The Person You Become When You Use Isn’t You. Here’s What’s Actually Happening in Your Brain

How marijuana can turn you into someone you don’t recognize and make you destroy what you love most.

I need to tell you something about weed that nobody wants to hear.

It doesn’t make you chill. It doesn’t help your anxiety. It doesn’t make you more yourself.

It makes you cruel. Impulsive. Reckless. It makes you say things that aren’t true and do things that aren’t you. It turns you into someone who hurts people you’d die for when you’re sober.

I know because I became that person. And I watched myself destroy something I loved while my brain was too hijacked to stop.

This isn’t anti drug propaganda. This is neuroscience. This is what actually happens in your brain when THC takes over. And this is why the person you become when you’re high isn’t actually you.

The Lie We Tell Ourselves About Weed

“It helps me relax.”

“It calms my anxiety.”

“It makes me more creative.”

“It helps my ADHD.”

“It helps me cope with trauma.”

We tell ourselves weed is medicine. We tell ourselves it’s harmless. We tell ourselves it’s not like “real” drugs.

Here’s what we don’t tell ourselves: It’s shutting down the part of our brain that makes us human.

What THC Actually Does to Your Brain

When you smoke weed, THC floods your brain within seconds. It binds to cannabinoid receptors throughout your nervous system, but here’s the part that matters:

It hammers your prefrontal cortex into submission.

Your prefrontal cortex is your executive function center. It’s responsible for:

• Impulse control

• Decision making

• Emotional regulation

• Consequence evaluation

• Empathy and perspective taking

• Aligning actions with values

That’s the part of your brain that stops you before you say something cruel. The part that considers consequences before you act. The part that remembers who you actually are and what actually matters.

THC doesn’t just relax this part of your brain. It sedates it. Sometimes completely.

“You’re not more yourself when you’re high. You’re less yourself. You’re operating without the very thing that makes you who you are.”

The ADHD Brain on THC: When Bad Gets Worse

If you have ADHD, your prefrontal cortex is already struggling. Your executive function is already compromised. You’re already fighting impulsivity, emotional dysregulation, and time blindness.

Now add THC to that equation.

Your ADHD brain has dopamine dysregulation. You’re constantly seeking stimulation to get your dopamine to normal levels. Weed floods you with artificial dopamine temporarily, which feels like relief. Finally, your brain works. Finally, you can focus. Finally, you feel normal.

But here’s the trap: THC destroys your brain’s ability to produce and regulate dopamine naturally. You need more and more weed just to get to baseline. Your ADHD symptoms when sober become exponentially worse.

The impulsivity that ADHD gives you? THC removes your last line of defense against it. The emotional dysregulation you already struggle with? THC makes it impossible to self soothe. The rejection sensitive dysphoria many of us with ADHD experience? THC turns it into full blown paranoid delusion.

“You think you’re medicating your ADHD. You’re actually throwing gasoline on a fire.”

Your time blindness gets worse. Hours disappear. You miss deadlines, appointments, entire conversations. Your working memory, already compromised by ADHD, becomes basically non functional.

And the cruel part? You can’t see it happening. Your ADHD brain already struggles with self awareness. Add THC and you lose the ability to recognize how impaired you actually are.

The CPTSD Brain on THC: When Trauma Meets Chemical Chaos

If you have CPTSD, your nervous system is already dysregulated. You’re already hypervigilant, already struggling with emotional flashbacks, already fighting to stay in your window of tolerance.

THC doesn’t calm your trauma. It weaponizes it.

Your hypervigilance becomes paranoia. That constant scanning for danger? Now you’re finding it everywhere, creating threats that don’t exist, seeing betrayal in innocent actions.

Your emotional flashbacks become unnavigable storms. Without your prefrontal cortex online to help you recognize “this is a flashback, not reality,” you’re completely lost in the trauma response. You can’t tell past from present. Everything feels like danger.

Your window of tolerance shrinks to nothing. The zone where you can handle stress without going into fight, flight, freeze, or fawn? Gone. Everything triggers you. Everything feels like too much.

“CPTSD plus THC equals living in a constant state of triggered with no ability to regulate.”

Dissociation increases. You’re already prone to checking out when overwhelmed. THC makes that automatic. You lose hours, days, entire experiences to the fog.

And here’s what nobody tells you: Regular weed use with CPTSD creates new trauma. Every time you lose control, every time you hurt someone while high, every time you wake up to damage you’ve done, you’re adding to your trauma load. You’re creating more to heal from.

