I’ve had trouble sleeping for as long as I can remember. While some people are able to capitalize on this tendency and, say, stay up all night watching French new wave films or something, most of my nighttime hours over the last 33 years have consisted of me suspecting that I feel sleepy, and then stressing myself out to the point of 1000% awakeness because I’m trying too hard to hold onto that feeling.
Sleeping pills. Frequent trips to the drug store. Nothing helped with my insomnia.
From high school onward, I’ve generally relied on over-the-counter meds to help put me to sleep. And they’re relatively cheap. I also had a one-time flirtation with a prescription sleep aid in college that caused me to stay wide awake for three days. Would not recommend.
Long story short, it wasn’t until the recent proliferation of marijuana products in California that I started being able to really manage my insomnia. For the last two years or so, I’ve generally consumed some sort of low dosage of THC/CBD to help me sleep every night. But here’s the thing about THC: it gets you high, you know?
And because of my embattled history with sleep, I started to realize I was consuming more marijuana than was ideal; my obsession with snoozing came at the cost of my productivity and whatever health problems arise from eating an obscene amount of Swedish Swimmers from Trader Joe’s.
Then I heard about CBD and decided to give it a shot
When a friend recommended I try Feals, a new CBD brand. It’s just CBD without the THC. I was skeptical; isn’t that the cannabinoid equivalent of switching to mild sauce from Taco Bell, when all your life you’ve been telling the drive-thru cashier to obliterate you with the strongest shit they have?
As it turns out, those people that are always trying to push moderation on you are occasionally correct. I tried the Feals Flight to start, which contains samples of their ingestible CBD oil in three different concentrations: 600 MG, 1200 MG, 2400 MG. I worked my way through the 600 MG and 1200 MG samples and noticed a pleasant, relaxed sensation in my muscles, but no notable sleepiness.
The verdict? I found my perfect dose, and am finally sleeping better.
When I was ready to try the 2400 MG, I took it about an hour before I usually go to sleep. Again, my limbs were feeling super duper relaxed, and it’s possible any lingering anxieties from the day were dissolving, but because I am a Type A-minus INFJ Virgo, I refuse to acknowledge that I have anxiety anyways, so it’s hard to say.
But here’s the important part: I. Slept. So. Well. I couldn’t start in on my full-size bottle soon enough, and now I’m slipping gently into a snooze every night. Perhaps the best part of all is that I’m not waking up frustrated from a lack of sleep or with stoney-baloney head from THC. And having almost reached the end of my first bottle it at this point, I have this to say: CBD, you are a sweet and sly godsend.
