Phil Stille

Phil Stille What we bring to cannabis shapes our relationship with it. https://clearheadedhighs.xyz/about
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08/20/2026

In this clip from a recent hangout with my friend and brother Nate Nathan Gould, he shares how he overcame a fear of needles that had followed him for years.

For a long time, giving blood would send his nervous system into what felt like a full-blown panic. He would sweat through his shirt, get dizzy, and sometimes have multiple nurses around him trying to keep him upright. Consciously, he knew he was safe, which almost made the reaction more frustrating because he could never understand why his body responded so intensely.

Eventually, Nate started wondering whether he could approach that fear the same way he had approached other limiting beliefs and patterns in his life. He sat down in meditation and traced the reaction back to the earliest experience he could remember involving a needle in his arm. What came up was a surgery he had as a child, where he remembered being told to count backward from ten and then suddenly blacking out around four. Looking at the memory as an adult, he could recognize how scared and uncertain he had likely felt in that moment.

From there, he spent time working with the emotional charge around that experience, exploring how it may have served him and looking at the memory from perspectives he had never considered as a kid. Then, when he recently went in for his annual blood work, he warned the nurse about everything that normally happened. They were sitting there talking when he heard her cap the vial and realized she was already finished. No sweating through his shirt. No dizziness. No panic.

After years of having such an intense reaction, this recent experience helped remind Nate just how powerful the unconscious mind can be and how much can be operating outside of our normal day-to-day awareness.

08/18/2026

A negative relationship with cannabis can be rewired for most people. While there are many ways to approach this idea and double-click on it, one of the simplest places to start is recognizing that we all inherited a conditioned mind. When paired with a psychoactive plant like cannabis, this is something worth reflecting on.

A conditioned mind is essentially the collection of beliefs, emotional patterns, assumptions, fears, and ways of seeing ourselves and the world that we have absorbed and developed throughout our lives, much of it without consciously choosing it. This is not inherently a bad thing. It’s just a thing, and a constant one.

When you pair cannabis with a conditioned mind that has never been intentionally reconditioned, experiences like foggy thinking, low motivation, poor follow-through, low drive, procrastination, or anxiety can become common. For some people that happens fairly quickly, while for others it may not become noticeable until years into a consistent relationship with cannabis.

Becoming aware of our inherited conditioning can give us a clearer understanding of what may actually need attention if we want to shift our relationship with cannabis and the effects we experience from the plant.

When attention shifts away from simply labeling cannabis as the culprit and toward looking at what the plant may be bringing into clearer view, positive headway can be made. This can be things like underlying dissonance around how we feel in our closest relationships, our sense of fulfillment or lack thereof in our work, or our vision for the future. From there, making intentional changes around things like sleep, nervous system regulation, screen time, boundaries, or relationships tends to create tangible changes in both daily life and the relationship with cannabis.

08/12/2026

Demand for higher potency cannabis created an increasingly uncomfortable tension for Flavia toward the end of building Flow Kana. As the market kept rewarding stronger products, what the company was making began moving further away from what she personally wanted to consume.

What I found valuable in this part of our conversation was her willingness to acknowledge the tension that created for her as a founder. She was responding to what the dispensary market rewarded and what customers wanted to buy, while at the same time reaching a point where she could personally consume very few of the products the company was making.

There can be a real difference between what the market rewards and what someone may actually find supportive or enjoyable in their own relationship with cannabis. In our recent conversation, Flavia talks about how that disconnect stayed with her and eventually helped drive the intention behind the new company she started with her husband, FK+ FK+ .

08/11/2026

Cannabis can be genuinely helpful for a lot of people, but everybody is different. The range of experiences people have with different forms of cannabis is enormous, which is part of why I try not to overcomplicate the conversation or turn someone’s relationship with it into a rigid set of rules.

Someone I work with recently asked whether I had some kind of regimen with supplements or other things I track. My response was that I do not, because I do not want to approach life where I have to count macros and take something for every little thing. Clearly, there are people who benefit from supplements for specific reasons, but for someone simply trying to improve their life, becoming hyper-fixated on optimizing and measuring everything can become its own distraction.

I think the same tendency can show up with cannabis. We can become so focused on finding the right amount, the right frequency, or deciding whether we need a hard break that we lose sight of the broader context of our lives. What I have realized in my own life is that the more I have addressed the underlying layers that contribute to self-sabotage, the more naturally I am able to find my own rhythm. These layers of ourselves often show up in our level of fulfillment in our closest relationships, our sense of purpose in our work, and our own sense of self.

