Weed and motivation decline

I noticed it on a Tuesday in March. There was a list on the fridge: fix the back gate, ring the dentist, draft the school form, lodge the BAS. I had read that list every morning for eleven days. None of it had moved. Not because the tasks were hard. Because between the reading and the doing, somewhere in the soft middle of the afternoon, I would have a smoke and the hand would just sort of unclench from the day. The list stayed on the fridge. I sat on the back step.

That is the thing nobody tells you about weed in your forties. The high is mild. The drift is forever.

What the research actually shows

The phrase "amotivational syndrome" got coined in the 1970s and it has been arguing with itself ever since. Here is the honest map, near as I can read it.

• Chronic, near-daily users (years, not months): genuine flattening of goal-directed behaviour. Effort-based decision-making goes down. Reward sensitivity dulls. The brain, given a choice between a hard task with a big payoff and an easy task with a small payoff, picks easy more often than baseline.
• Occasional users (a few times a month): effects modest, often inside the noise of normal life. A bit slower the morning after. Not a personality change.
• Adolescents: stronger and more durable effects, because the brain is still wiring. Not the cohort I am writing for, but worth saying.
• Reversibility: this is the bit that matters. The motivational dent appears to be largely reversible after extended abstinence. Most studies that tracked chronic users through 28 to 90 days of clean time saw the effort-reward calculus walk back toward baseline. Not all the way. Mostly.

So the "stoners are lazy" cliche is wrong on the easy reading and right on the boring one. It is not a moral failure. It is a measurable shift in the machinery that makes you bother.

The lived experience

Forget the studies for a minute. Here is what it felt like in my own house.

I stopped initiating things. That is the cleanest way I can put it. If somebody asked me to do something, I would do it. If a deadline arrived, I would meet it (mostly). But the small unprompted moves, the ones nobody is watching for, those went quiet. I did not start the conversation about the back fence with the neighbour. I did not book the eye test. I did not ring my brother. Nothing was refused. Nothing was begun.

The other thing was reactivity. I lived in response. The phone buzzed and I answered. The kid asked and I drove. The work email landed and I replied. From outside it looked like a normal busy life. From inside it was someone being pushed around the day by small currents, never paddling.

A friend of mine, sober five years, said it like this. "Mate, when you are stoned you are not the author of your day. You are a reader." That stuck.

The body metaphor I keep coming back to is a car in neutral on a slight downhill. It moves. It even feels like it is going somewhere. But the engine is not connected to the wheels. The moment the road tilts up, you stop.

The 90-day reset

I quit on a Friday, properly, after a few rehearsals that did not take. The first two weeks were not the bad part. The bad part was weeks three through six, where the world looked unbearably DULL and the inside of my head was loud and there was nothing to do with the loudness.

Then, somewhere around week eight, the thing happened that nobody warns you about clearly enough. I started wanting things again. Small things first. I wanted to fix the back gate. Not "should fix the back gate". Wanted. I went and fixed it on a Sunday morning before anyone else was up. I felt like an idiot for how good it felt.

By week twelve the list on the fridge was gone, because the list was redundant, because I had just started doing the things as they occurred to me. The dentist was rung. The form was lodged. I rang my brother on a Wednesday for no reason at all and we talked for an hour about nothing.

That is the 90-day shape, near as I can describe it.

• Days 1 to 14: irritability, sleep junk, vivid dreams, food tastes weird. Motivation still flat.
• Days 14 to 45: the long grey tunnel. Boredom. The urge to smoke not because you want to but because the alternative is just sitting with yourself.
• Days 45 to 90: small wants come back. Then bigger ones. Then a quiet shock when you realise you have been initiating things for a fortnight without noticing.
• Past day 90: the new baseline. Not a high. Just a normal contact with your own life.

What helped me get through the grey tunnel

The middle stretch is the bit nobody photographs. The first fortnight has a kind of grim heroism to it (you are doing something hard, and it shows). The day-90 mark has its own clean satisfaction. The middle is just plodding, and plodding without a story is where most of the relapses I know about happened, mine included on previous attempts.

A few things that actually moved the needle.

• Boredom-tolerance practice. Sitting on the back step for ten minutes after dinner with no phone, no podcast, no nothing. The first week of this I wanted to crawl out of my skin. By the third week it was the best part of the day. The skill you are training is being able to be unstimulated without reaching.
• Heavy physical work in the morning. Not gym, necessarily. Splitting wood, walking up a hill with a pack, shifting things in the shed. The point was to be tired by 9am in a body way, because tiredness in the body is a different beast from tiredness in the head and it doesn't trigger the same craving.
• Two appointments on the calendar each weekend. Just two. Coffee with someone at 9am. A specific job at the house at 2pm. Anchors. The unstructured weekend was where the urge ambushed me, every single time, in the early months.
• Telling one person. Not the world, one person. My brother, in my case. He did not have to do anything. Just knowing he knew was a kind of fence around the decision.
• Writing it down at night. Three lines. What I did. What I wanted. Where the want came from. After about four weeks the want started arriving with a return address, and that made it easier to refuse.

None of this is glamorous. The whole point is that it isn't.

The hardest part

Here is the bit that knocked me sideways. I had forgotten I used to want things.

When the wants came back, they did not feel new. They felt remembered. There was a version of me from years ago who had a list of things he was actually going to do (not just write down) and somewhere along the way that version had got muffled, and I had not noticed the muffling because it had happened slowly, the way a window gets dirty.

That is the cost the research can't quite measure. It is not that the smoke makes you lazy. It is that it makes you forget you used to be otherwise. You adjust to the lower ceiling. You call it being chilled. You call it not sweating the small stuff. You hand over your initiative one Tuesday afternoon at a time and after a while you cannot remember what initiative felt like, so you cannot miss it.

That is the real reset. Not a cleaner liver or better sleep (you get those too). It is meeting the version of yourself who had wants, and finding out he is still in there, and a bit cross at being kept waiting.

Slow start. Quiet middle. Wanting again.