The Impulsivity Problem Nobody Talks About

Here’s what happens when your prefrontal cortex goes offline:

Every thought becomes an action. Every feeling becomes a fact. Every impulse becomes unstoppable.

That angry thought you’d normally dismiss? You say it out loud.

That paranoid suspicion you’d normally recognize as irrational? You believe it completely.

That cruel comeback you’d normally swallow? It comes flying out of your mouth.

You lose the pause between stimulus and response. The space where choice lives. The moment where your values usually kick in.

You become pure reaction. No filter. No brake pedal. No consideration.

And the worst part? In the moment, it feels justified. It feels true. It feels like you’re just “being honest” or “standing up for yourself.”

You’re not. You’re just high and your brain’s quality control department is closed for business.

Why You Say Things You Don’t Mean

When I was high, I said things that make me sick to remember. Cruel things. Accusations that weren’t true. Names I can’t take back. Words designed to hurt.

These weren’t my hidden thoughts finally coming out. This wasn’t “in vino veritas” or whatever bullshit people say about substances revealing truth.

This was my brain on THC, grabbing whatever ammunition it could find and firing without thinking.

Here’s what’s actually happening:

THC disrupts your brain’s ability to regulate emotions. Your amygdala (fear/anger center) gets hyperactive while your prefrontal cortex (reasoning center) gets suppressed. You’re all feeling, no thinking.

Your brain loses context. Past, present, and future blur together. Old wounds feel fresh. Future fears feel imminent. Everything feels urgent and extreme.

Your empathy circuits go offline. The part of your brain that considers how your words affect others? Not working. You literally lose the ability to perspective take.

Your memory becomes selective. Your brain, flooded with THC, can’t accurately recall positive memories or experiences. It only grabs the negative, the fearful, the angry.

“You’re not revealing hidden truths when you’re high. You’re operating with half your brain tied behind your back.”

The Paranoia Rage Pipeline

Let me tell you about a specific pattern that weed creates, especially if you have trauma:

First comes the paranoia. Your high brain starts creating threats that don’t exist. They’re cheating. They’re lying. They’re going to leave. They don’t really love you.

Then comes the interrogation. You need answers. You need reassurance. You need them to prove the paranoid thoughts wrong. But nothing they say is enough because your brain can’t process reassurance properly.

Then comes the rage. When they can’t fix your paranoid spiral, when they get frustrated with your accusations, when they try to set a boundary, you explode.

And it feels righteous in the moment. It feels like you’re defending yourself. It feels like they’re the problem.

You’re not defending anything. You’re having a chemically induced paranoid episode and taking it out on someone who probably just wanted to watch Netflix with you.

The Obsessive Loop From Hell

Here’s something specific that happens with regular weed use that nobody warned me about:

You get stuck in loops. Obsessive, intrusive, destructive loops.

One thought, usually your worst fear or deepest insecurity, plays on repeat. Your high brain can’t shift gears. Can’t distract. Can’t apply logic. Can’t self soothe.

For those of us with ADHD, this is especially brutal. We’re already prone to rumination and hyperfixation. Add THC and it becomes inescapable. That thought loop becomes your entire reality for hours.

With CPTSD, these loops often center on trauma. Past betrayals. Fear of abandonment. Hypervigilance about being hurt again. The weed makes you unable to pull yourself out of the trauma spiral.

So you do what every high person does: You try to fix it externally.

You send 47 texts. You demand answers to questions that don’t have answers. You need reassurance that no amount of reassurance can provide. You spiral harder with every response that doesn’t magically fix your loop.

“The person on the receiving end is watching you lose your mind in real time, and there’s nothing they can do to help because the problem is in your brain, not the relationship.”

The Morning After: When Your Brain Comes Back Online

The cruelest part about weed is the clarity that comes when you’re sober.

You wake up and your prefrontal cortex boots back up. Suddenly you can see clearly. You remember what you said. What you did. How you acted.

And the shame hits like a freight train.

Because now you can see it wasn’t you. But it was you. You said those words. You sent those texts. You did that damage.

The high version of you doesn’t feel like you because it isn’t fully you. It’s you operating without crucial brain functions. But the consequences? Those are all yours to own.

For those of us with ADHD, the shame is amplified by rejection sensitive dysphoria. We feel the rejection (real or imagined) from our behavior at a cellular level. It’s not just shame. It’s agony.

