Our CBD Story Started With Trauma
One door opens and another one closes.
In our case, the closing door was slammed shut by a brutal perimenopause in 2018.
The long, winding story is here but the net net…rolling panic attacks, racing heart, zero sleep, pain, and a nice intro to the medical circus.
Multiple doctors. Benzos. SSRIs. Heart and blood pressure meds. Sleep drugs. You name it.
Almost broke me.
The saying goes…a healthy person has a 1000 wishes. A sick person has but one.
This opened the door…really a scramble through it to learn everything we could. About everything we could.
Deep dives into NIH research on hormones, the gut microbiome, neurotransmitters, and key pathways tied to what I was feeling.
It was truly sink or swim.
After the horrible withdrawals and weaning from benzos, SSRIs, and even the blood pressure meds, it became clear that there are only a few options that don't build tolerance.
Tolerance is the enemy!
If there were chapters to our CBD story, it might go like this:
- Why CBD was so impressive to us (based on research)
- Stumbling through the types of CBD (damn the marketers)
- From My story to Our story
It's a quick read but our story is quickly becoming 1000's of people's way back to health.
Why CBD was so impressive to us (based on research)
One of the tools we came across in our journey was CBD (and our pantry is littered with various bottles, vials, and elixirs…Thank goodness the witch hunts are over :)
It took some deep dives as we're not pot people but the research was ridiculous.
CBD has nothing to do with the standard responses from cannabis!
In fact, the Israeli godfather of CBD research, Raphael Mechoulam, coined the term "entourage effect" to show how CBD countered many of the excesses of THC, its cousin.
If you tease out the subtleties of how they work, you can't help but get excited about CBD across a range of pathways.
A quick detour to explain why we were practically thrown through that door!
Our bodies have an ancient (estimated at 600 million years old) pathway that's tasked with balancing every other system.
The endocannabinoid system.
There are two big players:
- Anandamide - named after the "bliss" Hindu goddess, Anand
- 2AG
Anandamide is a backup supporter when other pathways are stressed, exhausted, or under duress.
It's a chemical version of resilience!
Here's the deal to understand…
THC mimics anandamide and fits into the same CB1 receptor.
The problem is that it hits too hard and for too long. Hence, the side effects (both desired "high" and not).
Anytime you hit a pathway artificially high (above what the body would do), the body pushes back.
That's tolerance and your natural anandamide levels slowly goes down with prolonged use.
You end up worse than when you started!
Anandamide's role is to keep us "just high enough".
Think of those days where you feel really good. If you're on this page, those days may seem far in the past.
What about CBD?
CBD works like a feedback mechanism…it supports anandamide when low. Technically, it's called a positive allosteric modulator.
This is why you don't see overdoses with CBD and it can even have different responses depending on the state of the system.
One of our favorite example from research (of dozens across very different pathways):
- Healthy cell/neuron with low inflammation - CBD has no effect
- Healthy cell/neuron with high inflammation - CBD will reduce inflammation
- Cancerous or virally infected cell - CBD will BOOST inflammation!!
The latter makes sense once you realize that the immune system kills off faulty cells with inflammation (technically oxidative stress). See CBD and cancer
In fact, CBD will do this to faulty cells but not to surrounding healthy cells.
See why we got excited?? That's a very odd response. A gift down here really.
We have 1 million+ words of deep dive into 100's of different pathways and health issues. (search here).
A few key pathways...
So….we were excited back in 2018. Now how to buy CBD?
Stumbling through the types of CBD (damn the marketers)
We did what most people do. We found the biggest brands online that have some type of 3rd party testing.
3-4 of them to be exact. The almost full bottles probably linger somewhere in the house.
There is a big push for "full" or "broad" spectrum CBD on the market.
All the plant material. Other cannabinoids. CBG/CBN, etc. Terpenoids.
The "entourage effect" which as we now know is misused from its original meaning.
