This Is My Brain On Cannabis
Welcome to part 3 of the Anxiety Files, where I try different stress-busters to manage my anxiety. In last week’s newsletter, I wrote about taking a DNA test to learn what cannabis might best match my genetic makeup, and then I went out and bought some. Here’s what happened.
Tangling with tinctures
Now that I had product, it was time to try it out. I began with the tincture. The budtender advised that I take ten drops under my tongue as needed. Not sure what “as needed” meant. Should I take it every time I feel anxious? That would be a lot of times. I began with the mantra Len shared, “Start low and go slow.” Every morning after breakfast, I would fill the dropper up to 25 ml, take five drops under my tongue, and hold it for 30 seconds.
I didn’t feel much.
A week in, I got bolder. I filled the dropper up to 50 ml. The drops should absorb into your mucous membranes, and then enter the bloodstream, bypassing your digestive system. But I took way too much at once. The result was that my mouth filled up with so much liquid that it spilled out from under my tongue and into my mouth, where I promptly swallowed it[. It tasted like cannabis water and burned a little going down.
I’d completely forgotten about this and went about my day’s chores, including dropping off clothing at Goodwill, eating a salad at Sweetgreen, and getting my car washed.
At around 3:30, I walked over to my 13-year-old daughter Ella’s school to pick up her and a friend. I took my position in line behind a mom in Lululemon yoga pants FaceTiming too loudly with a friend. As I doom-scrolled through my Twitter feed, I noticed my heart beating a little more rapidly than usual. That’s kinda weird, I thought. I clicked on my iWatch to check my heart rate. It was thumping at a good clip of 120 bpm, well above the “resting rate.” I felt light-headed, and there was a high-pitched buzzing in my ears. For a moment I didn’t know where I was or why I was there.
Am I having a heart attack right now?
I politely excused myself to no one and began to pace up the street with a finger on my pulse. Another wave of lightheadedness washed over me. Where am I? What’s going on? My mouth was cotton candy. Shit. Am I going to die on the school pickup line? Is this how it ends?
Then it hit me. Boom. I’m high. Like out of my mind, bonkers, high. But why? How? I began to piece together the last few hours’ events like a detective solving a homicide. I recalled sitting at my desk at work, taking the cannabis tincture. That must be it. I took too much cannabis oil. But no sooner had I figured it out than I forgot what I was just thinking about and became disoriented again. This kept happening on a loop.
Luckily, I had the sense to pull it together and text the one person who could explain what was happening to me. Len.
Our text chain went like this.
Me: Dude. I took the tincture today, and for some reason, I’m totally high right now. Like scary high.
Len: It has very little THC. Just breathe through your nose and enjoy the slight high.
Me: There’s nothing slight about this. It’s intense! Ok, I’ll try to enjoy it, but I’m freaking out.
Len: Drink some water. Walk outside. It’s a beautiful day.
“Hi, Dad.”
It was my daughter and her friend. Ugh. “Hi, Sweetie. How was your day!? I said too enthusiastically.
“You ok, dad?”
“Yeah. Sure. Why wouldn’t I be ok?”
“You’re just talking really loud.” She looked at her friend, and they both giggled.
They know. They know I’m high. I was paranoid and nervous. Maybe I should tell her? Maybe I should call my wife to come relieve me? No, I can do this. It’s just a few blocks.
I asked if I could take a sip from her water bottle. We walked down Murfield Avenue. I became much more aware of what it felt like to walk, hyper-focused on my muscles as they tensed and flexed. I focused very carefully on the sidewalk. I certainly don’t advise anyone to walk their child home high, but I did find that I had a sharp sense of direction on that journey.
Everyone got home safely.
As soon as I dropped Ella off, I told her I needed to go for a walk. She was so immersed in her TikTok she had no idea that her dad was off his gourd stoned. As I strolled through the neighborhood, I recorded observations on my cell phone like I was a modern-day Charles Darwin. My thoughts seemed rational at the time, but listening to them later, they sounded like the rantings of a madman.
