Cannabis Makes You Lazy – At Least For A While, Anyway

Brooke James

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Smoking cannabis is said to make you lazy and demotivated - and dozens of television shows showing lazy stoners lying around in filthy, smoky apartments seem to back it up as a fact. But has there been any evidence at all in the real world that support such claims?

Now there is. There are studies that worked on investigating the claim that smoking cannabis can lead to reduced motivation, and findings showed that when you give people the equivalent of one spliff, under controlled conditions in a laboratory, they are less willing to work for money - in short, they are less motivated, at least in the short term.

The studies showed that recently smoking cannabis will reduce your motivation in the short-term. However, it does not affect so much in the long term, either - IFL Science noted that as long as you stop smoking for 12 hours, your motivation may not be impaired.

The popularity of the cannabis began in the late 1950s and 1960s, when academic reports regarding its "amotivational syndrome appeare." Clinicians then stated that regular use of marijuana could contribute to the development of "more passive, inward turning, amotivational personality characteristics." What made this report unreliable, however, is that the reports simply relied on observations of cannabis users and their lazy behaviors.

Another early research into the short-term effects of the cannabis also surprisingly found both motivating and demotivation effects, but the research was poorly controlled and rather bizarre, like getting people stoned and having them make stools as quickly as possible.

There are also obvious limitations to the study, including the small study sizes and the cross-sectional nature that only investigated the participants at one point in time - an improved study using a longitudinal design would allow for a better understanding regarding cannabis consumption effects and draw stronger conclusions at the same time.