I had a terrible response to all of them. Classic histamine (allergic) reactions.
- Nausea
- Congestion
- Sleep issues
- Increased anxiety!!
Remember that I was in the throes of perimenopause and progesterone was rock bottom.
Turns out that progesterone calms the immune system and that includes histamine response!
I'm not alone!
Roughly 40-60% of the population has histamine issues and that number goes up as we get older and for women (hint hint…progesterone leaving the scene).
Full-spectrum CBD may not feel so hot for those people. 75% of those people are allergic to THC as well.
I almost gave up…I actually didn't feel that great on CBD but this didn't match the research.
Finally, I stumbled on a CBD isolate brand in coconut oil.
Game changer!!
Totally different response and exactly in line with what I originally expected.
There's so much marketing for full or broad spectrum with almost no thought (or research) on the powerful histamine pathway which is curious to us.
We did a massive review on histamine looking at anxiety, insomnia, and pain (sound familiar??).
Histamine is excitatory in the brain and nervous system.
It eats up GABA, our calming agent (target for benzos).
That's only:
- Sleep
- Anxiety
- Pain
- Immune response
- Etc, etc, etc
Pretty much 80% of why people take CBD to begin with.
Goodness. Look at the reviews on the product pages and you see tell-tale signs of this same trajectory for many people.
So…how does this go from My story to Our story??
From My story to IndigoNaturals
The more we learned, the more excited we became.
CBD isolate was a life raft when I was drowning and 1000's of hours in NIH research just continued to cement this relationship.
But we wanted high quality CBD at a price per mg that we could afford.
There was some quality CBD on the market but it was very expensive.
It needed these essential requirements:
- Organically grown in the US at FDA registered farms
- CO2 cold-processed
- 3rd party tested (available at top of EVERY page)
- No THC!!!
- No solvents
- No heavy metals
- No pesticides
- No bacteria
- No mold
This was just the starting block.
CBD isolate of course since 99% of the research is on CBD by itself and this matches the histamine angle.
Then there was cost.
We found that we could provide higher levels of quality CBD with our 6000mg bottle at 2-3 cents per mg of CBD BEFORE discounts up to 50%!
Keep in mind that research shows peak neurogenesis (the linchpin for mental health and addiction) is at 300mg daily!
Again, it helps to read the research and ½ the dropper of the 6000mg is 100mg. 3x's after meals hits the 300mg goal.
Lots of crappy product out there with 250mg…in a whole bottle! And it's expensive. Ripoffs.
On top of this (since we've stared into the health abyss), we added ways to save up to 50% via subscriptions, referrals, and reviews.
Sure…it's a business but go through one of our 100's of reviews and tell us this isn't more of a brute force to give back.
Some we're proud of:
- CBD and anxiety guide
- CBD and sleep guide
- CBD and trauma guide (the future of mental health is the immune system!!)
In fact, we have dozens of reviews on non-CBD tools that we come across such as:
- Vitamin D
- Magnesium glycinate
- Berberine
- Siberian Rhubarb
- NAC
- Medicinal mushrooms
- Estrogen
- Progesterone
- Testosterone guide
And on and on.
If there's something we come across that supports key pathways without tolerance, we're Periscope Down! Deep dive.
We were flying blind in the beginning…piecing together everything we could and trying every supplement out there. Most of it causes tolerance or histamine issues.
All the research here hopes to be Air Traffic Control….back to health.
At IndigoNaturals, we love to send out personalized research based on your situation…just email us at support@indigonaturals.net or use chat option bottom/right.
It's our way of giving back since our one wish was granted.
Be well. Take care of each other. Take care of yourself.
IndigoNaturals
316 Mid Valley Center #283
Carmel, Ca 93923
support@indigonaturals.net
Our personal story really began here: Dre's Story.
(we're not big fans of getting our pictures taken :)
Andrea Goodacre Jarvis (left) and Sharon Gray (right) - IndigoNaturals founders