Rituals: How CBD and Meditation Work Together
Leading busy lives means we’re often bouncing from activity to activity without cooldown periods to recharge and regroup. In your busy schedule, the first thing that usually gets shoved to the wayside is the one thing you need most: self-care.
Self-care activities are what recharge your batteries and help you take on each day fresh and renewed. As you’re spending more time stuck inside during the recent COVID-19 pandemic, you may find yourself with even more added stress and anxiety than usual. You’ll find when you start taking time to care for yourself other areas of your life will become more manageable, less stressful, and clear.
Enter… CBD and Meditation
Combining CBD and meditation is a growing trend in self-care routines that we love! The potential stress-relieving qualities of CBD products and calming meditation complement each other really well. Let’s take a deeper look at how CBD and meditation can work together and why you should consider it as part of your daily routine:
What is a Meditation Practice?
Before combining CBD and meditation let’s take a look at what a meditation practice is. There are common misconceptions about meditation such as:
- It takes too long to meditate the right way
- You have to empty your mind to meditate
- Meditation practice is rigid and strict
- It’s really wooooooo.
These couldn’t be further from the truth! And we get it. Our founder was on the meditation struggle bus for a l-o-n-g time before finding a way that it could work for her.
Building a meditation practice doesn’t mean you’re spending hours a day sitting in silence trying to empty your brain of all thought. Meditation practice is the building of a self-care routine that you come back to, not just the individual moment you’re doing it.
Emptying your mind to meditate isn’t a requirement, either. Mindfulness meditation practice is about calming your mind, centering yourself, and allowing yourself to view thoughts that come into your mind from a positive, non-judgemental place. It’s about allowing yourself to have your feelings and examine them from a rational perspective.
As for the rigidity of meditation, that’s a yes and no. Yes, meditation practice is about routine but you can adapt it to work for you. Uncomfortable in a certain position? Change it up and help yourself succeed! If sitting upright and poised is your cup of tea, go for it. Prefer to lie down and meditate with your eyes closed? Perfect! In the end, meditation is about the personal journey and experience, not the setup.
And the woo? There are proven and measurable benefits of meditation when it comes to brain activity, stress, anxiety, and self-improvement. While maybe it used to be considered woo, there’s nothing “woo” about it.
What Prevents People From Being Able to Meditate?
What does your daily routine look like? If it’s like most, you’re getting up and downing a cup of coffee (or tea!) before you make yourself presentable and either run out the door for work (where you’re already 5 minutes behind and hoping for good traffic) or walking down the hall to your home office.
After work it’s back home (or closing the home office door) where you try to shake off the work day while cooking, cleaning, trying to spend time with a significant other, or maybe caring for kids. Where’s the time for you?
Ironically, the very aspects of our lives that meditation helps with seem to be what prevents us from taking a moment to do it. The good news is meditation doesn’t have to be an hour-long event. Even a few minutes a day of meditation has been shown to improve mood, increase relaxation, fight symptoms of depression, rewire the brain, and relieve stress and anxiety.
Once again meditation practice is about the routine/ritual. As our schedules get even more hectic today with the pandemic throwing a wrench in the works of our already complicated lives, taking a moment to implement a self-care routine is more important than ever.
How Meditation Changes the Brain
When you start meditating regularly, even for short periods of time, your brain changes. While it might sound like science fiction, when you meditate brain functions and structures begin to change:
- The prefrontal cortex enlarges, helping with rational decision-making
- Our amygdala shrinks, giving greater emotional control with meditation
- The Hippocampus thickens, a key portion of the brain for learning and memory
- Grey matter, responsible for intelligence, increases
Greater emotional control by meditating not only calms the mind, helping reduce stress and anxiety, but it also helps in the creative process. Many times the creative process is hindered by our mind’s inability to move on from something else. These hurdles make it difficult to think creatively or solve problems as easily. When you’re in greater control over your emotions, you can improve creativity and creative problem solving.
This brings us to the benefits of combining CBD and meditation! The potential stress-relieving qualities of CBD and calming meditation complement each other really well. Let’s take a deeper look at how CBD and meditation can work together and why you should consider it as part of your daily routine.
Why Combine CBD and Meditation?
Adding CBD to supplement your lifestyle may help reduce stress and anxiety, fight inflammation, and promote calm, so combining CBD and meditation feels like a no-brainer, right?
You can take this literally and combine CBD and meditation at the same time or take the spirit of the phrase and add both to your daily self-care routine. Either way, they work hand-in-hand to achieve similar goals.
Think about it as a complementary relationship. CBD may allow your body to relax more which enhances the benefits of meditation – calming your mind. Taking CBD before meditating is like giving your body a little nudge in the right direction. The combination of CBD and meditation may help you experience less anxiety, improve your overall mood, and let you see things more clearly. Being clear-minded is essential to managing stress levels and reducing strain from your hectic schedule.
Day Time Rituals
So next time you’re waking up and jumping right into the daily routine, consider adding CBD oil to that cup of coffee (it’s what brings us back to life each morning! ☕️🤗). Give it about 30 minutes to fully kick in (you can go about your regular routine during this) then take a few minutes to meditate and really prepare your mind for the day ahead.
Night Time Rituals
If you’re looking to unwind after a long day, maybe you prefer a CBD and meditation nighttime ritual to help you relax and sleep better, instead. You can add CBD oil to a nightcap (our favorite is a calming tea) or eat a CBD gummy to kick things off. Take a little time to meditate before bed and relax your mind further, recovering from the stresses of the day.
Meditation Apps
There’s a number of meditation apps you can use, but we suggest trying out trials of each to see what resonates with you the most. Some examples,
Headspace: This app is great for beginners, and has a number of different meditation “styles.” You can do guided meditation (which is where you’re listening to someone guide you through the whole thing) or meditations with no voices for different experiences; relieving stress, sleeping better, etc.
Calm: Calm is fantastic because it not only has meditations to listen to like Headspace, but also has music to meditate to from artists like Ellie Goulding and different “sounds” like the beach, the rainforest, thunderstorms and basically anything else you could want to fall asleep to.
Waking Up: This is created and guided by Sam Harris. This is similar to headspace but, if you’re familiar with Sam Harris, uses his guidance to take you through the meditation process which is slightly different than how others do it.
There are trials of all the above meditation apps (and if you have an AMEX card, Calm is free for a year) so give some of them a try. Having a daily self-care routine is essential to your overall health, and you’ll find taking a little time for self-care activities will improve the other aspects of your life. CBD and mediation can work together to help you take on the day or unwind in the evening. Since each person reacts to CBD products differently, take the time to find a balance that works for you.
Do you meditate? If so, how often? What have you noticed with a continuous meditation ritual?