Lots of people are addicted to weed.

Specifically to THC.

I was one of those people.

At 16 I had my first joint. 

At 17 I started smoking every day and continued like that for 3 years.

My daily average was 2 to 3 joints. 

And the worst part is that I was lying to myself that it’s not harming my life.

If you’re someone struggling with this or are just interested in how this addiction emerges, hang on. This letter will be a bit longer.

The root cause for weed addiction is much deeper than you probably think.

To understand it and especially to overcome it, we will have to explore how meaning is created, what effect weed has on the consumer/addict, and much more.

I was able to overcome my weed addiction.

Today I not only don’t smoke weed, I don’t even really crave it anymore.

No desire for it.

That was very different when I started my first attempts at limiting my consumption.

When I was 20 it started to dawn on me.

Actually, I was a guy with a burning desire for knowledge & success. 

I was always very interested in science, philosophy, self-improvement, and business, but I had gone down a wrong path.

I wasn’t jacked, didn’t have a profitable business, and wasn’t able to read for 20 minutes without getting distracted.

My mind was foggy, and my memory was damaged.

I was simply not satisfied with my life.

But I had the balls to start some business ventures, and even though I quit all of them every single time, something started to change.

Truth is, when you’re stoned every day, it’s almost impossible to start a successful business. 

Business is way too difficult for that.

However, preventing financial success is not the only side-effect of constant weed consumption.

Weed damages your sleep, makes you think slower, makes you forgetful, costs you money, robs you of your ambition, damages your lungs, but most importantly: 

Makes you waste your precious time on garbage activities like video games, Netflix, binge eating, and chilling for hours with your friends not doing anything worthwhile.

You might wonder: sleep? 

Yes, weed prevents REM sleep. That’s the phase of the night when we dream and most of the rest happens.

That’s why you don’t dream when you fall asleep stoned. 

It’s also the reason why you don’t have much energy.

Think about it. 

How much energy do you think did 99% of your ancestors have at your age? Only that much?

No! our bodies are MACHINES. 

Now don’t get me wrong, weed also has positive effects. 

It’s fun, feels pleasant, alleviates stress, and calms you down.

It also seems to be a great tool to avoid the problems in your life haha.

But if you’ve read until this point you’re probably someone struggling with this addiction or know someone like that.

So the following will be an exact description of how I was able to overcome my addiction so that you can copy-paste the same stuff to your life and do it even faster than me.

Get ready for some uncomfortable stuff:

Step 1

Like I said, I was trying to make money.

I had the desire for financial freedom so that I could travel the world and build a life I loved. 

I knew that building a business was my only ticket for that plane. 

I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life working a job for someone else to deposit 80% of the company’s profit into his own pocket. 

I realized that I either build my own business or will have to build someone else’s business.

So I started a blog, then an SMMA, then drop ship stores, then videography services, and so on. 

Even though I didn’t stick to any of these business models, which by the way all were legit but I just didn’t have the discipline to push it through, something very positive happened. 

I realized that I needed to smoke less.

The market will only give you money if you alleviate its pain. I didn’t know that at that time, but since that was what I was unconsciously trying to do, I struggled.

Eliminating someone’s pain is, you might’ve guessed it: very painful. 

That hardship made me realize that I needed every bit of money, energy, focus, and time I could gather to get rich.

I can only teach you what has worked for me.

So Step 1 to overcoming weed addiction is: 

Try to become rich.

Step 2

As a consequence, a whole year of starting new business ventures, and quitting them happened.

But I was not only dedicating myself to different businesses constantly, I was also dedicating myself to specific weed abstinence protocols.

I would for example declare in front of my friends that I’m not going to smoke until I’ve become a millionaire. 

I made all sorts of promises. 

„No joints until my first $5k!“ 

„Only on weekends!“

„No joint for 3 months!“ 

Stuff like that.

Now although I wouldn’t recommend doing this until you’ve already proven to yourself that you’re good without weed because you’ll only break your word, this did a lot for me.

Like I said, don’t do this because your confidence will be damaged and you will lie because you will most probably fail.

But here are the key takeaways of that time: 

• For the first time in 3 years, I had periods without any THC. 

• I stopped seeing friends for the sake of smoking. 

• I was attacking the root cause.

But I’ll get to those points one by one.

For this step, it’s important to embody the philosophy: „Less is more.“

If you have realized that weed is harming your life, simply consume less.

Smoke smaller joints. 

More tobacco less weed. 

1 joint less a day.

And less time wasted with friends.

That leads me to the next step.

Friends.

Step 3

If you are addicted to weed chances are very high that you have a group of friends that share this addiction with you.

You are like a little weed club. 

