Marijuana an anxiety cure?
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anonymous Asks ...
Will marijuana help with my anxiety. I have not smoked for a long time since high school but I am having bad anxiety now and now I can get a prescription for medical marijuana because of my anxiety. However, the few times I remember smoking pot back when I was a teenager I remember it made me feel quite paranoid and tense, not at all like I thought it would. Should I try it again now for anxiety? Will my actually having anxiety now (I didn’t in high school) change the way it affects me if I use it as medicine now?
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Loren Gelberg-Goff Says ...
I do not recommend marijuana for anxiety. There are many other options that are effective, healthy and beneficial and you won't run the risk of a bad experience.
Let's start with some basic counseling to determine the source of your anxiety. Anxiety is generally caused by a triggering event... something traumatic happened, or you believe is going to happen, and your body goes into a response to keep you alert and vigilant...
Meditation/Mindfulness is really helpful in dealing with anxiety reactions... There are many ways to learn or practice meditation, and you can, if you want start with a 2 minute meditation that is on my website (http://www.wellfromwithin.com/2minuteaudiomeditation.html ). If you are willing to sit for 2minutes periodically throughout the day you will find that your system has an opportunity to de-stress and your anxiety levels will drop.
Hypnotherapy... this is a great intervention to help get the root causes of your anxiety and help you come up with new and more effective ways to deal with your feelings and stress that trigger your anxiety reactions.
Neurofeedback: Known also as biofeedback for the brain, neurofeedback actually balances the right and left hemispheres of the brain so that your responses to various stimuli actually changes and your system does not go into anxiety mode.
EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique or Tapping) has also proven to be very effective in clearing up anxiety reactions.
EMDR : is another intervention that has been shown to be very effective in clearing issues that may be causing your anxiety.
I strongly recommend that you fully investigate these options before you go down the path of using marijuana when the results for you will be questionable at best..