With CPTSD, this shame becomes part of our trauma narrative. More evidence that we’re broken, toxic, unloveable. More proof that we destroy everything we touch.

Why “It’s Just Weed” Is Killing Your Relationships

Every time you get high and act out, you’re training the people around you that you’re unsafe.

Their nervous system starts bracing when they smell weed on you. They start walking on eggshells, waiting for the switch to flip. They start protecting themselves from the person you become.

And you? You’re too high to notice the distance growing. Too high to see them flinching. Too high to recognize you’re becoming someone they need protection from.

“You can love someone with your whole heart and still traumatize them with your addiction.”

The Long Term Personality Changes Nobody Mentions

Regular weed use doesn’t just change you when you’re high. It changes your baseline personality.

Your sober irritability increases. Your emotional regulation gets worse even when you’re not using. Your anxiety, the thing you were trying to treat, gets more severe.

For ADHD brains, executive function gets progressively worse. Task initiation becomes impossible. Time management disappears. The ability to follow through on anything evaporates.

For CPTSD brains, the window of tolerance keeps shrinking. You need weed to handle any stress at all. Without it, everything feels overwhelming, threatening, too much.

Your brain, constantly flooded with THC, forgets how to produce and regulate its own neurotransmitters. You need weed just to feel normal. And normal keeps getting redefined as more anxious, more paranoid, more reactive.

You become someone you don’t recognize, even when you’re sober.

What Actually Happens When You Quit

The first few weeks are hell. Your brain, used to external cannabinoids, has forgotten how to function without them. Everything feels raw. Too bright. Too loud. Too much.

For ADHD brains, the executive dysfunction feels unbearable at first. You can’t focus on anything. Can’t start anything. Can’t complete anything. Your brain is desperately trying to relearn how to produce dopamine naturally.

For CPTSD brains, every trauma symptom gets temporarily worse. Hypervigilance spikes. Emotional flashbacks increase. Your nervous system is trying to recalibrate without its chemical crutch.

But then something shifts.

Your prefrontal cortex starts coming back online consistently. You feel the pause between thought and action returning. You catch yourself before you say something cruel. You recognize paranoid thoughts as thoughts, not facts.

You start recognizing yourself again.

The person who values kindness. Who thinks before speaking. Who can sit with discomfort without exploding. Who can love without destroying.

That person was always there. They were just locked in a room while THC ran the show.

The Truth About Addiction and Behavior

Addiction doesn’t reveal who you really are. It reveals who you become when your brain’s executive function is compromised.

The cruel things you say when you’re high aren’t your hidden truths. They’re your unregulated thoughts without the filter of values, empathy, and consequence awareness.

The paranoid accusations aren’t your intuition. They’re your fear center firing without your logic center to evaluate reality.

The rage isn’t your authentic anger. It’s your emotional dysregulation without the capacity to self soothe or perspective take.

“You’re not a bad person with good intentions. You’re a good person with a compromised brain.”

What You Do With This Information

If you recognize yourself in this, here’s what matters:

Stop calling it medicine if it’s making you sick.

Stop saying it helps your anxiety if it’s creating more.

Stop saying it helps your ADHD if it’s making executive function worse.

Stop saying it helps your trauma if it’s creating new wounds.

Stop pretending the person you become when you’re high is revealing some deeper truth.

That person isn’t you. But the damage they do is real. The people they hurt don’t get to separate “high you” from “real you” when they’re trying to heal from what you said.

You can’t undo what you’ve done while high. But you can stop creating more damage.

You can choose to keep your prefrontal cortex online.

You can choose to remain yourself.

You can choose to stop letting THC turn you into someone who destroys what they love.

The Bottom Line

I hurt people I loved when I was high. Said things I didn’t mean. Accused them of things that weren’t true.

That wasn’t my authentic self finally being expressed. That was my brain with its humanity switch turned off.

The person you become when you use isn’t you. It’s you without the very mechanisms that make you who you are.

And if you keep choosing to become that person, eventually the people you love won’t be able to tell the difference.

They’ll just know they’re not safe.

And they’ll be right.

“Every time you get high knowing what it does to you, you’re choosing temporary relief over permanent relationships. You’re choosing a few hours of numbness over a lifetime of connection.”

The weed will always be there tomorrow.

The people you love might not be.

—Cody Taymore

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