We know New Year’s resolutions are the worst, but it’s still nice to have goals to work toward, and the beginning of a new year is a great time to begin anew ourselves. However, lasting change doesn’t happen overnight, so we at Greeley Gallery think the entire month of January should be used to prepare ourselves for our 2024 resolutions.
We encourage you to dig deep and choose ambitions that are personal to you. But there are three goals we’ve found that most people seem to share: exercising, sleeping better, and just generally improving their health. Luckily for us, cannabis can help us achieve all three.
1. Elevate Exercising
Everyone knows exercising regularly is good for us, but starting from square one is a struggle. Thankfully, cannabis can be just what we need to get off the couch and begin our journey toward reaching square two and three and onward. Don’t take our word for it. A 2022 survey of people aged between 18 and 55 reported nearly 60 activities they enjoyed under the influence of cannabis.
The most popular activities were hiking (60%), yoga (58%), and aerobic machines (50%). When asked the primary reasons the participants used cannabis before exercise, they answered “helping to focus/concentrate” (66%), “helping enjoy the exercise experience” (65%), and “enhancing mind-body-spirit connection” (65%).
No need to get stoned either. A couple of puffs of the energizing Lemon Ozium or uplifting Tangie sativa strains about fifteen minutes before your workout will prepare you for whatever activity you choose. Not a fan of smoking? That’s okay; a crisp Magic Seltzer is sure to get you going, too.
2. Sleep Quality
Improving sleep quality is one of the best know effects of cannabis consumption. Studies show that medicinal cannabis, like cannabidiol (CBD), improves sleep in adults with insomnia and other sleep disorders. We recommend Wyld Hemp Sleepy Time CBD/CBN gummies to help you stay asleep and a nice indica strain like Vino or Bahama Blizzard to help you fall asleep.
In addition to helping us fall asleep, research also shows that cannabis affects our ability to dream. More specifically, cannabis seems to decrease or suppress our REM sleep (the stage of sleep when we dream). Instead, we spend more time in the N3 stage of sleep, which is the most restorative sleep stage.
Intriguingly, when someone consumes cannabis before bed several nights in a row and then stops, they sometimes experience a “rebound” of dreams. In other words, we don’t seem to lose the dreams we don’t have. Our brain stores them and then processes the backlog once cannabis is out of our system.
For these reasons, we recommend using cannabis as a sleep aid only when you’re struggling to sleep as opposed to relying on it every night.
3. Better Health
There’s a reason Greeley Gallery is a recreational and medicinal cannabis dispensary. It’s because while the psychoactive effects of cannabis are fun, the health benefits cannabis provides are outstanding.
CBD is most well-known for its medicinal properties, including improving sleep, pain management, reducing anxiety, and increasing appetites. Also, both CBD and THC benefits your brain. You may have heard that medical marijuana helps neurological and mental disorders, such as decreasing seizures for patients with epilepsy, but did you know cannabis works as a neural protectant, too? This means cannabis helps protect adult brain cells, especially in the aging brain.
We recommend Angel Help CBD Drops, which is a flavorless tincture that’s easy to incorporate into any daily routine.
Final Thoughts
The best thing about all of this is that it requires very little cannabis to achieve these benefits. Micro-dosing cannabis is a fantastic way to gain all of the benefits cannabis has to offer, with just a couple of puffs of a joint, drops of a tincture, or milligrams of an edible. Our favorite is the Siskiyou Sungrown – Softgels, which are easy to add to your daily vitamin regimen.
You can find all the products we recommended today at our north Portland cannabis dispensary on the corner of N. Rosa Parks and Greeley Ave. Be sure to share your 2024 goals with our friendly and knowledgeable staff, who are happy to answer any questions you have or make recommendations. We are open seven days a week between 7 am and 10 pm. Hope to see you soon!
Written By: Katrina Paulson