What is happening to me? I can’t remember what it feels like to be normal. Am I going to feel this way forever? Some call pot the Devil’s Lettuce. Now I know what they’re talking about. My mouth is so dry. Okay, breathe. In and out. The grass is so green. It’s really green. Wait, why do I feel this way again? Right. I took too much of a tincture. Maybe they poisoned my salad at Sweetgreen? I love reggae music. I want to listen to reggae music
When I returned home, I locked myself in my bedroom and called Len again. He recommended the following remedies:
Take two quick breaths in my nose and a long exhale out my mouth.
Watch a funny movie.
Take some CBD (with no THC) to counter the effects of the THC. (CBD has been found to soften the anxiety and paranoia caused by THC.)
Mercifully, I had a supply of pills called “Parachute” stashed in my drawer for just this occasion. The CBD pills promised to help “come down from a high.” They’d been sent to me for review. The prescription called for two pills. I took five. I also fixed myself a glass of lemon juice because I recalled someone telling me that lemons get rid of the psychoactive effects of THC and help you come down.
Around this time, my wife Diana came home from work. She found me on our living room couch doing deep breathing exercises. I told her what had happened. She had had a terrible day at work and was not amused. “How could you do this? You know you can’t take that stuff!” she said, exasperated.
“It was an accident,” I said.
“Throw it away. Throw it all away!”
She marched upstairs to our bedroom, slamming the door behind her. Now I was high, paranoid, and in the dog house. This was the worst cannabis experience ever.
I zombie-walked toward the glow of my laptop. Write. I will write. I didn’t want to write; I wanted to obsess over being high, but I made myself.
It was probably the most focused hour of writing I’d done in years. It felt like the words poured out of my mind straight to my fingertips. I didn’t think about being high or scared or upset the whole time. I was unconscious, in a zone, like how I imagine Michael Jordan felt when he couldn’t miss a shot. (Confession: I went back and read my writing later, and it was no Michael Jordan.) But my point is that I felt staggeringly creative without the nagging little voice telling me every sentence I wrote sucked.
The high eventually wore off. I’m not sure if it was the lemon juice or the Parachute pills. (Most likely, it was Diana’s wrath. There's nothing like an angry spouse to sober you up real quick.) As the peak of the high began to fade after about three merciless hours, I felt more relaxed and peaceful. My heart rate returned to normal, and my worries subsided. I had the glow of the high without the scary side effects. I’d reached what’s known in stoner circles as being “baked,” instead of being “fried.” Just like baked chips are healthier than the fried variety, I’d found my happy place. Not too stoned, not too anxious. Just right.
So what happened to me? Why’d I gotten so high? The likely explanation is that I swallowed too much of the tincture rather than let it dissolve under my tongue. When you use a tincture correctly, the cannabinoids absorb directly in the skin and enter the bloodstream, bypassing your digestive system. I didn’t do this. I swallowed the stuff, allowing the THC to enter my gut. This is where the problems arose.
I asked Uwe Blesching, Ph.D, a medical writer and author of three books on cannabis, including The Cannabis Health Index to explain.
“When you ingest THC, it will take about an hour or so for it to be broken down into various metabolites, including something called 11-OH-THC, which is much more potent as far as psychoactivity is concerned,” Dr. Blesching said. “So when you ingest THC, you’re not just getting the high effect from THC, you’re also getting the effect of the metabolites.” You’re also getting a delayed reaction while your digestive system breaks the cannabis down.
This explains that sudden, uneasy feeling of getting a massive jolt to the brain. It’s a double shot of THC and 11-OH-THC.
Hiking High
Diana eventually forgave me. But she made me promise that I would never do pot around her or the kids again. I certainly respected my wife’s wishes, but I told her I needed to give cannabis one last shot for my anxiety experiment. I had to replicate my feeling coming down from my terrible tincture high.
Len and I believed the answer might lie in inhaling cannabis rather than swallowing it. This gave me a few choices. I could smoke the raw cannabis flower Len gave me, or I could vape.
I chose vaping for four reasons:
Vapes hit your system within seconds, so there would be no surprises, like the doozy I got on the school pickup line.
