How To Use CBD Oil

Finding out how to use CBD involves a few aspects, mostly around which method of consumption (capsules or drops) and which dose to go for.

Finding the best dose involves using numero uno as a guinea pig, or an n=1 experiment if you like. This takes you through how you can accurately measure different doses, and how you can track your way to finding your ideal therapeutic window.

CBD Oil Dosage: Research

One of the ways we like to deal with health outcomes is to categorise treatments based on which disease someone has. This often leads to the idea that a specific dose applies to managing a particular disease.

Whilst this may seem like a good idea, it fails to account for the fact that a particular disease can occur through a myriad of different perturbations across mechanistic pathways. Basically, even though a diagnosis labels two people with a certain disease, the pathways that are broken could be very different between them.

For this reason, theres no optimal dose for addressing symptoms according to what disease or health condition you have.

In other words, there’s no specific dose for managing chronic pain, anxiety or inflammation across diseases. That dose is completely subjective.

Having said that, the studies that do currently exist are a good rule of thumb to gauge the ballpark figures for:

• A minimum therapeutic effect
• Establishing tolerable upper limits (safe doses)

But, as you’ll soon see, theres much better ways to find your own specific therapeutic window.

Here’s a summary of the existing research on doses within particular sample populations for different conditions:

Author	Condition	Dose	Type of CBD	Study Duration	Outcome
Crippa et al	CBD dosage for anxiety	400mg | 1 x daily	CBD Isolate	2 days	Significantly decreased anxiety, slight mental sedation
Zuardi et al	CBD dosage for Bi-Polar	600mg - 1200mg	CBD Isolate?	4 weeks	No effect on mania
Jadoon et al	CBD dosage for Blood Pressure	600mg	CBD Isolate	1 day	Reduced blood pressure
Morgan et al	CBD dosage for Cannabis Dependence	-	Whole-plant CBD	2 days	High CBD : THC was less addictive than low CBD : THC strains
Naftali et al	CBD dosage for Crohns Disease	10mg | 2 x daily	CBD Isolate	10 weeks	No beneficial effect compared to placebo
Consroe et al	CBD dosage for Dystonia	100mg - 600mg | 1 x daily	CBD Isolate?	6 weeks	Dose rated improvements in Dystonia (20-50%)
Solowij et al	CBD dosage for THC Impairment	100mg | 2 x daily	CBD Isolate	12 weeks	significantly fewer depressive and psychotic-like symptoms
Jadoon et al	CBD dosage for Diabetes	100mg | 2 x daily	CBD Isolate	13 weeks	No effect on blood sugar, but improved resistin and GIP
Cuhna et al	CBD dosage for Epilepsy	200mg-300mg | 1 x daily	CBD Isolate	18 weeks	Totally and partially reduced convulsions
Hurd et al	CBD dosage for Heroin Addiction	400mg - 800mg | 1 x daily	CBD Isolate	7 days	CBD significantly reduced drug cue-induced craving and anxiety
Carlini et al	CBD dosage for Insomnia	160mg | 1 x before bed	CBD Isolate	4 weeks	Sleep improved significantly
Wade et al	CBD dosage for Multiple Sclerosis	120mg | 1 x daily	Whole-plant extract	2 weeks	Signifiant pain relief
Zuardi et al	CBD dosage for Parkinsons (psychosis)	150mg - 600mg | 1 x daily	CBD Isolate	4 weeks	Psychotic symptoms significantly improved
Elms	CBD dosage for PTSD	9mg - 100mg	Whole-plant extract	8 weeks	91% patients had a decrease in PTSD symptom severity
Leweke et al	CBD dosage for Schizophrenia	200mg | 4 x daily	CBD Isolate	4 weeks	Psychotic symptoms significantly improved
Bergamaschi et al	CBD dosage for Social Anxiety	600mg | 1 x daily	CBD Isolate	1 day	Significantly reduced discomfort, anxiety, cognitive impairment
Irving et al	CBD dosage for Ulcerative Colitis	250mg | 2 x daily	Whole-plant extract	10 weeks	Improved subjective quality of life

CBD doses of up to 300 mg daily for up to 6 months have been safe (1), and higher doses of 1200-1500 mg have been used for up to 4 weeks (2).

How To Take CBD

One of the most popular ways to ingest CBD is by using a tincture preparation/oil. These typically come with a glass pipette which administers CBD with a carrier oil in small droplets.

Alternatively, you can get caps which are already pre-dosed so taking fixed doses consistently is easier. Caps tend to come in ranges from 10-50mg, so experimenting with doses is slightly less flexible. It might be easier to play around with tinctures at first as you can increase and decrease the dose with more flexibility, but with a little less precision.

However, if you are using a spray then those doses may be more accurate to clock, so you can have a play around with an accessible form.

You may have noticed that CBD can be referred to as a percentage as well as in milligrams (mg). Confusing, right?

Whilst knowing the percentage is handy to assess the general potency you are getting, measuring doses in mg is more practical. This way you can also go by doses used in research as well, as CBD is mostly referred to in mg.

