Welcome to the first entry to The Loco Ocho Diary. It is brought to you by taking too many Better Than Nine 60mg Sleep Gummies.
Why Following Dosing Guidelines for CBN is Important
Most everyone who has gotten past middle school has learned that you aren’t supposed to take more of something than the bottle recommends. For instance, if you have sore muscles from yardwork and the Aleve bottle says, “Take 1-2 tablets every 8 hours”, then most reasonable people will take 1 or 2 tablets. If you take 3 or 4, it probably won’t kill you, but you’re asking to learn about that “Adverse Reactions” section of the label and that is never pleasant.
But what do you do when a ‘recommended dose’ hasn’t been established yet?
When you’re working with compounds that have virtually no toxicity and can’t kill you, like cannabinoids, you play guinea pig with yourself and your friends.
I specifically talking about cannabinol, or CBN. CBN is a degraded form of THCa. THCa eventually will turn into CBN over time under natural conditions or the conversion can be deliberate. CBN is not a new cannabinoid because the cannabis plant has been making it since probably dinosaurs roamed the earth. However, commercially available, affordable, pure CBN is only a few years old. Also, because of Federal restrictions on cannabinoids, no major studies are done by the universities and drug companies. CBN is considered to have sedative properties which is why I decided to feature it in our sleep gummies. However, due to the above reasons, I didn’t have enough info to know how many milligrams was the right dose for the average person.
Guinea Pig Time!
I’ve been experimenting with cannabis-based products for over 20 years, so I knew that starting low was the way to go. Remember, you can always take more, but you can’t untake something. I decided to start with 5mg of CBN. I took that and I didn’t feel anything. The next day, I took 10mg of CBN a few hours before bedtime and noticed that it did seem to relax me and make sleeping easier. I took a 20mg dose the next day and that was even better for me. At this point, I started getting confident, and maybe a little cocky, about CBN.
I wanted to make a “your going to sleep for 8 hours whether you want to or not” product, so I decided to crank the dose up to 100mg CBN. I could easily change doses because I was working with a measured MCT/CBN solution. I went ahead and took 100mg of CBN about an hour before bedtime. I got in bed, set the TV sleep timer and was ready to see what happened.
When my alarm went off the next day at 7:00am, I was irate. I hadn’t slept at all and it was all my fault. I said to myself, “Daniel, you really got to get your act together and be more responsible. You’re 40 years old and still making irresponsible decisions. You knew that you had to wake up and work today and you stayed up all night hunting anacondas in the Amazon rain forest.”
Boy, was I mad. I was laying in bed, physically exhausted, and smelled sweaty like I had been running around a humid jungle wrangling 25ft snakes. I angrily got out of bed and went to pee and wash my face and was really laying into myself for deciding to go anaconda hunting on a work night. After I washed my face and woke up a little more, I started to think about the logistics of this. I looked around and realized that I didn’t have a suitcase, dirty clothes, or any evidence that would indicate that I had traveled, especially somewhere as far and random as the Amazon.
That was when I realized that CBN was no joke. I was 99% sure that I had not gone to the airport, figured out how to get to the Amazon jungle, figure out how to find an anaconda, then go back to the airport and get home in less than 9 hours. After about the 3rd cup of coffee, I came to the conclusion that I actually did sleep, but I was dreaming so vividly that my body was physically reacting to my dreams as I they were real. In conclusion, 100mg CBN was too much for me.
This story is 100% true.
After all this happened, I continued experimenting with different doses of CBN until I found the right one for consistent and positive results. I did have a little more work as I started introducing other cannabinoids to create the ‘entourage effect’ in our Sleep Gummy. The entourage effect refers to when a combination of something is greater than the sum of their parts. Kind of like mixing alcohol with other things. 2 light beers alone won’t impair most people, however, drinking 2 beers and taking some types of medications can cause all sorts of crazy.
So, don’t worry. Our Sleep Gummies do not have 100mg of CBN per piece. They have about 20mg CBN per piece.
The moral of this story is to follow recommended dosing with everything you consume. If 1 gummy helps you sleep, 2 or 3 may not help you sleep 2 or 3x better. You could end up hunting anacondas in Colombia’s Amazon basin, when you should be getting ready for a productive day of work!
I hope that we learned something today.
Take care!
Daniel