Responsible Cannabis Use: How Much of Your Life Do You Want to Spend High?
For me, it’s around 10%.
Post-publishing edit: After a recent cold, I realized that I don’t want to count “medicinal use” toward this 10% goal. In my experience, being sick sucks, but being high and sick is pretty much as nice as just being high, so it’s kind of a no-brainer for me. As long as I’m only sick a few days a year, I’m giving myself permission to not worry about percentages then and just use cannabis “off the books” to treat the symptoms. 😇
My 8-week “t-break from everything” is now drawing to a close, so this is the perfect time to think about what kind of relationship I want with this wonderful plant. (See my post on t-breaks below.)
I’ve previously considered my cannabis use in terms of sessions per week or grams per month, and I think both of these perspectives can be useful. But I realized that there’s a simpler and more intuitive metric for quantifying my use:
Percentage of Life Spent High. In other words, how much of my life do I actually want to be high vs. sober?
This approach makes sense to me, because time is the one assuredly finite resource in life (cue sad violin), so we have every reason to be mindful about how we use it.
So I think a valid question for any long-term thinking cannabis user is: “On average, what proportion of my life do I want to spend high?”
There’s no right answer, of course. Some of us would happily choose to be high 100% of the time, while others would opt for perpetual sobriety. Most would probably find themselves somewhere in between.
And some might also say: “No, I don’t want to start kill the fun from this by overanalyzing it” or “I hate numbers.” And that’s fair enough too, I get that not everyone likes this particular lens.
But I do think the general gist of the question can be useful for keeping usage in check and getting the most out of cannabis.
What’s my number?
Thinking about my own percentage, where do I start?
Well, I know I have an instinctive hard ceiling at 50%. I know lots of folks can handle that or even higher levels of use, and they may need to do so to manage pain or other issues, but for me it’s a huge barrier. I simply wouldn’t want high-Grantham to be in charge of my life more than sober-Grantham. That guy is fun but should not be steering this ship.
And, I don’t know if it’s some old Reagan-era DARE propaganda still lodged in my brain or what, but I’d probably worry about anything even close to 50%.
What’s more, I love the feeling of being high. So much so that I don’t want to rob it of pleasure by making it too frequent an experience. Kinda how the first fistful of munchie-crisps I shove into my gullet is an amazing fanfare of taste, but the 20th is basically just chewing cardio.
At the same time, I believe this plant has enough life-enriching potential that for me personally, to leave it at something like 1% would not tap into its full potential. (Although doubtless this too would be very nice as a rare treat – maybe worth a try at some point.)
With these factors in mind, and also backed by a firm gut instinct, I’d guess the right percentage for me is something like 10%. In other words, I want to spend around 10% of my time high, and 90% sober, give or take a percentage point
I like this split. It has a kind of instant Pareto-appeal, and the high is firmly, clearly in the minority. (The DARE-celebrity spokesperson in me nods in approval.)
If I had to stratify if further, I’d say I want to spend around 1-2% of my time being really high, 3% medium high, and the rest just very lightly high. (See my post on finding your minimum effective dose below.)
But I don’t want to get bogged down with these nuances: what does 10% mean in real life?
Let’s look at hours awake first: there’s about 16*365 = 5840 awake hours in a year. So with the 10% cap, I can spend at most 584 awake hours high. That’s roughly 11 hours per week.
For me, a high from a single dry herb vape session lasts around 3 hours, and my ideal average week would look something like this:
Friday: 3 hrs high. This is for an evening post-workout come-down and getting into the weekend mood.
Saturday: 4 hrs. This is typically for some me-time, music, and meditation.
Sunday: 3 hrs. Evening post-workout come-down again.
Monday: 9 hrs. This is the window for any work and creative tasks where I want to get a high perspective. And it’s also part of my campaign to un-suck Mondays.
Obviously, that’s going to work every week, as there will be commitments that require sobriety. But if this were the average, that would bring me to [works abacus]… 19 hours high. That’s well above the 11 hours I need to reach my 10% goal 🤦🏻♂️
But wait! I also take regular T-breaks, currently ca. 90 days per year. This means there are more high hours to go around when I’m not on a break. Those annual 584 hours can be divided onto roughly 39 weeks, meaning an average of ca. 15 hours per week. Still not enough 🫤
So to get to my goal, I can either decrease my weekly average time high, or spend more time on t-breaks. Both options have their pros and cons, but I’m more drawn to extending my t-breaks, since they are pretty easy for me to maintain.
If I increase my annual t-break time to 150 days , it means I can spend a little over 19 hours per week high during other times – exactly in line with my 10% goal. Hurrah! 🥳
In practice, I think I’ll do two 2,5-month t-breaks per year. In addition, I always have shorter breaks here and there when traveling or during intense periods of work, as well as other sporadic blockers. The extra leeway from these should easily cover the intermittent minor bingeing on special occasions, bank holidays, being sick, etc.
This all means that I need to update my current rules for cannabis use, but the good news is I’ll get to 10% easily.
I feel pretty good about this. My gut says that at least for now, 10% sounds like a good ratio for me personally to maximize the benefits of cannabis while minimizing the negatives.
How about yourself? Have you thought about what your preferred percentage would be, and where are you in relation to it now?
Feel free to share your thoughts over on the SCU subreddit.
Last but not least: Oh crap, what about my sleep? Surely I need to quantify that too. Otherwise what am I even? Some kind of half-quantifier, measuring just one thing but not the other, like an animal?
In a future post, I’ll write about determining how much of my sleep I want to occur under the influence of cannabis.
Enjoy responsibly!
-G. G.
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Smart Cannabis Use is for informational purposes only. You need to be aware of and abide by the laws in your area. Please also be aware that cannabis is not suitable for everyone, such as minors or those with certain mental health conditions. You are responsible for your own choices and actions.