Dr. Greg Wells is a performance physiologist and a scientist in translational medicine at the Hospital for Sick Children. His most recent book is called Rest, Refocus, Recharge: A Guide for Optimizing Your Life and he believes that sleep is the bedrock of health and wellness. As all of us know after two years of life in the COVID pandemic and surviving another long Canadian winter, nerves get frayed and everyday life can become a challenge. For Wells, the solution—which he militantly works towards and defends—is sleep.
“I see an awakening in society during the COVID pandemic in the importance of health and wellbeing and the foundation of health is sleep,” says Dr. Wells, a former Olympic-calibre swimmer who still coaches a broad range of Olympic and professional athletes. “If you sleep well, everything else gets easier. It enables you to respond to challenges, which is something that over these past two years I know all of us have felt.”
All of us have also felt the pull of pharmaceutical answers, but cannabis companies are becoming more effective at offering sleep aids by focusing on cannabinoid molecules from the cannabis plant. On the market, there are particularly good CBN oils that help offer solutions to the age-old dilemma of getting a good night’s sleep. When choosing your CBN products, look out for naturally derived without synthetic materials that are lab-created with an innate accelerant to refine the CBN materials. The way it works is that the CBN products interact with our CB1 receptors, and this new material is then ten-times less powerful and psychoactive than products containing THC. When awakening in the middle of the night overrun with anxiety and stress, CBN products have felt like glistening white knights. Sleep, as Dr. Wells says, is the most important defence for our environment and a good night’s rest can arm you for the world. CBN products can help us achieve the most important evening factor in determining the success of our waking days.
“If you’re exhausted, the chance of hitting the gym is very low, but the chance of you lashing out at someone at work who you shouldn’t lash out at is really high—but that’s your fault, not theirs,” says Dr. Wells, who also adds that achieving healthy sleep patterns is not something that happens overnight. Wells’s daughter grew sick during the pandemic and it took him and his wife six months to re-learn how to sleep. “Don’t expect things to happen overnight, but don’t get discouraged—keep at it, and try new things.”
Some things that Wells recommends trying is setting your alarm clock—but not for when to wake up, but for when to go to bed. He also stresses consistency in your nighttime routine. “Defend your last hour before bedtime, no devices within an hour of going to sleep and think of your bedroom as a sleep cave, make it pitch black and keep it cool, around 19-degrees Celsius,” says Wells, adding that you’re training your body to release melatonin, which is the hormone released in the pineal gland that regulates the sleep-wake cycle. “Think of sleep as training with your eyes closed. Your body gets fitter while you sleep than it will during your workouts because that’s when the growth hormone is released. When you’re sleeping, the body regenerates itself.”
A lack of sleep and chronic exhaustion has become a plague during the smartphone era and the pandemic has only ratcheted up our need to relocate our zen. Sleep, then, is our best defence against bad decision making and a negative attitude. CBN nighttime products, natural, pharmaceutical-grade but made without synthetics, are tried and true. It’s a chance, safe and plant-based, to reclaim your life.
