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Phil Stille

@philstille

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What we bring to cannabis shapes our relationship with it.

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It’s safe and possible for you to change ❤️🙏🏼 by @philstille

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2 years ago

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2 days ago

Your closest relationships influence the effects you get from cannabis and the role it plays in your life. The people you spend the most time with, and the conversations you find yourself in most frequently, leave something behind, whether positive, neutral, or negative. When those relationships consistently leave you angry, tense, drained, or depleted, those thoughts and emotions become part of what you bring to the plant.

This is one reason the familiar idea that we become the sum of the five people we spend the most time with takes on additional meaning when cannabis is involved. You may finish a draining conversation, use cannabis shortly afterward, and then find yourself ruminating, feeling foggy, becoming irritable, or wanting to disconnect. It can be easy to blame that entire experience on weed without considering what entered the experience before you used it.

When someone begins to recognize that certain relationships are consistently draining, bringing more intentionality to the conversations they are in, what they bring into those conversations, and the boundaries that may be needed can begin to change the larger pattern. As those relationship dynamics become clearer and some of that pressure is addressed, there is less being carried into the experience with cannabis. This creates more room for a clear-headed relationship with the plant and a better understanding of what was shaping the experience before. by @philstille

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5 days ago

Being caught in a back-and-forth relationship with cannabis for more than a decade can leave someone feeling frustrated and unsure what to do next. You may have taken breaks, experienced more clarity, and then found yourself returning to the same pattern. Eventually, removing cannabis for another stretch can begin to feel like an incomplete answer.

I’ve personally witnessed many people in this position find their rhythm and develop a clear-headed relationship with the plant that no longer feels negatively cyclical. When you have spent years thinking cannabis is the issue, looking at other areas of your life can seem counterintuitive. But there are a few areas where intentional changes and boundaries consistently help people make headway.

Two of the biggest areas worth examining are fulfillment in your closest relationships and fulfillment in your work. When either of those areas feels stagnant, it is easy to interpret the resulting lack of motivation as proof that weed is holding you back. Cannabis can contribute to the cycle, but lasting headway may also require setting boundaries, stepping away from certain relationships or work dynamics, or moving in a direction that feels more meaningful.

Creating a clearer relationship with cannabis can require real changes and, for some people, real sacrifices. If those changes are not something you are willing to make, letting go of cannabis may be the better decision. But if part of you still believes a healthier relationship with the plant is possible, Maslow’s hierarchy is a useful reference for reflecting on what is being paired with the cannabis. The more alignment someone creates across those areas of life, the clearer and more intentional their relationship with cannabis can become.

If you have been in this cycle or know someone who is looking to make changes, there is a free resource through the link in my bio that goes over the six key areas I’ve found most impactful in creating a clearer relationship with cannabis. No signup is required. by @philstille

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10 days ago

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a month ago

Talking to yourself has historically been viewed by society as a sign that something is wrong with you. Many of us learned to react to it with resistance or judgment, even though conscious, intentional self-talk is one of the best practices we can have with ourselves.

Traditional journaling never felt natural to me because I did not enjoy sitting down and writing everything out. Recording voice notes gave me another way in. I could speak freely, listen to what was actually going through my mind, and begin working through thoughts and beliefs that were difficult to recognize when they remained internal. I would also record video journal entries and rotate back and forth between the two practices, and it helped me tremendously.

One of the reasons I think recording is useful is that clicking the record button creates a different level of intention. There is something about knowing the thought is being captured that tends to help us speak more clearly, get more out, and process things further than we might when there is no paper in front of us or no recording device capturing it.

That does not mean this practice will be perfect for everyone. But for me, and pretty much everyone I have worked with who has started doing some version of it, recording intentional self-talk has been incredibly helpful. by @philstille

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a month ago

When cannabis feels like it is holding you back or weighing you down, much of the advice you hear will tell you to toughen up and quit. But for many people, the more useful move is to reflect honestly on what is behind the habit itself. Taking a walk and considering how you feel in your life more broadly is a useful place to start. Do your closest relationships lift you up or drain you? Do you feel fulfilled in your work, your sense of purpose, and your sense of self?

If there is disalignment in one or more of those areas, cannabis is going to amplify that sense of being weighed down. Taking time away from it can be helpful, and many people find real benefit in doing so. But we are all different, and it is possible to make headway in these areas without kicking the plant out of your life.

If there is an underlying sense of “meh” in any area of your life, where you spend the week looking forward to the weekend only for it to fly by and leave you feeling deflated going into the next week, cannabis is often going to accentuate that in how you feel during and after using it.

Before deciding that cannabis itself is the problem, take an honest look at what the plant is amplifying. As you begin making changes in the areas that feel stagnant, draining, or disconnected, your experience with cannabis can change too. You may still decide that taking a break or letting it go is right for you, but having a healthy and clear-headed relationship with the plant is also possible. by @philstille

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a month ago

A loud inner critic can feel incredibly real because the thoughts, beliefs, and negative framing behind it are associated with deeply embedded neural networks and pathways. When the same ways of thinking and interpreting ourselves are reinforced over and over through repetition, emotion, experience, and belief, those pathways become deeply established.

That is why the inner critic can sound so convincing. The thought does not always register as one possible interpretation. It can feel more like, “This is the story. How could anything else be the story?” The intensity of that experience reflects how strongly those patterns have been reinforced over time.

