Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › When you use something to cope
The fog after cannabis is not gone by morning. In younger users learning can stay dulled for several days, so Saturday night is still in the room on Wednesday.
That changes what to look at. Rather than arguing about the night itself, keep a rough note of the days that follow: what got read, what stayed in, how the week went. Laid out over a month, the record makes its own case, and a case you made yourself is much easier to accept than one made at you.
If you are using something to cope and it has become hard to stop, please speak to a doctor before changing anything.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Do not be like those who forget God, so God causes them to forget their own souls (Quran 59:19). Forgetting is described there as something that spreads, which is what a dulled week quietly does.
وَلَا تَكُونُواْ كَٱلَّذِينَ نَسُواْ ٱللَّهَ فَأَنسَىٰهُمۡ أَنفُسَهُمۡۚ أُوْلَٰٓئِكَ هُمُ ٱلۡفَٰسِقُونَ
Do not be like those who forget God, so God causes them to forget their own souls: they are the rebellious ones
Qur’an 59:19read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A Cochrane review of personalised digital feedback for drinking found small reductions, roughly on a par with face to face brief interventions. Showing someone their own pattern back to them does a modest amount of work. The effects are small, so treat a record like this as one useful piece rather than the whole plan.
Kaner EF, Beyer FR, Garnett C, Crane D, Brown J, Muirhead C, Redmore J, O'Donnell A, Newham JJ, de Vocht F, Hickman M, Brown H, Maniatopoulos G, Michie S. (2017). Personalised digital interventions for reducing hazardous and harmful alcohol consumption in community-dwelling populations.. The Cochrane database of systematic reviews doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A cost you can see written down is harder to explain away than one you only vaguely feel.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
If stopping has been harder for you than it seems to be for other people, that is worth taking seriously rather than reading as a flaw in your character.
If the language of a recovery group puts you off, that is a reason to look for a different group, not a reason to decide that help is not for you.
If a young person is using regularly, waiting to see whether they grow out of it is a gamble. Help early is nearly always cheaper than help later.