Weed comes under the heading of cannabis. This is an umbrella term for all soft drugs extracted from a hemp plant. Weed can have a major impact on your behaviour. This can range from memory and concentration problems to confusion and complete memory loss. This greatly depends on the duration of use and the amount of weed ingested. How does weed affect your behaviour? We will tell you everything about the relationship between weed and behaviour in this article.
Short-term effects with single-use
The pleasant effects are a nice and cheerful feeling. Your senses work more intensely. In addition, your imagination, creativity and sex drive are also stimulated. These side effects are perceived as a pleasant change. Unfortunately, not all the effects of cannabis are positive. A regular or structural user can experience both short-term and long-term negative effects. We’ll tell you more about the short-term effects first.
Short-term effects with regular or structural use
Short-term changes can vary from person to person. This depends on the degree of tolerance, mood, time of use, intake and the type of cannabis. For example, an edible variety, such as space cake, may have a different effect than a joint. Behavioural changes that can be experienced in the short term are:
- Problems with your memory, concentration and taking in information.
- Dizziness, tingling and worse vision.
- Impaired coordination
- Your frontal sinus becomes blocked, which can lead to headaches.
- If weed falls the wrong way, you feel sick, tense and anxious. Sometimes this leads to vomiting.
- Weed can induce psychosis, worsen it or cause a relapse.
- You can have a bad trip or freak out.
As you can read, weed does all sorts of things to your behaviour. It is therefore always wise to be vigilant and take in mind that weed impacts behaviour.
Long-term effects with regular or structural use
The long-term effects include mental and physical health problems. We list some of them for you:
- Concentration problems.
- Insomnia.
- Confusion and memory loss.
- You become nervous, paranoid and irritable.
- Reduced fertility.
- Weed can cause allergies.
- You may become gloomy or depressed, causing increasing isolation from the outside world. You can become isolated.
- Mental dependence can cause you to get in the way of your own development.
- When you smoke more than two grams a week, you are not lucid or active for much of the week, without realising it yourself.
- Smoking weed (and hash) is bad for your lungs, heart and blood vessels – especially if you smoke your joints with tobacco.
- You have an increased risk of mental disorders, such as schizophrenia and psychosis.
As you read, the long-term effects of cannabis are not mild. A long-term user’s behaviour can change drastically. Weed can also have a lot of social consequences. Cannabis can lead to social isolation as you feel less and less like doing things and have less energy or desire to see and talk to other people. Using cannabis can also cause you to see your family or friends less and less. You probably get a new group of friends with the same type of lifestyle, thus maintaining your addiction. Moreover, if you still live with your parents, problems may arise in your relationship with them. They will probably notice that you are not doing well, and may start to worry. You may also suffer from forgetfulness or concentration problems or simply less interest in things, so using may have negative effects on your study performance or at work.
Weed addiction
Weed affects short-term memory. Users have to think more about what they say, as they often forget what they said the moment before and therefore lose the thread of the story. Besides negative effects on short-term memory, psychological addiction to cannabis is a major danger. Cannabis makes the brain lazy, so to speak. The brain produces fewer neurotransmitters because it receives a substance similar to its own produced substance via smoking cannabis anyway. This makes one restless when quitting smoking cannabis. This is because the brain produces less of the substance itself and the substance no longer enters the brain through smoking either.
The conclusion
Weed can thus have different effects on user behaviour. Intention, duration of use, intensity and physical – and mental – state are important here. So the answer to the question ‘what does weed do to your behaviour’ is incredibly long and extensive. So the actual impact of weed on a person’s behaviour varies from person to person.
