You won't be able to avoid the symptoms of abstinence regardless of how slowly you reduce it. You may have bigger or smaller symptoms according to your physiology but unless you're a very lucky rarity, you'll feel them. Reducing may be helpful but if cannabis currently triggers anxiety on a recurrent fashion it may be better to take the symptoms head-on for a while to clear your head and be able to re-evaluate as soon as possible.
Most abstinence effects, including irritability and anxiety were greatest on Days 0-3 and decreased thereafter. Cannabis craving significantly decreased over time, whereas decreased appetite began to normalize on Day 4. Strange dreams and difficulty getting to sleep increased over time, suggesting intrinsic sleep problems in chronic cannabis smokers.
Chronic, frequent cannabis smokers may experience residual and offset effects, withdrawal, and craving when abstaining from the drug. We characterized the prevalence, duration, and intensity of these effects in chronic frequent cannabis smokers ...
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
From someone who consumes and stops frequently for extended periods of times, my experience is that strange dreams don't really go away, at least not entirely(maybe a few more clean months would stabilize this), first 3 days may have headaches or discomfort(I only get an headache on the first day generally), and after that it becomes alright, but I generally still feel drained in the first three days as if my mind was under stress. Cravings don't exactly go away at least in a 1-2 month period and generally get bigger after you forget the reason you stopped(in this case anxiety).
Insomnia is a month long effort as well, so be ready to stay in bed in absolute boredom because you won't fall asleep, and to go to work without sleeping because you didn't fall asleep. Eventually you get tired enough that you do sleep and then you get weird dreams, they can be fun and WEIRD.
Mood swings are a bit unpredictable for the first month or so and hard to notice until the second month clean where you're much more stable(depending on your mindset, problems and if you use cannabis purely recreatively or as a mindful aid this will affect you more or less, research generally says that in absolutely healthy people it goes away in the first few days). That also means your anxiety may also increase, although I really don't know. I advise therapy if it becomes a problem or in any way makes your life harder, it's generally quite effective if you trust it. I don't advise using weed if you have an ongoing or unresolved mental issue that's negatively affecting your life as it has a tendency of either worsening it or preventing a proper resolve.
I don't get the other symptoms frequently so can't talk much about them. I suppose in the same way some people may not get any symptoms at all, who knows... Duration also seems to vary, for example guy above can sleep after one week. Be ready for some variation, everyone is different.
As for drugs to fix your headaches, really avoid ibuprofen(US Advil ) if you can, you can take paracetamol(US tylenol), if your headache can go away it will go away with it, if not well, you'll have to take it on until you fall asleep. Preferably save ibuprofen for inflammation or high fevers (unless you have liver issues and can't really take paracetamol), since ibuprofen has quite a big list of adverse effects that actually happen frequently enough, and it's quite bad for your stomach, which is often already affected enough when changing drug habits.(this information is not meant to be taken as advice, but as a reminder of something to bring up to your doctor so he can be aware of it and decide for you).
All in all it's not too bad, you'd have a much harder time leaving other more common drugs like nicotine or caffeine.
(...) in the liver. Here, liver enzymes (primarily the cytochrome P450 system) hydroxylate Δ9-THC to form 11-hydroxytetrahydrocannabinol (11-OH-THC), a potent psychoactive metabolite that readily crosses the blood-brain barrier (
Mura, Kintz, Dumestre, Raul, & Hauet, 2005). 11-OH-THC is more potent than Δ9-THC (
Hollister, 1974;
Hollister et al., 1981) and appears in blood in higher quantities when Δ9-THC is ingested than when it is inhaled (
Huestis, Henningfield, & Cone, 1992); hence, it may be responsible for the stronger and longer-lasting drug effect of edibles vis-à-vis comparable doses of smoked cannabis (
Favrat et al., 2005).
Food products containing cannabis extract (edibles) have emerged as a popular and lucrative facet of the legalized market for both recreational and medicinal cannabis. The many formulations of cannabis extracts used in edibles present a unique ...
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Eating cannabis is generally more intense and that may increase your withdrawal. It's also important to notice that proper research on the effects of eating cannabis on the liver and whatever else are really rare and they don't seem to be focusing as much research on this as they are on the most common consumption methods.
On top of that there are many studies that show some correlation, unfortunately still being limited in sample size, between edibles and transient psychosis or anxiety. Follow references to see more.
Background Cannabis is the most commonly used illegal drug and its therapeutic aspects have a growing interest. Short-term psychotic reactions have been described but not clearly with synthetic oral THC, especially in occasional users. Case presentations We report two cases of healthy subjects...
bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com
