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Rachel Feltman: Cannabis is supposed to help you chill out, but finding the right dose to induce those calming effects is notoriously difficult. Just a little too much can send a cannabis user spinning out in the opposite direction. Recreational users sometimes call this acute anxiety and panic “paranoia,” and it’s a common complaint from people seeking emergency care for cannabis-induced intoxication.

New research offers some hope for folks who have trouble finding a relaxing high—and it comes from a surprising source.

For Science Quickly, this is Rachel Feltman. Scientific American’s associate news editor Allison Parshall is with me to tell us more about these new findings.

Feltman: So I hear you’ve got some exciting news for the anxious weed smokers of the world.

Allison Parshall: Yes!

Feltman: What’s this new study all about?

Parshall: If you’ve ever smoked too much weed or taken one too many THC gummies, you might be familiar with this side effect that stoners have long called paranoia—just, like, this acute feeling of anxiety and panic, like the world is just collapsing around you and/or everything is bad and terrible, and you kind of just have to ride it out. It’s one of the main things that people complain about when they show up for emergency health care after having taken too much cannabis.

Feltman: Sure, yeah.

Parshall: It’s just kind of gnarly.

So basically, in the new study, they found that one of the aromatic compounds in weed—basically it’s just there to smell nice; it’s called d-limonene—can actually reduce these anxious side effects and make people have this paranoia reaction less.

Feltman: You mentioned in your article for Scientific American that some of the researchers were kind of surprised that this aromatic compound had this effect. Why was that?

Parshall: One of the researchers that I talked to—he was the senior researcher; his name was Ryan Vandrey—he was surprised mostly ’cause he was coming at it from more of a skeptical perspective. He wasn’t necessarily expecting that these compounds called terpenes, of which d-limonene is one, would actually have a measurable impact, just because they’re present in such small quantities in cannabis. Like, Vandrey estimated that maybe you get d-limonene as 1 percent of the compounds in any given strain; it depends on the strain.

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Anaissa Ruiz Tejada/Scientific American

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