What is a natural high, and can you be naturally high? How to get high without weed or drugs: the runner's high, why time with people you love feels so good, how to increase dopamine naturally with music and cold water, what holotropic and Wim Hof breathing actually do, and how long before you feel a natural high after quitting weed.
The full answer
How do you get a natural high?
How do you get a natural high? You give your body a reason to make its own, because it already makes cannabis-like keys and dopamine, and a long run, time with people you love, music and cold water have all been studied for this. I'm Justin Hartfield, and I've spent twenty-five years in cannabis.
This is what really blew my mind about cannabis. Long before you ever try the plant, your body is already dosing you.
What is a natural high?
What is a natural high? It's a high your own chemistry makes, and cannabis itself is the proof, because THC gets you high by fitting a lock in your brain.
But that lock is hundreds of millions of years older than the plant.
So it was built for something your own body makes. You've been high your entire life, and nobody's told you.
Can you be naturally high?
Can you be naturally high? Your own cannabinoids were at work from your very first day.
The first dose comes with your first meal. Breast milk carries 2-AG, one of your keys. Newborn mice that couldn't use it barely fed, stopped growing, and some even died.
And your food supplies the raw material. Your keys are built from fat. In mice raised without enough omega-3s, the locks in the brain's mood centers stopped working.
How to get high without weed
How do you get high without weed? One way with real evidence behind it starts with your own two feet.
You keep making these keys for the rest of your life, and you can make more. A long run is one way. After forty-five minutes, both of your endocannabinoid keys rise in your blood, and runners still felt the high when scientists artificially blocked their opioid receptors.
Why does being with people you love feel so good?
Why does being with people you love feel so good?
Time with people you love may raise these keys too. In mice, company raises anandamide in the brain's reward center. Block the lock there, and company stops being rewarding.
In those mice, it was oxytocin, the bonding hormone, that set the anandamide off.
How to increase dopamine naturally
How do you increase dopamine naturally? Music you love is one way, since brain scans have caught dopamine being released at the peak of a favorite song. And in 2019 in Barcelona, twenty-seven people listened to music on three different days, after a pill that raises dopamine, a pill that blocks it, or a placebo, and their pleasure in the music rose and fell with their dopamine.
In 2000 in Prague, young men who sat up to their necks in cold water, fourteen degrees Celsius, for an hour had two hundred and fifty percent more dopamine in their blood, which isn't the same as more in the brain. An hour in cold water is a lab protocol, so start with seconds, and never go in alone.
Holotropic breathing and Wim Hof: why breathwork feels like a high
Holotropic breathing and Wim Hof breathing feel like a high for a plainer reason. Fast, deep breathing blows off carbon dioxide, and with less of it the blood vessels in your brain narrow: in a 2003 scan study of nine people, blood flow to the brain fell as their carbon dioxide fell. That's a big part of the lightheaded rush, and it's why you never do it in water or behind the wheel.
How long before you feel a natural high after quitting weed?
And if you've quit weed, how long before you feel a natural high again? The part we can measure is the locks. In 2012, daily smokers had fewer CB1 locks in the outer layer of the brain, and after about four weeks without cannabis on a research ward, most of that layer was back to normal. A 2016 study saw the gap close within two days.
That's the clock for the locks, so a month is a fair test before you decide being sober feels flat.
So a natural high is your own chemistry, the same system THC borrows, and you can turn it up without the plant. The whole film is on my site, linked below, and next, whether your brain can make its own painkiller.
What the studies show
Every claim in this answer, the study behind it, who was studied, and who paid for the research. “None listed” means the paper names no funder.
