Perhaps in this past year more than others, we’ve come to recognize that our mental wellness is just as important to keep up with as our physical health. When you’ve got extra stress weighing down your life, how do you deal with it?
If you’re like a lot of my patients, you might blow off steam with some self-care steps like taking a bath, getting a massage, or listening to some calming music. And those are great therapeutic ways to relieve stress naturally! If those steps aren’t doing the trick alone, here’s a few others that you might try to see if you find helpful:
Mindful Meditation
I recently had a fascinating discussion with yoga instructor Alexandria Ianni as part of my Wellness Toolkit series. Alexandria studied with Cyndi Lee of New York City’s famed OM yoga center and brought her experiences there back to Columbus, where she practices now.
Alexandria explained to me how she practices mindful meditation: “In this seated meditation, when we’re noticing the thoughts that come up, the first thing that we get clear on is how often we’re thinking. So we notice a thought and instead of going down this whole rabbit hole, we just say, ‘thinking’. And we come back to the breath at the edge of our nostrils. So then that’s something that doesn’t just benefit us on the mat.”
Check out my discussion with Alexandria to learn more about how mindful meditation might help ease your stress.
CBD
A lot of my patients have found that CBD helps them to relax, and science supports the calming effects of cannabidiol (CBD), which is the non-psychoactive part of the cannabis plant. (It won’t get you high.) CBD can be dosed in lots of different forms. At Green Harvest Health, we sell full spectrum CBD in lots of different great ways to dose it, from oils, to gummies, to topicals like luxury bath powder.
Medical Marijuana
It’s funny when we think about it, but stress is actually a good thing most of the time. Stress is your body’s natural way of reacting to certain situations, such as sudden dangers or difficult and unexpected challenges. Your body releases a hormone called adrenaline. Adrenaline rushes
through your veins, giving you that superhuman-like burst of energy that helps you cope with and appropriately respond to the stressful situation. This reaction, often called the “fight or flight” response, helps to deaden the senses and dull pain for long enough for you to get through the trauma and back to (relative) safety.
While stress responses are natural, they aren’t always helpful. For patients diagnosed with PTSD, stress responses can be harmful because with the blockage of the stress, the person cannot process and move past the traumatic experience.
That’s where a lot of patients with PTSD find that medical marijuana helps them. It’s thought that the specific combination of cannabinoids in THC-containing psychoactive medical marijuana (the kind that you can only get legally in Ohio in a state dispensary) helps a lot of my patients with PTSD to feel improvement from their symptoms.
If you have PTSD and would like help with treating it with medical marijuana, contact our office. Have questions or would like to suggest a subject for my next column? Please email me at [email protected].
Dr. Bridget is a board-certified family physician, cannabinoid physician, and life coach. She is the owner of Green Harvest Health Clinics and GHH CBD Medicinals. Learn more at www.greenharvest.health and DrBridgetMD.com.
