How to Relax Without Weed

Relaxing is a physical event, not a mood you argue yourself into. The fastest lever you have is your breathing: roughly four seconds in, six seconds out, for about five minutes. A longer out-breath is the part that does the work. After that, in rough order of evidence, come movement, progressive muscle relaxation, a warm bath before bed, and time outside.

The honest caveat is that none of it will feel like much for the first couple of weeks, and that is not a failure of the technique. Your baseline is genuinely raised right now, and everything is being compared against a chemical that worked in ninety seconds.

Why nothing feels relaxing right now

Two separate things are happening, and it helps to keep them apart.

The first is withdrawal. Nervousness or anxiety is one of the recognised symptoms of cannabis withdrawal, and a clinical review of its management puts symptom onset at 24 to 48 hours after stopping, with most symptoms peaking at days two to six and heavy users sometimes running two to three weeks or longer. So for the first fortnight you are not trying to relax from a normal baseline. You are trying to relax from an elevated one.

The second is the comparison problem. Weed produced a noticeable state change in a couple of minutes with no effort. A walk does not. Held up against that, everything legitimate feels like it is doing nothing — which is a measurement error rather than a fact about walks.

There is also a possibility worth sitting with. A critical review of cannabis and anxiety describes a dose-dependent relationship in which low doses are anxiolytic and high doses are anxiogenic, and notes that roughly one in five chronic users in the data it reviews reported high levels of anxiety. If your dose climbed over the years — and most people's does — the thing you were using to calm down may have been contributing to the problem it was solving.

Start with the breathing, because it is the only one that works in minutes

Everything else on this page takes days or weeks to pay off. Slow breathing works now, which is why it goes first.

The specific finding: in a controlled study, participants breathing at four seconds in and six seconds out for five minutes showed substantially lower state anxiety than after normal resting breathing, and were buffered against the anxiety increase that followed unpleasant images. The effect sizes were large. The sample was small — 17 healthy young adults — so treat it as a good demonstration of a mechanism rather than a definitive trial.

The wider evidence is more modest and more reassuring. A meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials pooling 12 trials and 785 adults found breathwork associated with lower self-reported stress than control conditions, a small-to-medium effect, with comparable effects for anxiety and depressive symptoms across a larger set of studies. The authors are careful to say most of the included studies carried a moderate risk of bias and that stronger trials are needed.

So: real, useful, not magic. Which is the right expectation.

How to actually do it:

1. Sit or lie down. Hands somewhere you can feel your ribs move.
2. In through the nose for a count of four.
3. Out, slowly, for a count of six. The out-breath is the active ingredient.
4. Five minutes. Set a timer so you are not checking.
5. If you feel lightheaded, you are breathing too deeply. Make it smaller, not slower.

The reason to practise it when you are calm is so it is available when you are not. A technique first attempted at peak craving does not work.

The rest, ranked honestly

Movement, most days. The same clinical review cites a pilot study in which physical exercise was associated with improved scores on a marijuana craving measure. It is also the intervention most likely to fix your sleep, which is the thing most likely to fix your evenings. Walk before you commit to anything harder.

Progressive muscle relaxation. Tense a muscle group hard for five seconds, release, notice the difference, move up the body. It works partly because it gives an anxious mind a job. Fifteen minutes, usually best before bed.

Temperature. A warm bath or shower an hour or two before bed, then a cool room. The point is the drop in body temperature afterwards, which is one of the signals sleep runs on.

Daylight, early. Ten minutes outside in the morning does more for a wrecked sleep-wake cycle than anything you can do at night, and a settled cycle is most of what "relaxed" means.

Something absorbing with your hands. Cooking, an instrument, repairs, a game with actual difficulty. Not because hobbies are virtuous, but because attention that is fully occupied is not available for rumination.

Company, specifically. Being around people is underrated here and hard in week one. It does not have to be a conversation about quitting.

None of these are a one-for-one swap, and expecting one to be is the fastest route to concluding that nothing works. The realistic version is four or five small things that each take the edge off, adding up to an evening you get through.

What does not work

• Alcohol. It relaxes you for an hour and takes the second half of your night. It is also the most common way a cannabis quit turns into a different problem.
• Doom-scrolling as decompression. It occupies attention without lowering arousal, which is why an hour of it leaves you tenser than when you started.
• Waiting until you feel like it. Nobody in week one feels like doing breathing exercises. Do it on a schedule, badly.
• Trying everything at once. Five new practices started on day two is a plan that fails by day five. Pick the breathing and one other thing.
• Reasoning with the feeling. Talking yourself out of anxiety mostly rehearses it. Change something physical instead.

The evening is the real problem

For most people this is not a general relaxation question. It is a 9pm question — one specific slot, one specific chair, one specific transition from the day being over to the night starting.

That slot needs a plan rather than willpower, and the plan works better if it starts before the craving does. The pattern of when the urge arrives is more predictable than it feels; the app's urge log usually shows a person's cravings clustering into two or three hours of the day rather than spreading evenly, and knowing your hours means you can put the walk, the bath or the five minutes of breathing just ahead of them instead of scrambling afterwards.

If the evening slot is the whole of your problem, what to do instead of smoking weed goes further into filling it, and how to get through a weed craving covers the twenty minutes when it has already arrived rather than the hour before.

Two related things are worth reading if they apply. If the anxiety is the main event rather than the tension, anxiety after quitting weed explains why it spikes and when it eases. If the relaxation you actually miss was the getting-to-sleep part, that is a different problem with a different fix — see why you cannot sleep after quitting. And for where you are in the overall arc, how long weed withdrawal lasts sets out the day-by-day.

When this needs more than a breathing exercise

Some of what gets called "trouble relaxing" is an anxiety disorder that was there before cannabis and is now visible without it. That is common, it is treatable, and it does not respond to bath salts.

Talk to a doctor or a clinician if anxiety is severe, if it is not improving after several weeks off, if you are having panic attacks, if it predates your cannabis use, if you are also withdrawing from alcohol or benzodiazepines, if you are pregnant, if there is paranoia or hallucination in the picture, or if you are having thoughts of harming yourself.

In the US, SAMHSA's National Helpline is free, confidential and open 24 hours a day at 1-800-662-4357. If you are in immediate danger, call your local emergency number.

Cognitive behavioural therapy for anxiety and for insomnia both have substantially better evidence behind them than anything on this page, and neither requires you to have a diagnosis to be worth asking about. How we choose and check the research behind pages like this is in our editorial policy.

Sources

• Slow-paced breathing reduces anxiety and enhances midfrontal alpha asymmetry — PMC — the four-in, six-out pace and its effect on state anxiety.
• Effect of breathwork on stress and mental health: a meta-analysis of randomised-controlled trials — PMC — pooled effects on stress, anxiety and depressive symptoms, with the risk-of-bias caveat.
• Cannabis and Anxiety: A Critical Review — PMC — the dose-dependent relationship between cannabis and anxiety.
• Clinical management of cannabis withdrawal — PMC — withdrawal onset and peak, and exercise as a management option.
• SAMHSA National Helpline — free, confidential support at 1-800-662-4357.