Most meetings only happen for the sake of smoking together, not for the sake of meeting each other.

This step is very uncomfortable but not as uncomfortable as Step 4, so don’t give up yet.

Here’s the truth: 

If you were the only one in your friend group who’s smoking weed, you wouldn’t roll one joint after the other, and you wouldn’t smoke every day.

It would feel weird, right? 

But because you are surrounded by other guys who are also wasting their potential, the joint feels justified. 

Now two very important points I need to make here.

1. If you continue hanging around with your friends like this you will always fall back.

2. Refusing to participate in weed club events doesn’t mean that you are a traitor.

So what I started to do once I had gone through the phase of quitting and falling back a few times was this:

I refused to see friends to smoke together.

I didn’t refuse to see friends in general, but I simply did not hang out when the obvious reason for the hanging was weed.

This was extremely crucial.

If I hadn’t done that, and wouldn’t stick to this principle to this day, I’d be smoking, at least from time to time.

Humans are social, and we compare ourselves with the people we surround ourselves with.

Now although this might sound like betraying your friends, it isn’t.

You can always meet to do something different. Something that isn’t smoking weed.

Also, by not showing up to the daily weed club, you are positively impacting your life and also theirs.

So if you actually care for your friends, start seeing them less often.

To make this step simple, just follow this principle: „I don’t meet with friends when the sole purpose of the meeting is smoking weed together!“

This is extremely powerful.

But now comes the really hard part of this.

You might not have expected this much value from this letter. 

I wanted to make sure that it is a condensed mini-course with everything you need to know about quitting weed addiction. 

So.

The most important thing is the following step.

Step 4

In this step, you will have to solve the underlying problem that causes your weed addiction.

For me, weed provides a feeling of meaning or purpose.

I had a meaningless life.

Bored, confused, and lost.

I didn’t know what I should do with my life but also didn’t take any action.

I was an over-thinker, afraid of taking risks and experimenting with life.

What weed did for me was to stop my endless thoughts, and give me the feeling of, like I said, meaning.

Weed was my self-medication for a meaningless life.

Now I had to understand how meaning works since that was the problem weed was solving for me.

Meaning is primarily created through the neurotransmitter Dopamine, and Dopamine only gets produced when we make progress toward a goal.

That’s why you feel great after having been to the gym, but like shit after you watched TikTok for 1 hour. 

Gym is progress, TikTok is regress.

So once I realized that I needed to set a goal and pursue it, things started to change.

I knew that the activities that caused progress would be hard, like going to the gym for example, but that they would get me closer to my ideal life.

I also realized that bigger goals give more meaning.

So the logical thing to do was to set an infinite goal.

A goal I would never be able to achieve.

I set the goal of becoming the best version of myself because I thought that I would 1.) never become that guy but can only get closer to him, and 2.) that all things in my life are dependent on my skills, my character, my knowledge, etc. Therefore I had to focus on improving myself to improve my life.

But I tried to make this scientific. It shouldn’t just be some self-improvement motivation.

So I asked myself: 

„What would my best self be like?“ 

I concluded that he was maximally healthy, wealthy, and wise and that all other things like relationships shouldn’t be controlled too much to keep them pure.

Then I made a 12-month plan that would ensure that I get closer to my best self.

This plan guaranteed that I go to the gym & eat healthy, build a business & focus on assets, not quick cash, and that I read a lot.

Sticking to this plan is easy since it’s derived from the most positive goal I can possibly imagine. 

It’s the most important thing to me and so it’s really a no-brainer to stick to it.

That way I was able to go from smoking sometimes, to not even wanting to smoke anymore.

The reason is that building the best version of myself is infinitely more meaningful than smoking weed.

I don’t need medication anymore haha.

So.

If you have read this letter this far, I’m sure you will be able to quit.

Consider giving the following writing exercise a chance to find out what the underlying problem of your weed addiction is: 

WRITING EXERCISE

This exercise is a stream-of-consciousness exercise. This means that there will be questions for you to answer. Then you will set a timer, and simply answer the question until the alarm rings non-stop. Non-stop means no editing and no pause in writing. This is extremely powerful. If you do this, you will figure out what causes your addiction. You can apply this to any other addiction as well. 

1.

Set a timer for 10min, and answer the following question: 

Why did I become addicted to weed?

2.

Set a timer for 10min, and answer the following question:

Why am I still addicted to weed?

3.

Set a timer for 10min, and answer the following question:

What is weed preventing me from achieving?

4.

Set a timer for 10min, and answer the following question:

For what reason would I quit weed?

This is very effective.

I hope this was useful.

I tried to put everything into this letter.

So with that, 

See you next Saturday.

-Ömer

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