Feelings or lethargy, nausea, irritability and nights of insomnia as experienced during marijuana withdrawal can make the process very unpleasant and increase the likelihood of a relapse back to use. One of the best ways to alleviate the severity of marijuana withdrawal symptoms is through regular and intense exercise.

Many tens of thousands seek professional treatment help for their marijuana addictions each year in America. There is no shame in getting help when you can’t do it on your own, and it’s a far more courageous and sensible thing to do than ignoring the reality of your addiction, and continuing to lower your quality of life and health through ever more heavy marijuana usage.

But when you do make the decision to get help…where do you go, and what do you need?

Here is a basic overview of some of the available treatment options.

12 Steps Group Meetings, Such as NA or MA (Marijuana Anonymous)

These free peer support meetings can be a great venue to explore your compulsion to use and to gain insight and strength towards recovery. Learning what you need to know from other people also dealing with an addiction to marijuana or other drugs of abuse.

Like AA, marijuana and narcotics anonymous use the 12 steps to sobriety as a philosophical framework to recovery, and as with AA, you must subscribe to certain core beliefs for the steps to work. You can’t fake it, and you either believe in and the process and approach it with commitment or dedication, or you don’t, and if you don’t it's not likely going to work for you.

Individual Therapy

One on one sessions with an experienced addictions therapist or psychologist can also help a lot as you grapple with getting and staying off marijuana. These can be expensive, but getting some individual attention and help with your particular issues does have real value, and the insights gained from a few sessions can offer you a very solid foundation for your attempt at getting clean.

Working with a therapist you should expect to explore any personal issues that lead you to seek such intoxication, and also explore why it is that you turn to marijuana as a coping mechanism. You may also want to explore any unresolved personal issues that linger and contribute to your drug seeking behaviors.

A trained therapist can also help you to devise a tailored relapse prevention plan, help you to identify those things in your life that led you to crave marijuana and help you to understand just what you can do to beat these temptations.

Group Support Therapy

A generally more affordable alternative to individual therapy is the participation in a peer support group. Ideally, you will join a group of people with similar world views and facing similar life challenges, and explore together what works and what doesn’t on the road to long term recovery and sobriety.

Group therapy generally occurs with 6-10 others, and there is most commonly a trained group leader who guides the sessions and offers insights where appropriate. Group sessions offer a number of benefits to addicts in recovery. Firstly, no one in this world is quicker to spot dishonesty or denial faster than another addict in recovery. You may get away with a lot of your manipulations (even the one's you're not aware of) in a lot of places, but in group they're going to call you on it, and you can’t deny their expertise either!

You can also learn effective and concrete strategies for staying clean. Exploring together what seems to help gives you some real world workable options to try when you feel you can’t go on anymore. Additionally, recovering together with a group of people you can get to know pretty intimately can offer a lot of encouragement and inspiration. Nothing keeps you going more than watching someone that you know struggles as you do, break free from addiction and really reap the benefits of sobriety.

Drug Rehab

A lot of people just can’t do it on their own, and either can't do it on an outpatient basis, or are just so tired of their problem that they want to start with the most intensive and effective therapeutic option to recovery.

Getting into a drug rehab program offers a lot, and although it is disruptive and it is expensive, sometimes you just need to get out of the environment of abuse, get into a safe and sober environment and start to learn what you'll need to know to stay sober over the long term.

In drug rehab you will get a comprehensive blend of individual and group therapy, MA style 12 steps meetings and drug and relapse prevention education. You also get the time away from abuse to gain self awareness over those things in your life that lead you to need to use. Without outside distractions you have the opportunity to focus all of your attentions on getting better, without all of the everyday concerns that normally distract your attention.

Drug rehab is a big commitment, but it also offers the best chance at recovery and a long future without marijuana.

Get Some Help

There is no shame whatsoever in getting help when you can’t do it on your own. Marijuana is a very addictive drug, and the cravings and temptations to use can overwhelm even the best of intentions. Through therapies and support, you can learn what you need to know to get off and stay off marijuana for good.

Marijuana is no big deal…if you only smoke it in real moderation and if you wait until you are 21 to do so.

Unfortunately, a lot of teens are smoking it in great quantities…a lot of teens are addicted to the drug. Also, since by definition teens are not 21 years of age, they are doing great harms to their still developing minds.

If parents can keep kids from using the drug until after the age of 18 the risks that they will ever have a real problem with it decline dramatically. Additionally, since the risks of mental illness related to marijuana usage rise greatly with earlier ages of experimentation, the younger teens start smoking, the greater the damage done.

Prevention is the key, and preempting a problem before it emerges is always the best course of action, but even after experimentation ensues, the earlier you intervene and you earlier you stop that drug use, the better the eventual outcome, and if needed, the easier the treatment.

What are the Teen Specific Risks of Marijuana Usage?

Addiction

Teens seem especially vulnerable to the addictive properties of marijuana, and with the strength of today's marijuana, too many teens get caught up in what begins as casual experimentation and ends us in dependency and pain.

Academic Performance

Teens who smoke marijuana don’t do as well in school. Marijuana smoking teens are less likely to finish high school, less likely to get good grades and less likely to go to college. Smoking marijuana can seriously derail academic performance, and during a time in life when school success has such a great influence on later life success.

The teen years are a time of exploration, a time to have a lot of fun, but also a time when your job is to go to school, get good grades and move on into successful adulthood. Marijuana lowers the chances.

Marijuana decreases cognitive performance for about 24 hours after it is smoked; decreases the ability to consolidate memories and concentrate, and on tests of mathematical and verbal reasoning, marijuana smokers perform significantly worse. If you smoke daily, you are never as smart as you would otherwise be and even if you are still a motivated student (something that seems less likely with greater marijuana usage) you are not as able to perform well, not as able to learn what you need to know.

The damage done is not permanent and your mind can recover, but at the same time you can't get those years back, and if you do poorly in high school there can be long lasting and serious life consequences.

The Risks of Mental Illness

The earlier you start using marijuana, the greater your risks of suffering from psychosis later in life. Teens who smoke before the age of 18 have 2-3 times the chances of experiencing a schizophrenic like condition in their 20's. Marijuana use also seems linked with later in life depression and anxiety disorders, although the link has been less casually proven.

Marijuana usage is also linked with increased rates of teen depression, especially depression in teen girls. Teen girls who do develop marijuana prompted depression are very likely to self medicate their condition with ever more drug and alcohol abuse, further compounding the problem.

Psychosocial Development

Marijuana decreases your ability to learn, and what you do learn tends to be state dependant learning. Essentially, you can learn while high on marijuana, but you need to be high once again to retrieve that information and to make full use of stored marijuana consolidated memory.

Marijuana also blunts emotional experiences. While high on marijuana you do not accurately experience social and emotional challenges that are essential for full emotional and social development. If you are high on marijuana enough of the time, you never learn how to deal with the challenges and social situations of life, and you never mature into a real developmentally appropriate adult. The earlier you start smoking the greater the delay, and the more you smoke the less social learning that is accomplished. If a teen starts smoking at 13 and becomes a daily user throughout their teens, even where they to ultimately stop in their 20's, they would present in many ways with the emotional and psychosocial maturity of a 13 year old.