “fears” in society have manifested themselves. Coloradans are still productive, they’re still graduating, and in fact it seems their teenage use has actually declined compared to non-legal states.

A new study goes even further by showing that college students who smoke marijuana actually showed a higher tendency to be motivated in school than those who didn’t use it.

Although the study is not exceptionally large, consisting of fewer than fifty people, the study attempted to find various metrics to measure performance. As the study notes, “Previous studies on this topic have ‘used different methods and have not controlled for important confounding variables,'” the researchers wrote. This new study attempted to adjust for these variables and found that “Cannabis days in recent months and symptoms of cannabis use disorder predicted the likelihood of selecting a high-effort study.” SOURCE: Marijuana moment

In other words, the study found that those who smoke weed want to challenge themselves more than those who don’t.

“The results provide preliminary evidence suggesting that college students who use cannabis are more likely to make an effort to receive a reward, even after controlling for the amount of the reward and the likelihood of receiving the reward,” they wrote . “Therefore, these results do not support the amotivational syndrome hypothesis.”

“Contrary to the amotivational syndrome hypothesis, college students who used more cannabis were more likely to choose the high-effort option, regardless of reward size, likelihood, and expected value of the overall reward. Although there was no significant difference between the cannabis use groups, there was a moderate-sized effect that consistently supports an association between cannabis use and greater effort decisions.”

This aligns with other studies that have shown that people who smoke cannabis tend to be more active, have a lower BMI, and those who use cannabis before and after exercise recover faster than those who don’t.

Again, the scope of the study doesn’t allow us to make broad sweeps and claims like “cannabis use causes you to make higher effort decisions,” which just isn’t 100% true at this time. Anyone reading this with any experience of cannabis absolutely knows that smoking too much weed can get “lazy”, but that’s not the norm.

I’ve been smoking weed for over twenty years and often smoke before I have a large amount of work to do. Cannabis helps me (sometimes) stay focused depending on the work I’m doing. If I read through studies and try to decipher the word pack used in the newspapers, I probably wouldn’t smoke weed.

However, when I need to do research, create websites or produce music, cannabis becomes an important tool to increase my motivation. From a stoner’s point of view, the increase or decrease in motivation is therefore situational.

Maybe stoners aren’t demotivated – just not interested…

One theory that’s always stuck with me is that stoners aren’t necessarily lazy – they’re just aware that any particular activity that’s asked of them just doesn’t interest them. For example, “When I smoke weed, I just don’t do chores…”

While this might be true for some, do you think it’s the weed that makes you dislike chores, or the fact that you dislike chores to begin with? Maybe weed gives you more freedom to just say fuck it and do something that’s more comfortable. Of course, the ability to do what you don’t want to do is a wonderful tool in the belt of self-development—but as you grow, so do priorities, and in return doing things you don’t necessarily like doing becomes ” something you do”.

For example, you may not like doing chores, but over time, the clutter in your home will become a bigger pain point than “not getting chores done” in the first place. With two opposing ideas, you now have to choose the least painful of the two – and so you end up doing the tasks you didn’t like because by doing so you create a situation that ends up being worse for you.

Of course these are basic examples and the fact is that motivation is just one perspective. Whether you smoke weed or not, finding the motivation to do things you don’t want to do can be difficult. Perhaps smoking weed can make you choose the “lesser of two evils” more, but even in this situation, once perspective has shifted enough, motivation will follow.

What can we conclude from this?

First, we can conclude that “the science” is not necessarily fixed. In the 1990s and 1980s, it was “accepted science” that amotivational syndrome is a real thing that happens when you smoke weed. Nowadays, we find that those who smoke weed tend to opt for more challenging activities regardless of the reward. That’s not to say that weed causes this behavior, but it appears that in the study conducted by the researchers, the researchers found that those who smoked weed simply liked more challenging scenarios. This discovery should prompt us all to question “studies” more critically. This means being aware of how these studies work and how to interpret the data.

For a long time, we’ve been drummed into the idea that stoners are lazy, but recent studies show the opposite.

Don’t let anyone call you a lazy stoner because that would be demonstrably wrong.

HIGH SCHOOL CHILDREN AND CANNABIS USE, READ MORE…

WHY COLLEGE KIDS SHOULD KEEP SMOKING WEED, READ THIS!

OR..

CANANBIS ON CAMPUS, A HOT TOPIC FOR SOME SCHOOLS!