I find the neuroscience around this helpful because it makes the process of change understandable and tangible. These patterns were built through repeated emphasis, which means new patterns can also be built intentionally. When someone repeatedly responds to these moments in a different way, they begin forging and strengthening neural pathways in a new direction.

As those new pathways are reinforced, the pathways associated with the old pattern weaken through lack of use while the newer pathways become increasingly dominant. Over time, that changes what comes forward automatically. The benefits compound as the new way of thinking becomes more established and the old inner critic begins to dissipate. by @philstille

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2 months ago

In this clip from a recent hangout with my friend and brother Nate @nathangould, he shares how he overcame a fear of needles that had followed him for years.

For a long time, giving blood would send his nervous system into what felt like a full-blown panic. He would sweat through his shirt, get dizzy, and sometimes have multiple nurses around him trying to keep him upright. Consciously, he knew he was safe, which almost made the reaction more frustrating because he could never understand why his body responded so intensely.

Eventually, Nate started wondering whether he could approach that fear the same way he had approached other limiting beliefs and patterns in his life. He sat down in meditation and traced the reaction back to the earliest experience he could remember involving a needle in his arm. What came up was a surgery he had as a child, where he remembered being told to count backward from ten and then suddenly blacking out around four. Looking at the memory as an adult, he could recognize how scared and uncertain he had likely felt in that moment.

From there, he spent time working with the emotional charge around that experience, exploring how it may have served him and looking at the memory from perspectives he had never considered as a kid. Then, when he recently went in for his annual blood work, he warned the nurse about everything that normally happened. They were sitting there talking when he heard her cap the vial and realized she was already finished. No sweating through his shirt. No dizziness. No panic.

After years of having such an intense reaction, this recent experience helped remind Nate just how powerful the unconscious mind can be and how much can be operating outside of our normal day-to-day awareness. by @philstille

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2 months ago

A negative relationship with cannabis can be rewired for most people. While there are many ways to approach this idea and double-click on it, one of the simplest places to start is recognizing that we all inherited a conditioned mind. When paired with a psychoactive plant like cannabis, this is something worth reflecting on.

A conditioned mind is essentially the collection of beliefs, emotional patterns, assumptions, fears, and ways of seeing ourselves and the world that we have absorbed and developed throughout our lives, much of it without consciously choosing it. This is not inherently a bad thing. It’s just a thing, and a constant one.

When you pair cannabis with a conditioned mind that has never been intentionally reconditioned, experiences like foggy thinking, low motivation, poor follow-through, low drive, procrastination, or anxiety can become common. For some people that happens fairly quickly, while for others it may not become noticeable until years into a consistent relationship with cannabis.

Becoming aware of our inherited conditioning can give us a clearer understanding of what may actually need attention if we want to shift our relationship with cannabis and the effects we experience from the plant.

When attention shifts away from simply labeling cannabis as the culprit and toward looking at what the plant may be bringing into clearer view, positive headway can be made. This can be things like underlying dissonance around how we feel in our closest relationships, our sense of fulfillment or lack thereof in our work, or our vision for the future. From there, making intentional changes around things like sleep, nervous system regulation, screen time, boundaries, or relationships tends to create tangible changes in both daily life and the relationship with cannabis. by @philstille

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2 months ago

Demand for higher potency cannabis created an increasingly uncomfortable tension for Flavia toward the end of building Flow Kana. As the market kept rewarding stronger products, what the company was making began moving further away from what she personally wanted to consume.

What I found valuable in this part of our conversation was her willingness to acknowledge the tension that created for her as a founder. She was responding to what the dispensary market rewarded and what customers wanted to buy, while at the same time reaching a point where she could personally consume very few of the products the company was making.

There can be a real difference between what the market rewards and what someone may actually find supportive or enjoyable in their own relationship with cannabis. In our recent conversation, Flavia talks about how that disconnect stayed with her and eventually helped drive the intention behind the new company she started with her husband, FK+ @fkplus . by @philstille

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2 months ago

Cannabis can be genuinely helpful for a lot of people, but everybody is different. The range of experiences people have with different forms of cannabis is enormous, which is part of why I try not to overcomplicate the conversation or turn someone’s relationship with it into a rigid set of rules.

Someone I work with recently asked whether I had some kind of regimen with supplements or other things I track. My response was that I do not, because I do not want to approach life where I have to count macros and take something for every little thing. Clearly, there are people who benefit from supplements for specific reasons, but for someone simply trying to improve their life, becoming hyper-fixated on optimizing and measuring everything can become its own distraction.

I think the same tendency can show up with cannabis. We can become so focused on finding the right amount, the right frequency, or deciding whether we need a hard break that we lose sight of the broader context of our lives. What I have realized in my own life is that the more I have addressed the underlying layers that contribute to self-sabotage, the more naturally I am able to find my own rhythm. These layers of ourselves often show up in our level of fulfillment in our closest relationships, our sense of purpose in our work, and our own sense of self.

That is why whenever I speak to someone who has been back and forth with cannabis, I ask them to look honestly at what is happening in those areas. Often, that is where someone begins to uncover why they may be leaning on cannabis or using it to disconnect, even if they were not fully aware of it before.

As those parts of life begin to change, the relationship with cannabis often changes with them. For some people, that means developing a more intentional relationship with the plant. For others, the impulse to reach for it begins to dissolve naturally. by @philstille

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2 months ago