Vape highs reach their peak at around 30 minutes, and they don’t generally hit you as strongly as edibles.
Vapes deliver a more consistent dose. Smoking flower is less predictable.
The psychotropic effects of vapes last 1 to 3 hours, while the effects of edibles can last up to 12 hours.
Next, I made a date with Len for a smoking session. Poor Len, having to endure my pot panic attacks. We decided that we would smoke then go for a hike in a nearby canyon away from distractions and school pickup lines.
Len brought along some cannabis pipes shaped like women in bikinis. Classy. He stuffed some flower into the pipe, lit it, and inhaled. I chose to smoke a vape he provided with a 10:1 CBD to THC ratio. I held it nervously to my lips, said a silent prayer to the cannabis gods, and breathed in. Then I coughed for five minutes. “I’m not sure you inhaled,” Len said. “Take a little more.”
The second time, the vape went down smoother. I watched a tiny cloud slip from my lips and out the car window. As if on cue, a cop drove by. I ducked my head. “The fuzz,” I said. He didn’t stop. Smoking pot in Los Angeles is like breathing air.
Seven seconds later, I was high. My heart started pumping away, and I felt an unwelcome tightness in my chest and throat.
“That’s perfectly normal,” Len said. He was right about that. According to the American College of Cardiology, cannabis elevates your blood pressure and heartbeat.
“Just tell yourself what you’re feeling is the effects of cannabis, but it is not dangerous.”
“My mouth is bone dry.”
Also, normal, Len explained. Cannabis reduces the amount of saliva in your mouth.
We went for our high hike. I noticed that the grass appeared a little greener and the sky slightly bluer. About 15 minutes into the hike, I checked in on my anxiety. My heartbeat was at its normal pace. The moisture in my mouth was back to normal. I felt happy, borderline giggly. I was very hungry.
But I wasn’t anxious. I was too tired and mellow to be anxious. I felt like I’d just awoken from a nice, restful nap—that hazy feeling you have between sleep and waking up. But this sensation didn’t last for two or three minutes; it lasted a few hours. Len and I drove to a health-food restaurant, where I ate a breakfast panini–tofu scramble, vegan cheese, and spinach on gluten-free bread. This was a mistake—not my order, but the restaurant. I was starving afterward. I swung by In and Out burger and got a double with fries on the way home. The music on my car radio sounded a lot better. I heard parts of songs I’d never really noticed before for the first time. Even Post Malone sounded inventive and interesting.
I liked the way I felt, but I couldn’t imagine feeling this way all the time. I would never get anything done. This didn’t strike me as a sustainable solution to my anxiety.
Sleeping with CBD
For my CBD experiment, I went online and ordered one of the most potent organic CBDs on the market – “extra strength” full-spectrum 2400 mg CBD. The ratio of CBD to THC was 30:1. I also looked for formulations containing CBN, per Dr. Breus’s recommendation.
I was looking for the magical power of cannabis to help me get some much-needed sleep. On the first few nights of my CBD experiment, I took about half the recommended dose, mindful of the cannabis mantra: start low and go slow. There was no notable effect on my sleep. As usual, I dozed off at about 11:30 pm and woke up 2 to 3 times a night. I either had to pee or was awoken by a dream. I noticed my dreams were more vivid under the influence of CBD. One involved a deep conversation about hip hop with Questlove. But I still woke up cranky and anxious about the day ahead.
I went for it on the third night and took a big boy dose of CBD. The results were almost immediate. I slept entirely through the night and woke up feeling rested. There was still anxiety, but I was less inclined to stay in bed and wallow in it. Side effect: My wife also reported that I snored louder than she’d ever heard.
The Verdict
Neurological assessment
What did my brain look like on cannabis? I took a qEEG brain mapping test at the Peak Brain Institute in Culver City to find out. Quantitative Electroencephalography (or qEEG) records the electrical patterns of your brain in real-time, then spits out the results in a digital “map.” QEEG shows you which areas of the brain are working efficiently and which areas need a little help.
