For many people, when they find and start taking CBD, they can't believe they have ever lived without it. It can help with pain, anxiety, mood, sleep, inflammation, and so much more. But, not everybody gets so lucky, and it can take some trial and error to make CBD work. In this blog, I’m going to share nine tips on how to make CBD work for you and what to do if it doesn't.
The first client I had for the Complete Cannabis Consultation was a sweet elderly lady in her 70s named Helen. She called me because her quality of life had been drastically impacted by arthritis pain. She couldn’t volunteer, garden or go on walks with her friends anymore, all things she had loved doing and desperately missed.
We started her on a dose of about 5mg of CBD twice daily, and within a couple of days, she was up and chugging around. By two weeks into her CBD regime, she felt good enough to resume her daily activities, and now she’s busier than ever.
I thought I must be the best Cannabis Coach on the planet to have that impact.
Ha! It turns out that Helen was a rare client who immediately felt significant impacts from low doses of CBD. For most of my clients, it takes much more playing around with the dose and ingestion method, and I know dozens of people who have tried CBD and found it didn’t work at all.
Today, I’m going to break down my four years of coaching clients, so you know how to make CBD work for you and what to do if it’s just not working. Plus, stay tuned for a great discount on CBD and CBDA products.
How to Take CBD So It Actually Works - 5 Tips For Success
For almost everyone I’ve worked with, it requires them to take the right dose of CBD for the right amount of time before they write me to tell me how much better they’re doing. So let’s break it all down into five simple tips.
1. Use ENOUGH CBD. For some people, that might be 5 mg or a couple of puffs from a CBD vaporizer. For others, it might be several hundred milligrams or 3-4 CBD joints a day. Cannabis affects every single person differently, so your general state of health, metabolism, diet and more can all impact how much you’ll need.
2. Use CBD OFTEN ENOUGH. Maybe you’ll be able to drop some CBD oil under your tongue in the morning and feel good all day. Or maybe you’ll need 3-4 doses a day to feel okay. Or maybe on some days, you’ll need more than others. The point is, it’s not one and done for most people.
Tracking how you’re feeling and how long it’s taking to set in and wear off is helpful for knowing how many doses a day you’ll need.
3. Use CBD for LONG ENOUGH. Unlike THC, it can take days or weeks of consistent CBD supplementation at the right dose before you realize how much better you are doing. Again, this depends greatly on how many conditions you have going on in the first place. If you’re relatively healthy and using CBD to see if it can reduce your Monday anxieties, you might feel better after just a few doses. On the other hand, if you’ve been suffering from migraines and fibromyalgia for years, it could take much longer for you to feel the effects.
4. Choose the right INGESTION METHOD. Most people only think about CBD oil, but there are so many ways to consume this beautiful plant, and oil is just one. Check out this blog on 6 Ways to Consume Cannabis Without Smoking for some of the other common ingestion methods. One will likely become your favorite, or maybe you’ll get into dose layering. That means that you might take CBD in different ways throughout the day to treat different symptoms or get different effects.
5. Choose the RIGHT PRODUCT. This one is especially hard for my American friends. Here in Canada, if you’re buying CBD from a regulated source, you can trust that the bottle or package contains what it says it does. Down south, it’s harder to suss out quality products. And this is a problem because if you’re going to invest days and weeks and dollars into seeing if CBD can work for you, there better be some dang CBD in the bottle! I recommend Healer’s CBD products because they are formulated by a doctor I trust, and you have access to all the third-party lab testing as well. Save 20% off your Healer purchase with the code: revealcannabis
What to Do When CBD Doesn’t Work - 4 More Tips for Success
Now we know that for CBD to be effective, you have to use enough, use it long enough and often enough and use the right product and ingestion method. So let's say you've got that all down pat, and you've given CBD that good old college try. If it's still not working, what should you do then? Don’t worry. I’ve got you covered with four more tips.
1. If you’re taking CBD in edible or oil form, try consuming it with a fatty meal. Some studies show that you can increase the bioavailability (how much CBD your body can actually use) significantly just by ensuring you have a full stomach when you take it. Fatty meals seem to be the best but experiment with how you feel on an empty stomach or with some food. It makes a big difference for a lot of people.
2. Add in THC. Yes, THC is the compound in cannabis that can make you feel high in large doses. But in small doses, THC can be extremely helpful for many conditions without making you feel wonky. Many people can take less CBD by adding a bit of THC to their morning routine. What does this look like for you? Maybe it means adding in 1 to 2 mg of THC with your morning CBD oil dose. Or perhaps you could sprinkle a bit of THC flower into your CBD joint. Many people do well on a 1:1 ratio of CBD and THC, meaning they take about half and half of each compound.
3. Add in other cannabinoids. Although we don't have great access to CBG in Canada yet, all of my students over at the Cannabis Coaching Institute who are using it are loving it. They say it particularly helps with mood and gastrointestinal issues, and dozens of students have started taking a blend of CBG and CBD daily and find it much more effective than CBD on its own. Of course, you can also add a little THC to that mix and see how you do with more plant compounds.
4. Add in acidic cannabinoids. This one isn't too much different than tip number two, but I don't think a lot of people think about acidic cannabinoids, and they can be really helpful. We're going to do a quick plant science lesson here. The cannabis plant doesn't actually grow THC or CBD. It grows the precursor molecules THCA and CBDA, and when you heat those up, they turn into THC or CBD. Over the past few years, there's been quite a bit of excitement about how acidic cannabinoids may be far more powerful than there are more well-known cousins. It's easy to add THCA or CBDA into your routine by making a cup of cannabis tea, sprinkling some ground raw cannabis onto your meals, or taking pre-formulated oils like the great CBDA oil offered at Healer. Remember you can use code revealcannabis for 20% off your order.
So, if you’re not like my wonder client, Helen, those are my top NINE tips for how to make CBD work for you! If you’ve tried all of these and it’s still not yielding results, or if you want to hit the ground running, book a Complete Cannabis Consultation with me. I’ll help you figure out what works best for you and get you started on your path to wellness. Thanks for reading, and we hope this information was helpful!
With love (and cannabis!),
Andrea
