Remember that one road trip that felt like it would never end? Wherever you were going, whoever you were with, you were probably drinking something. Along the highway and backroads, you let your mind drift, munching snacks and sipping your drink as the time passed.

Before long, you feel a warmth inside you building up. It’s poking and prodding and uncomfortable. It annoys you and makes you reposition constantly. Eventually, you have to announce to the driver, “I gotta pee!”

After another half hour of trying to find a good spot to pull off, you feel like you’re being tortured. The uncomfortable feeling has hit a point of pain, you just want relief. Finally, you make it to a rest stop and take care of things.

As you walk back to the car, you feel like a new person. You feel lighter, less grumpy, paying more attention to what’s around you because you are no longer focusing on your own desires since you have found relief.

That’s a bit of a comical intro to help describe what it’s like to be high, but don’t we all genuinely feel a euphoric relief after a much-needed pee break?

To get more specific about what being high feels like, well, it varies greatly. In this brief article I will try to explain the inner workings of what it is like to be high. We’re strictly going to focus on what it is like for a consumer to get an appropriate dose of quality cannabis. When taking too much cannabis, or using an adulterated product, the effects are absolutely different and can be outlined in a different article.

So, what is being high really like?

While it varies greatly from person to person, the overall consensus is that it feels very good. That’s pretty vague, and you likely already knew that, but the simplest one-sentence answer is that being high on cannabis is a very good feeling due to the various positive effects and few negative effects.

Recently I have been catching up with plenty of my consuming buddies to gather input on the subject, here are a couple of viewpoints of what it is like to be high.

Image From This is Jane Project

It feels natural, the pleasant feeling doesn’t seem distant. You aren’t arriving at a whole new place physically or mentally. Some drugs can be much more overwhelming and control you more than you control yourself. Cannabis is absolutely not this way.

People mention cannabis feeling like sobriety, just more relaxed. It truly isn’t inebriating in the way that something like alcohol is. You are in control of the situation and it is lovely.

Tingling is a popular sensation depending on dosage, consumer, and product.

It’s a hard feeling to describe to someone who hasn’t felt it. It isn’t a ringing or vibrating you feel, just a light tingle. Depending on various factors, the feeling could be in your eyes, the front of your forehead, the back of your head, along your neck, through your back, on any part of your body. It is light and enjoyable, not physically jarring.

Cannabis reduces inflammation in the body which for many results in a thorough feeling of pain relief. Sometimes the pain is replaced with pleasure, sometimes it’s just minimized to the point that you forget about it. While reports vary the percentage of illnesses caused by inflammation, we know it is a LOT. Almost every common disability or illness is caused by inflammation.

Asthma, chronic ulcers, tuberculosis, (rheumatoid) arthritis, Crohn’s, hepatitis, some cancers, stroke, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s are just a few illnesses that are inflammation-related.

Many pain medications block your pain receptors from functioning – they fully prevent you from feeling pain. That’s why chronic opioid users describe both a physical and mental “numbness”. Cannabis does not numb your body or paralyze muscles. In simple terms, the reaction of the drug on our bodies is just not strong enough. I will go into depth about the strength of binding that a drug has to our bodies’ receptors in a later article.

The mind/brain is an interesting thing. More powerful than any machine we’ve created, with trillions of synapses each second, and tons of feet of tangled organic tissue. When introducing cannabis into the mix, it only becomes more interesting.

People describe themselves as more grounded and centered in life when high. The mind is more free-flowing. You don’t typically see a hippie stressing out of their minds, they’re more likely to be playing the bongos and enjoying the tantalizing noise of percussion in their ears.

Some popular phrases come to mind when thinking of a high mental state, (many of which resonate with me personally in how cannabis has shaped my thought pattern and view on life) are:

“Don’t sweat the small stuff.”

“Focus on what you can change, let what you can’t go.”

Good advice, but difficult to take to heart sometimes. When that Escalade pulls out in front of you and makes you miss the light, you don’t think of the good vibes and not sweating the little stuff, you ignite into a unique fury and rage. Cannabis puts you into a mindset where you can let those little, but still frustrating, things go with ease.

After prolonged use, instead of simply being cool-headed when high, cannabis shifts your thought process so that even when sober, you are able to hit the metaphorical speed bumps of life a little easier. For religious people, they often describe cannabis as a way of bringing them closer to their respective deity. For spiritual people, they feel cannabis allows them to center themselves and look inward for necessary self-reflection.

It’s easy to read all of this and see it as only the good and not the bad, coming off biased. I use cannabis and advocate for its use often.

The reason I only outlined the positives is that cannabis truly does give only positive effects when taken properly (improperly being taking too high of a dose, consuming bad products, or not having the right set and setting). The “negatives” that occur during proper use are almost not worth mentioning. Dry mouth and dry eyes are the only objective negatives that come to mind when I think of appropriate consumption.

Cannabis is a lot of things to different people, but the best one word I can give you is: relaxing. I tried to outline all the different aspects of what being high is like but as I mentioned, it varies so greatly from person to person and it is a difficult feeling to describe to someone that hasn’t experienced it.

A picture is worth a thousand words, but a joint is worth millions. I would be robbing it of its beauty to compare it to being drunk, and not doing it enough justice to liken it to an extremely powerful version of a runner’s high. I hope you got a better understanding of cannabis today, and I hope you read again soon.

This has been your Best Bud Austin with The Mary Jane Experience. Stay high my friends.

What are your experiences being high?