The Peak Brain Institute was founded by Dr. Andrew Hill, a UCLA-trained neurotherapist. In layman’s terms, Dr. Hill measures your brain waves and then gives you a treatment plan to improve your brain’s function. This can be anything from playing video games to listening to music.
Dr. Hill describes Peak Brain as a “gym for your brain.” Before going, I imagined a Planet Fitness with trainers in lab coats guiding you through mind crunches and imagination Pilates. I even wore my sweatpants, just in case. But Peak Brain looks much more like a hip SoCal dentist’s office, with tactile puzzles in the waiting area and a series of mysterious rooms with sliding glass doors.
A technician directed me to one of the rooms. As I sat in an office chair, she covered my head with a bright blue skull cap with sensors. I then sat quietly for 20 minutes, staring at a wall as a computer recorded my normal brain function.
Then it was time to make the test “dirty,” as they called it.
With the skull cap still on my head, I snuck outside to an alley in the back. Not wanting to get too high and have a potential panic attack at the brain gym, I puffed on a vape pen that was low in THC and high in CBD. I took one hit and waited for 5 minutes, but when I didn’t feel dirty enough, I took another hit and hoped for the feeling to sink in. The technician and I waited another 20 minutes before having my brain mapped again—this time under the influence of cannabis.
I was concerned that I didn’t inhale enough cannabis when the test began, but around five minutes in I felt my head begin to lighten and my heartbeat start to accelerate. This was followed by the now-familiar, where-the-ef-am-I, disoriented feeling. I took a few deep breaths and tried to settle down to enjoy the experience. I found the process of staring at the wall while high a little less boring than it was the first time around. A crack in the paint took on the form of a side profile of Richard Nixon.
A few days after the test, I met with Dr. Hill, a tall, imposing man with a bald head and dark, arched eyebrows that reminded me of Bill Nye the Science Guy. He presented me with colorful printouts of various sections of my brain. One side was my brain au natural; the other side was my brain on weed.
He seemed concerned. “Are you getting enough sleep?” he asked. “Because your brain map is indicating that you’re tired, burnt out, and not very focused.”
“That sounds about right,” I said.
Then he looked at images of my brain on cannabis. “The midline activation of your brain is really jacked up,” he told me. “This means that you’re obsessing and ruminating more when you have cannabis in your system.”
He explained that the front of my brain selects what to focus on and the back of my brain evaluates it. So, for example, my front brain is saying check out the crack on the wall I didn’t notice before and the back of my brain is telling me it looks like a former president.
But on cannabis, this communication between both parts of my brain is turbocharged. The result is what he calls “speed ping pong.” He said, “Your brain is going much faster than normal and causing you to be cognitively fatigued.”
“Is it just me, or do other people have this reaction to cannabis?”
“You are a person with a very quick brain,” he said. “Cannabis usually doesn’t crank up the brain in this way, but your brain goes hardcore ADHD on cannabis.”
“All kinds of cannabis, or just what I smoked today?”
“Likely, all strains of cannabis. Strains high in CBD cause your brain to react less.”
“So, cannabis and my anxiety don’t really mesh?” I asked.
“Not from what I’m seeing.”
Self-Assessment
There is no doubt in my mind that cannabis is therapeutic for many people—including those with anxiety. But it is also a highly personal drug. One person’s reaction to cannabis might be completely different than another’s, and—as I learned—this can be influenced by myriad factors, including genetic predispositions, dosage, strains, and ratios of CBD to THC.
I want to move into the cannabis-gated community, set up shop, and pass the pipe with Snoop Dogg, Seth Rogan, Chelsea Handler, and all the others who have sung the praises of pot publicly, but I don’t think it’s the right fit for me.
The feeling of being high causes me to be hyper-aware of all the physical sensations in my body. I thought it slowed down my thoughts, but brain maps show that it sped up my worrying. The THC compound in cannabis alters the reality that I’m used to so that I feel disoriented, lost, and a bit confused when I’m feeling its psychotropic effects.
I will continue to experiment with high CBD, low THC with CBN formulations for sleep because, lord knows, I need to sleep better and because if I do become high, at least I will be asleep and unaware of how freaked out I’ve become.