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How Cannabis Can Help With Mindfulness

How Cannabis Can Help With Mindfulness

Health

How Cannabis Can Help With Mindfulness

What is Mindfulness?

Mindfulness is a tool that can be utilized at any moment. This topic gained a significant amount of attention over recent years. Mindfulness is studied for its therapeutic benefits for those struggling with mental and physical disorders.  Furthermore, it is known to help with stress reduction. One therapeutic approach, known as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), often combines mindfulness. CBT and mindfulness are used in conjunction to bring about positive change. Here is a short fun video explaining mindfulness.

What Is The Similarity Between CBT and Mindfulness?

How Cannabis Can Help With Mindfulness

CBT looks at how our thoughts, behaviors, and emotions influence one another. For example, our thoughts may impact our emotions resulting in a behavior. CBT focuses on identifying the root of what influences our presenting problems.

For instance, you may feel sad when you are alone. One way to change this cognitive distortion is to try and identify the thought that creates the sad emotion. Perhaps, you were alone a lot as a child and you associate this to a negative emotion (sadness).

In order to create change, you must identify the problem and work to reverse this thought pattern. Changing thought patterns are difficult, but mindfulness is the key. We can catch our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors when we utilize present-moment awareness.

Mindfulness helps in CBT because it allows us to focus on what is happening in the present moment. Sometimes, this may produce negative feelings. Although this is the case, negative feelings are just as important as positive ones.

Think about the age-old concept of yin and yang. We cannot experience positivity without negativity, or light without darkness. In a world where we try to create the illusion of control over our lives, mindfulness helps with acceptance and letting go. If we can allow ourselves to experience the negative, then it creates room for those feelings to pass.

The Benefits of Cannabis

How Cannabis Can Help With Mindfulness

Self-reports, studies on the impact of health ailments, and the statistical rise in use demonstrate the benefits of cannabis. More people are asking questions about further uses of cannabis. Unfortunately, research is only on the cusp of what needs to be done.

With legal discrimination against cannabis and powerful lobbyists, society continues to identify marijuana as a drug. Therefore, finding research on how cannabis may assist in a healthy population of people proves difficult.

The Relationship between Mindfulness and Cannabliss

Cannabis may help in feelings of happiness, pain management, and creating a calm state of mind. For some, cannabis induces more anxious feelings including paranoia and racing thoughts.

Therefore, if you are someone wanting to combine mindfulness and cannabis together, consider the type of weed you are ingesting. Sativa strains provide an energetic high. For some anxiety-prone people, a sativa may inhibit mindfulness.

Those with anxiety may prefer Indica strains, which may help in promoting feelings of peace, present-moment awareness, and a slowing of the mind. Mindfulness is something we can attain at any moment. With that being said, what is the harm of combining two beneficial components?

A Scientific View

How Cannabis Can Help With Mindfulness

In a world where it is difficult to control the chaos on the outside, it can feel more troublesome to quiet the chaos on the inside. Cannabis helps with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), anxiety, depression, PTSD and fibromyalgia.

In fact, a study done on patients diagnosed with fibromyalgia found a significant increase in mental health outcomes for those using cannabis. All you need to do is look at the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental health disorders (DSM).

A rise exists in people diagnosed with mental health disorders because we continue to treat psychological problems as a deficiency in the human being. The DSM serves a purpose, especially for those with serious mental illness. Although this is true, our society over-diagnoses people. Alternative treatments, like mindfulness and cannabis, may help.

What Are the People Saying?

How Cannabis Can Help With Mindfulness

On a forum on reddit.com people express their feelings on mindfulness and cannabis: “I find this to be true. I think it depends on the individuals own chemistry with the plant’s psychoactive components.”

“After meditating a few times earlier this week, I’ve found that weed just dulls my mind and I can’t get as much clarity as doing it sober. I haven’t smoked in three days now and I feel great. I normally smoked 2-3 times a day. It doesn’t work for me, but if it works for you, roll with it.”

“I find that either an Indica body stone or Sativa head high will give a sensation resembling that of mindfulness, and in the right circumstances/dosage will truly be mindfulness. Inducing mindfulness or meditating while high produces highly exaggerated effects, as though the two together are so much more powerful than either could be alone.”

“It depends on the type of marijuana for me. Strong indica helps, strong sativa really sets my mind on fire and makes it so hard to concentrate, despite my most valiant efforts.”

“I have found it to be enhancing to my practice.”

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