That is why whenever I speak to someone who has been back and forth with cannabis, I ask them to look honestly at what is happening in those areas. Often, that is where someone begins to uncover why they may be leaning on cannabis or using it to disconnect, even if they were not fully aware of it before.

As those parts of life begin to change, the relationship with cannabis often changes with them. For some people, that means developing a more intentional relationship with the plant. For others, the impulse to reach for it begins to dissolve naturally.

08/02/2026

Journaling has always been a useful way to process thoughts and keep track of what is happening internally, but video documentation offers another form of reflection that can be even more powerful. Writing things down still has plenty of value, though for some people it is much easier to sit on a park bench or in their car, set a phone beside them, and talk honestly about what they are thinking and experiencing.

Video captures more than the words themselves. It also preserves how you were speaking, the energy you carried, your body language, and the way you seemed to relate to yourself at that point in time. This can be especially helpful for people who are actively trying to change or work toward something in their lives.

Six months later, the inner critic may return and try to convince you that nothing is working or that you have not made as much progress as you thought. At that point, you can go back and see the difference for yourself. You can hear how you used to speak, notice how you carried yourself, and compare it with who you are now. If you have remained accountable to the changes you were trying to make, there will almost certainly be something valuable there for you to see.

That record gives you something tangible to work with when the old negative voice becomes convincing again. Instead of relying only on how you feel in that moment, you can see the change and remind yourself that the work is doing something. Then you keep going.

07/29/2026

In this clip from a recent conversation about her story and the story behind her company FK+ FK+ , Flavia shares what it was like to be judged for using cannabis while competing as an athlete.

At the time, many of the people around her viewed cannabis through the usual stereotypes. Some called her a drug addict or a bad influence, even though she was avoiding alcohol, waking up early, training, and taking her athletic commitments seriously. For her, cannabis was not connected to partying or abandoning responsibility, but that distinction did not seem to matter to the people who had already decided what cannabis use meant.

Flavia talks about how those experiences stayed with her and became part of what continues to drive her today. Being misunderstood for choosing cannabis over habits that were far more accepted socially gave her a firsthand understanding of how strong the stigma around the plant can be.

Full conversation is linked on my bio.

07/27/2026

If you smoke w**d daily, scroll on your phone every night, and regularly wake up feeling foggy or slow to get going, you might find that it is actually the scrolling creating most of that fog or slowness. If you have felt cannabis is the culprit here, that is understandable considering much of society’s perspective on the plant. However, if you shift your focus for a while to how much, when, and what kind of content you consume, you may notice the fog lifting pretty quickly without changing the cannabis part.

Reducing nighttime scrolling can be difficult, especially when the phone has become the main way you wind down before bed. The same adjustment is important if scrolling or screen time is one of the first things you reach for after waking. Something as simple as charging your phone in another room or leaving it out of arm’s reach overnight can make the difference between intending to cut back and actually doing it. You could also begin by replacing visual stimulation at night with something you can listen to, such as a podcast about a subject you are curious about, comedy, business, self-development, or something connected to your creative interests.

The type of content matters too. Listening to something that leaves you tense, agitated, or mentally activated works against the point, since the goal is letting your mind settle, not giving it something new to chew on. Giving yourself some time in the morning before looking at a screen also allows your mind to wake up without immediately being flooded with new information.

Whether someone’s goal is to take a break from cannabis or create a more intentional relationship with it, making these adjustments can help tremendously. It can be a challenging area to change for a lot of people, especially when scrolling has become part of both the nightly and morning routine, but it is worth the effort and whatever boundaries are needed.

07/25/2026

Many of the beliefs people still carry about cannabis were formed through decades of propaganda rather than an honest look at the plant, the science, or the experiences of the people using it. Even as laws and public attitudes continue to change, those old ideas still influence how cannabis is discussed by families, politicians, and society more broadly.

In this clip of a conversation I had with Dr. Riley Kirk Riley 🌳💚 , she explains how strongly the effects of Re**er Madness still show up in her work with legislators. She has sat in front of political groups and watched people dismiss or laugh at legitimate medical applications of cannabis that would be treated seriously if the same conversation were about a pharmaceutical drug.

We also discuss a passage from her book, Re**er Wellness, about approaching cannabis with a blank slate rather than filtering every fact through what we were taught the plant does to people. If a pharmaceutical drug relieved pain, improved mood, and reduced inflammation in the way cannabis does, with relatively few side effects, it would likely be widely prescribed. It would probably even be advertised in a Super Bowl commercial.

Cannabis deserves to be considered with the same level of seriousness and curiosity as any other substance used for health or quality of life. That requires separating what the plant actually offers from the cultural story that has surrounded it for generations.

07/24/2026

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