There are a lot of claims tacked onto CBD usage, one of which is helping reduce anxiety. For me, anxiety is a daily ritual, one that creeps into practically every aspect of my life. Like a lot of mental disorders, anxiety gets lumped into an umbrella descriptor for feeling stressed or worried, like depression is to general sadness or OCD is to being really organized. But it’s more than that, really. I went into my journey of taking CBD every day before work knowing that it was not going to cure my anxiety but was going to help me not focus on it. And it did just that.
Ingesting the tincture and feeling the effects is one thing, but it’s more about adding it into my routine that really helped. It’s the step after doing my makeup and before brushing my teeth. My favorite, so far, has been the Plant People Regular Strength Drops: Mind + Body. There’s 630MG of CBD in the bottle and I fill the dropper between 0.25 and 0.50ML. It’s thin and easily absorbed sublingually, which is an odd feeling at first but you get used to it. It also doesn’t have a strong taste, so if I forget to do it before brushing my teeth, it doesn’t compromise my minty freshness. I also really like the Rosebud 700MG CBD Oil and the Standard Dose 1000MG Tincture, of which I take 0.25ML or less in the mornings. I also have a lower-dose capsule on my desk that combines CBD with natural ingredients like Ginkgo and Bacopa from Plant People. I pop one of those towards the afternoon when I feel the effects of the tincture wearing off. So far, I feel it’s mostly helped my wandering eye from clicking through the sale sections we report on every day.
Getting to work in the morning from my apartment in Brooklyn is a bit of a chore. My local train is always crowded and no one, save for the handful of gleeful kids riding to work with their parents, is happy to be there. I can’t help but flinch at screaming children or feel like, at any moment, something’s going to happen while I’m underground (bomb, shooter, fire, train crash, etc.). It’s a fleeting, intrusive thought but it’s there. Every day. After a month of taking a tincture in the morning, I’ve noticed that feeling and those thoughts have started to taper off. Maybe it only happens once a week when we screech to a halt because a train in front of us has a broken door, not because there was an explosion. I can actually immerse myself in the book I’m reading, the podcast I’m listening to, or the daily New York Times crossword I’m (sort of) finishing.
CBD is a complicated thing. So is anxiety. Taking it every day didn’t give me a foggy brain or make me feel high. It also didn’t make me feel like I could conquer the world or make my bum knee feel brand new. It fell somewhere in the middle, leveling out the playing field and filing down the teeth of anxiety so when it does bite, it doesn’t break the skin.
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