To most accurately dose CBD, knowing how much CBD in mg/drop or serving can help you find your sweet spot with plenty of room for exploration.

CBD Content of Gaia Guru Products

Oral drops come in a 10ml size and contain  ~ 200 drops per bottle:

• Lift CBD drops | 500mg total CBD |  2.5mg / drop
• Relief CBD drops | 500mg total CBD |  2.5mg / drop
• Focus CBD drops | 500mg total CBD |  2.5mg / drop
• Calm CBD drops | 500mg total CBD |  2.5mg / drop

Capsules contain a total of 30 vegan capsules with organic coconut oil.

• Get woke CBD capsules | 300mg total CBD | 10mg / cap
• Nightcap CBD capsules | 600mg total CBD | 20mg / cap

Massage oils come in 100ml sizes and contain 10 - 20 servings.

• Original massage oil | 1000mg total CBD | 50 - 100mg / serving
• Warming massage oil | 1000mg total CBD | 50 - 100mg / serving

Muscle and lip balms:

• CBD lip balm | 15ml | 100mg total CBD
• CBD muscle balm | 30ml | 500mg total CBD | 40 - 80mg / serving
• CBD muscle balm | 60ml | 1000mg total CBD | 40 - 80mg / serving

Going By Body Weight

This seems like a practical method to go by, but in reality its actually pretty flawed.

Its kind of like how using Body Mass Index (BMI) to assess body composition is flawed. It uses measures of weight in relation to height to assess obesity risk, but fails to account for whether the weight is composed of muscle or fat. Its practical, but inaccurate. 

Going by body weight alone fails to account for genetic differences in your Endocannabinoid system and metabolism, that influences the effects CBD may have.

Even if you share the same body weight as someone, you could have a totally different effect from CBD.

Your individual response varies because of your unique body composition and:

• Metabolic activity of liver enzymes (CYP) which metabolise cannabinoids
• Nutritional Status (omega 3:6 consumption notably) 
• Endocannabinoid tone (synthesis, degradation and signalling of Endocannabinoids) 
• Sleep (also impacts EC tone) 
• Stress (impacts EC tone)

Finding Your Own Sweet Spot

There's another way to go if you choose not to go by body weight or doses used in research.

You may have heard the saying start low and go slow. This refers to activating your endocannabinoid system, gently introducing it to CBD.

If you've never taken CBD (or cannabis) before, then your endocannabinoid system hasn’t been fully ‘woken up’ yet. So gently wake it up, starting with small doses at first, and gradually increasing them over time.

This helps establish your optimal dose of CBD, so you can find your therapeutic window. Your therapeutic window is the space between the smallest dose which produces a meaningful effect, and the point where your response starts to plateau.

Start with a low dose, say 2-5mg. If this doesn’t provide any meaningful effect for you, increase your dose until you find it does. You’ve now found your minimum viable dose.

You may choose to explore higher doses for greater effects beyond your minimum viable dose. This way you can explore if more is necessarily better for you, or just ends up wasting your oil. This is a valuable experiment you can conduct on yourself to truly understand how your oil is working for you.

What works for you is going to be completely subjective, so start low and increase incrementally to find your personal 'goldilocks zone' (thats juuuuust right). 

CBD has no official Tolerable Upper Limit (maximum safe dose), but is generally well tolerated. Thats why its a good idea to have some idea from the literature just to be safe.

The Food Standards Agency (FSA) suggests taking a daily dose of 70mg CBD.

Some people may require higher doses based on their individual needs. A CBD containing food supplement for adults was recently recommended at a daily intake of up to 130 mg or 1.86 mg CBD per kg body weight.

Tracking Your Way To Success

Once you have established your relationship with CBD, you can play around with it, and start to track how you respond to different doses, and establish whether its best to:

• Dose in response to symptoms
• Dose periodically throughout the day
• Dose with food
• Dose Morning or Night

Get your free Gaia Guru tracker here.

There’s no one right way to use CBD as it works very subjectively. After a little experimentation, you can find how much, when and with what CBD works best for you.

CBD Dosage: Topicals

Using CBD topically requires a slightly different strategy to when its used orally. When applied through the skin, CBD doesn’t tend to have widespread effects in the body, but acts locally.

It’s still a good idea to bring awareness to how much you are using, and what doses you apply. This way you can see how much product you need to provide you with your desired effects. 

Take the Gaia Guru Muscle Balm for example; both the 30ml and the 60ml balms contain 16mg of bioactive CBD per ml of product. 

Start off by using ~ 2.5ml, which looks like a small dab on the end of your finger. That amounts to ~ 40mg of CBD. See how that works for your desired outcome, and increase by 0.5ml each time until you experience your desired effects. 

Its a similar method with the Gaia Guru Massage Oils. They provide 10mg bioactive CBD / ml of oil. That’s an easy ratio to work with, as you can increase by increments of (1ml) 10mg CBD each time you want to explore higher doses. 

We suggest starting with 5ml of oil, which can actually go quite a long way when it’s spread out over a particular body part or area. You can then increase the serving by 1ml each time to see how you respond to higher doses of CBD.