What To Do When Your Kratom Experience Is Not Good
When you read online about how good kratom is, you’ll invariably get reviews, guides, and articles, telling you how good it is.
You’ll be told about all the benefits of kratom, how it can calm you down, cheer you up, and balance you out. You’ll hear how it can remove physical pain, and also be great for opiate withdrawal symptoms.
You’ll rarely hear about the bad experiences though. So what I’m going to do here is talk to you about my own experiences with kratom against the experiences of kratom that a friend had after I recommended it to them. They weren’t great, and I want to go through what happened and explain why that happened, and what can be done to minimize the chances of having a bad kratom experience.
How Kratom Works & The Benefits It Brings
Kratom works in the body by interacting with the opioid receptors. It has this in common with opiates like heroin and morphine, and opioid medications. However, kratom is only a partial agonist of the opioid receptors at low to moderate doses. It becomes a full agonist of all (it’s thought but not confirmed) four opioid receptors only at high doses.
This is why kratom is less addictive than other opiates which are full agonists of one or more opioid receptors even at low doses.
It also explains why at lower doses kratom is a stimulant. It’s a member of the coffee family, and at low doses, because it’s an only minor partial agonist, it’s the other stimulant properties which kick in most.
In terms of benefits, these are what you should experience from using kratom:
- It can deliver significant pain relief
- Kratom can really chill you out and calm you down
- You can be lifted out of depression with kratom
- Kratom delivers a significant energy boost at lower doses
- At higher doses, you’ll feel calm and pain-free
- Kratom can make you confident and fearful
Exactly how it does all this will depend on the dose. The lower the dose, the more energizing it is, the higher the dose the more sedating it becomes.
White kratom is less sedating, red kratom is more sedating, and green kratom tends to sit in the middle. But getting that balance right is quite tough, especially when you take purity into account as well.
That’s why finding the right strain, the right vein color, the right dose, all to fit your exact needs, can require quite a few times experimenting over several weeks.
How I Use Kratom
Now I’ve only ever had an awesome time using kratom. I use it to give me physical pain relief because I suffer from a bad back. A slipped disc, which normal opiate medication struggles to touch, and it’s also quite addictive and dangerous.
So sometimes I come off them or at least minimize the dose, and I will then use kratom when things are really bad.
I find kratom not only gets rid of the pain, but it calms me down and stops me from worrying about it as well. Just a few hours release, followed by a decent night’s sleep allows me to recharge and feel more positive the next day.
I’ll be honest, I’ve also used it to get high. 5 g is enough for pain relief and calmness, but I’ve tried up to 10 g and been as high as a kite and felt brilliant. A huge rush, followed by a slow drift down until sleep a few hours later.
My Friends Kratom Experience
Which made what happened to my friend all the weirder. As I’ve said, I’ve only had great experiences kratom, and I have experimented quite a bit with it.
He wanted to try it to try and chill out. He’s a writer and has a busy lifestyle and wanted to try it one evening a week to really chill out, listen to some music, and empty his mind. So I told him about a great place to buy kratom online, where the purity should be quite good, and recommended he got red and green to experiment with.
I was very shocked a couple of weeks later when he reported back and said he had a pretty bad experience using it.
The first time he used it, he used just 3 g of green kratom, Green Malay I think he said, but it could have been Green Borneo. It doesn’t really matter, most green kratom will be generally the same (although Malay can be a little more euphoric).
He said he felt a rush of energy, little skips like caffeine kicking in, little peaks going up and then he felt really good for a couple of hours, and then it drifted down. Nothing overwhelming, a bit like having a few drinks.
The next time things were really weird. He took 5 g of green kratom and didn’t have a good experience at all. He had a larger rush, and he said it just felt overwhelming. He felt uncomfortable, sweaty, itchy, and just unsettled. He felt his heart pounding, and it really concerned him (although the anxiety might have caused the heart-pounding rather than the kratom as it’s a central nervous depressant which actually reduces your heart rate). He also said it was uneven, not a smooth experience, it came and went.
So, I recommended he tried 5 g of the red kratom, Red Bali it was, although again, any good quality red kratom will generally give a pretty similar experience.
He tried that and didn’t like it either. He didn’t feel any rush of energy, he just started to feel really tired. No pleasure, but there was pain relief. I was quite surprised he got such an experience using just 5 g, but as I like to tell people, everyone is different and kratom is a very personal thing in the effects it delivers.
All in all, he wasn’t particularly impressed with his initial kratom experiences.
But what I said to him to try is white kratom. A low dose of white kratom, to see if the more stimulating edge to it can offset the obvious problems he has with central nervous system depressant drugs.
He hasn’t told me what happened yet, but I know he’s bought some White Borneo to try. I said to try 3 g, and then the next time 5 g and see how he feels compared to the red and green.
Kratom is that diverse that it can be a case of experimenting like that, and I’m now going to give you some top tips on how to minimize the chances of having a bad kratom experience and giving up.
How To Get The Best Kratom Experience Possible
If you want to have a good experience with kratom, you’re unlikely to have it the first time. You might feel fantastic in a big rush, but the thing is some people do seem to have a natural tolerance to it, and the first experience can be far better than the rest.
But if you’ve got a normal response, then these are the things you can do to try and get a brilliant kratom experience every time:
- Experiment a lot. Find a good green, white, red kratom, and take 3 g. See how you feel, and then wait at least two days, and take 5 g. Compare and contrast your experience. If 5 g is really good, then try 6 g, then 7 g. But don’t increment above 5 g at more than 1 g per experience.
- The purity and quality of the kratom is absolutely essential. If you get poor quality kratom, you might not get a great experience even from 5 g. But on the other side of that coin, it can also be an uneven experience. You could take a lot more, and then get caught out with a sudden overwhelming experience because the quality of the kratom you have bought is just not consistent even throughout the powder you have, especially if it’s poorly blended or has something wrong with it.
- Make sure you take kratom on an empty stomach with fruit juice. That will potentiate it, and you’ll get the strongest reaction in one go. It also safeguards you a bit because you can’t get caught out. The full dose will hit you in one go, and you’ll feel the full experience in one go. Some people who don’t do this get a delayed reaction, so after a couple of hours they take a bit more and then get an overwhelming hit that freaks them out.
- Make sure you don’t drink alcohol or are using any other opiates or central nervous system depressant medications while you take kratom. Too many CNS things hitting your body at once can create a really bad experience, with lowered heart rate, causing concern, lowered oxygen meaning you feel dizzy, it can just create panic. Just stick to kratom on its own, and practice with dosing it in that situation.
So there you go, that was the experience my friend had, and they really contrasted with the benefits I’ve experienced with kratom of the past couple of years.
I’m pretty convinced anyone can have a fantastic experience using kratom as long as they use good quality kratom from a reputable seller, and they experiment gently to find exactly how it reacts different doses, and when different types of kratom are used.