When talking about a Cannabis Induced Apathy, I was mainly referring to a long-term effect that persists while you are sober. I think if you are just made super relaxed and maybe even couch-locked while buzzed, is a different story.
I'm more interested in the persisting phisiological changes caused by frequent Cannabis usage, that may or may not actually dull your body's reward system reaction to normally pleasurable things, rather than the tired feeling that causes you to consciously choose to not want to do something while buzzed or for a while afterwards. Personally, I don't like the idea of my sober life choices being affected by my buzzed life (haha), so I've decided to start doing a bit more research, and surveying of users.
Being stoned out and about kicks up my apprehension level a bit so I am more attuned to watching the environment. Being stoned at home is more relaxed so I can enjoy friends, the environment and myself. So I guess it comes down to individual situations, for me.
Whatabout when you aren't stoned? While under the influence of Cannabis, relaxing and enjoying things is easy. It's a matter of it having a long-term negative effect on your brain's reward system when you are sober.
While providing homeostasis for our cellular biology via our endocannabinoid system cannabis ( or more so- cannabinoids) also imparts a calming effect and a sense of well being.... simply being that allows you to not over react to any given situation... now, taking the ability to act away is not really what's happening, just giving the person a more stable platform from which to view the world...
I think of the stroy from Ram Dass maybe from the book " be here now"..
He was going to India to seek out spiritual enlightenment and was focused on doing so through psychedelic substances.. fast forward to India- he tells his Guru that he will be taking acid (lsd) for his personal enlightenment and his guru acts interested.. so Ram hands him his whole supply of acid to look at and the guru takes all of it! Ram sits mortified thinking he just killed his guru! hours pass and the guru meditates while Ram anxiously awaits any response while noticing no change at all ... so basically the guru was at such an elevated plateau of existence that the lsd had zero effect on him and he took enough to send a horse to the moon and back on a pink spaceship! moral is, if you are elevated and the rest of the world is not expect your elevated awareness to be confused with apathy...
I find this extremely hard to believe. If the guy had no LSD tolerance, I highly doubt he didn't get blasted into space from taking so much LSD. The guy has no idea what was going on in the guru's mind while he was sitting there motionless meditating.
...been using Cannabis daily since...1968-69..it's never diminished nor enhanced my apathy...I can do a study linking apathy to tab cola...big deal....let's negate human experience...for another useless study!
I wouldn't consider knowing what both the positive and negative effects of anything we do, useless. It's better to know the truth and then decide what to do with it, than to life in a comfortable delusion until it's too late.
For me, I find an oz or more per week to be extreme. An oz every 2 weeks is definitely in the moderate range for me. As for frequency, I almost always vape (or, in the past, smoke) all day . .but moderate is maybe 4-6 times a day . .extreme is more than that.
Oh, alright. Yea, I would consider vaporizing an ounce a week to be pretty extreme. A gram in a day divided in 2-3 sessions is pretty much the max I would even enjoy. More than 3 times in one day, and the effect of diminishing returns makes me rather just be sober for those remaining few hours.
It doesn't make me apathetic in the sense that I no longer enjoy anticipation and excitment at other activities that I like to do, but it does make me lazy as all get out.
Yes, I have vaped strains that are "up" and strains that give you 'couch lock' the none of them really kick me into high gear in a productive way the way some say it does for them. The most "up" herb just doesn't knock me out, but none of it really energizes me to do a bunch of stuff.
They all make me very lazy...everything's manana, manana, manana.
I also don't find MJ to be a great social drug. Alcohol is much better for me in a group social situation as on MJ I just want to space out and listen to music or read.
Do you notice anything different about your enthusiasm for non-Cannabis things, while you're sober?
As for Cannabis vs alcohol... if everyone in the group is getting stoned, I much prefer Cannabis, but I don't really enjoy being the only one buzzing on Cannabis when everyone else is sober or buzzing on alcohol. In that case, I'd prefer to remain sober or drink a bit.
I think it's a complicated matter, but I believe it's unlikely to have much foundation in reality except as a periphery effect.
I can't help but note that most of the effects describe predictable effects of addictive behavior or depression masked/self-treated with substance use. "For those who do use Cannabis frequently, rewards that somehow involve Cannabis, got more reaction than rewards that were completely unrelated" pretty much says it all, doesn't it?
To put it bluntly, if cannabis feels like the main thing you have going on in your life, it's not hard to see why it's the subject that will arouse the most interest in you.
Forget comparing it to alcohol or hard drug use, you can see the exact same pattern in mundane "addictions" that are never recognized as such. Find me a new family man and I'll show you a man who can talk of nothing else and downplays anything that isn't related - natural addictive behavior programmed into us by evolution.
It's probably not a healthy pattern of behavior when focused on an unprofitable habit, but I also don't see a lot of hoopla made for "love induced apathy" even though it's undeniably something we've all seen and experienced even to negative extremes.
At least with pot, it's also an easy problem to fix - feel like you have "cannabis induced apathy"? Get up off the couch and do shit, problem solved. If it doesn't feel solved yet, keep doing shit, it'll solve itself before you know it.
I do agree that such apathy can be found with a lot of addictions. It may or may not be caused by the same physiological processes, though, so I think it's worth researching.
It may be easy to counter the laziness by getting up and doing stuff, but for those who feel uninterested in a lot of things, perhaps cutting back on the Cannabis could help make doing those things more enjoyable, as opposed to just getting them done so you don't feel lazy.
