Today I’ve been so anxious for no reason.its 2am and I still can’t sleep because of anxiety about being anxious. I’m going to be a complete zombie tomorrow and it’s going to suck. I wish I knew where to aim these feelings.
I had somehow forgotten I had both cbd and melatonin on hand. The combination managed to knock me out, but only at 3am so I still feel like shit. 
Had a string of rough nights. Gotta start sleeping normally. My confidence is super high but my functionality is pretty low. Not sure how to close that gap.
Been missing my meds pretty regularly. Like, once or twice a week. I’m not trying to go off them, there’s just so many I get intimidated, but not taking them is really fucking me up.
I’m really depressed tonight. I think it’s a crash from feeling great all day, but that doesn’t make it any better. I’ve pretty much gone back to chain smoking. I do want to quit, but I need more help than I currently have. Looking into professional help. I don’t have an alternative coping mechanism so it’s almost impossible for me to bear not doing it.
I think CBD is making me a little manic. Don’t think I have to give up on it but I do have to cut back.
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Seems like a pretty sound approach to me.
I’ve never tried CBD; what are the effects like?
It helps me with depression but seems to increase effectiveness of stimulants, or so I hear. I might need to cut back on coffee, not CBD.
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Makes sense; stimulants are definitely a risk factor for mania/hypomania, so experimenting with using less of those is probably a good idea.
You might want to consider finding good teas that you’ll be more tempted to use as a substitute; it might help to make it a lot easier to reduce coffee intake.
Personally, I quite enjoy coffee, but I usually don’t deal particularly well with drinking it. I think it doesn’t mesh at all well with my anxiety, and it seems to screw with my stomach and sometimes cause a bit of nausea, too.
CBD is taking care of the anxiety well but it turns out I’m more addicted to the act of smoking than I am nicotine.
Can you find a mindful ritual to use to try and replace that?
I just might switch to a nicotine-less vape. No carbon monoxide, no nicotine, no problem.
Lemme tell ya, I don’t smoke but I so so so get what ya mean there. The ritual of smoking is perhaps the most appealing thing about smoking. The little breaks, the commie style bumming of cigs and lights. I swear if only it didn’t have all those bad things I’d be all over it.
UPDATE I just unscrewed the cart on my current vape so it doesn’t give me the nicotine but does take me outside and fulfill the ritual.
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On the few occations I smoke, that’s what appeals to me.
Yeah, when I find that I miss smoking, that’s what I miss - not the smoking itself, but the little rituals, the feeling of snatching a few little moments for yourself, the kind of instant sense of camaraderie with other smokers, that feeling of oneness with all things from a coffee and a smoke in the early morning with the sunrise. The pleasing cadence of popping open my zippo, hitting the wheel, lighting up, and snapping it shut again.
There was a book that centers around these sorts of matters that Nelson recommended to me a few years ago, called “Cigarettes are Sublime”, by Richard Klein. Fascinating book, well worth the read, though some parts of it might be a little lost or take a little more effort to understand for people who haven’t had that experience.
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I’m honestly afraid to quit smoking. Not because it’ll be hard, but because I don’t know who I’ll be once I do. I haven’t had a thought not influenced by some sort of chemical that wasn’t prescribed to me since I was 20, and I was horrible at life at 20. I don’t wanna go back to that.
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I’ve sometimes had similar thoughts, though somewhat in reverse. I probably qualify as being “horrible at life”, but some things about myself I don’t want to give up are tied in with that. For the most part though, I think the right thing to do is try your hardest to disentangle what’s useful from what isn’t.
I think you’re probably very different now than you were at 20, so just quitting smoking doesn’t seem likely to take you back in that direction. But even if it does, you could still start smoking again, right?
Seems to me that it ought to be worth finding out who you’ll be, because even if you don’t like it you can still find your way back.
Thoughts about non-nicotine vaping? I have a friend who basically just vapes rich food flavors with no nicotine added as a way to not eat said foods and also because he enjoys the ritual of it all.
I mean, it’s seems obviously better than nicotine vaping. Still, inhaling any kind of weird shit must be presumed to be worse for your lungs than not.