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Comment by stef25 | Hacker News Reader

Not 100% convinced about it, but I wanted to say: that I stopped smoking pot.

Told myself well in advance that I'd quit 11 months in to my girlfriend's pregnancy (EDIT - obviously the residual effects are still there. I quit 8 months in to her pregnancy. This is what drugs do, kids.)

Since then (now almost a year later) my ability to comprehend and concentrate on technical things has improved a lot. I've learn things in web development that I just couldn't back then. Probably due to the fact I was a daily smoker for almost 20 years.

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11 months into the pregnancy you quit? isnt 9 months the usual gestation period?

It's actually 10 months (40 weeks).

I don't know where the 9 months myth came from since I also believed on it. I just learned recently with my first baby.

Only February contains exactly four weeks (28 days), and only in non-leap years.

The average month 4.345 weeks:

365 / 7 = 52.142 / 12 = 4.345

Therefore:

10 months * 4.345 = 43.45 weeks

9 months * 4.345 = 39.105 week

Neither is 40 weeks. And anyway, 40 weeks is only an approximation as it is common for births to occur from 37 to 42 weeks from the first day of the woman's last menstrual period.

Reminds me of this: https://xkcd.com/1530/

(But maybe with a seal or llama)

Curious - did you stop 100% or do you still smoke occasionally?

Very very occasionally, like when the wife & kids are out of town and I have the place to myself. I've smoked maybe 5 joints since I quit. Unfortunately I still indulge in other substances more than I'd like to.

First: props for stopping smoking pot.

Next ... 11 months in to your girlfriends pregnancy? How does that work exactly (since full term is usually 9 months)?

Give him a break, he's still recovering ;)

I gotta disagree with you here. I smoke a little bit every day and I've gone through periods of a month or two without smoking and the only difference I found was that it was easier to get up in the morning if I didn't smoke the day before. My cognitive abilities don't seem to be impaired at all. It's possible that smoking pot for you was associated with other lifestyle affects (like sleep quality/duration) that were negatively affecting your cognitive efficiency.

> My cognitive abilities don't seem to be impaired at all.

do you use some sort of external metrics to verify that?

using the same brain for smoking pot and determining that smoking pot causes no impairment isn't exactly a well-designed experiment.

I never claimed to be conducting an experiment. This whole thread is opinion-based, so I'm not sure why you are holding me to any kind of scientific standard.

I was simply asserting that I could perceive no difference in my abilities between times that I smoked and the periods of time where I didn't. At least not enough where I could make a statement similar to the OP where he detected a significant improvement in cognitive functioning after quitting.

No, but you did essentially shoot down someone else's statement about what led to their growth. You can't have it both ways. You can't shoot them down and assert they are wrong because your experience disagrees with it, then say it is all just opinion, man. Either respect their opinion about their own life experience or defend your assertion that they are wrong with something stronger than personal opinion.

I take your point. I did not intend to shoot them down or suggest that his personal growth was imaginary.

However, I think you missed the main point of my post, which was to suggest that perhaps there was a comorbid reason for his perceived cognitive deficiencies that were not a direct result of marijuana, but related to known side effects, such as REM sleep disruption.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4660250/

It comes across like your point is "Stop implying that I, personally, need to quit toking every day." Because the idea that drugs impair cognitive performance is hardly novel.

It sounds like you feel personally threatened and you feel some need to shoot down the well established scientific fact that drugs impair cognitive function.

There may be more going on in his life than marijuana impairing cognitive function, but you have absolutely no basis whatsoever to assert that they are wrong about their own life and there is some other explanation for the cognitive effects they experienced.

How do you mitigate the effects of marijuana on REM? I (mostly) quit even light drinking because I need a good nights sleep to function.

I don't smoke much anymore, but more because I don't feel like I have a safe place to kick back and smoke than anything else. When I do smoke I feel tired the next day.

Vaporize. Smoking is bad for you, and dehydrates you.

I'm actually sleeping a lot less than when I was smoking.

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