Dosage – all you need to know

Dosage made easy

No matter which strength coloradoCBD, the dosage instructions are the same:  Place your bottle of coloradoCBD on a countertop, remove the cap  and drop the syringe all the way into the bottle   (The tabs will keep the syringe from falling into the bottle). Pull the plunger all the way to the stop.  This will fully load the syringe with exactly one milliliter of liquid – the twice a day, recommended, amount. Discharge the contents of the syringe into your mouth.  If you can, keep the CBD under your tongue or against your cheek for a minute or so before swallowing.  This is the quickest route into your system – but, if it is uncomfortable, go ahead and swallow – the end result will be the same.

For best results, it is important that you take coloradoCBDtwice a day. CBD can be taken at any time, but standardizing your routine will make it less likely to skip a dose. Many users make it a daily habit to take it when they first wake up and again at bed-time.  Try not to miss a dose, but if you do, if the next scheduled dose is only a few hours away, just wait till then to get back on schedule, otherwise go ahead and take it.  (Here’s something that might help)

Note: We prefer a syringe because of its greater accuracy, but a traditional dropper is also included in every package for those who prefer it.  The instructions for use are the same, but just load the dropper to a little past half-way for a regular one-milliliter dose.

Stay ahead of the symptoms:

Have you ever been in a situation where you had to carefully manage pain?  Then you understand how important it is to ‘stay ahead’ of the pain – to keep up with the recommended dosage and not fall behind schedule, so the pain does not re-occur. If you do fall behind, it could take two or three days of being back on schedule, properly medicated, to get past the pain again. It is much the same with CBD – falling behind schedule, either in amount or frequency, will greatly reduce its effectiveness.  Keeping up with your dosage – staying ahead of your symptoms – is essential for good results.

A little science

To understand how long it actually takes for anything you ingest to reach full effect, we need to discuss a little science:

Supplements, vitamins, alcohol, almost anything taken into the body, are gradually absorbed, then gradually eliminated. How long this takes is different for every substance.  The usual scientific way of describing this is called its “half-life” – the amount of time after which only one-half of the original amount remains in your system. For example, depending upon dosage and other individual factors, aspirin, has a half-life of three to six hours, so does alcohol, and the half-life of caffeine is about five or six hours.

Depending on dosage and other factors, CBD has a reported half-life of between 18 and 32 hours.  Since the CBD in your system is only half-absorbed after 24 hours, but you are taking it every 12 hours, you are ingesting CBD more quickly than your body eliminates it and so the level of CBD in your system continues to rise.  After a period of time, it reaches a point referred to as a “steady-state” – a constant level in your system where consumption and elimination balance out – and stays at that level for as long as you maintain the same dosage and schedule.  (This gradual build-up to a therapeutic level is the reason many medications “take a little while” to start working)

This helps explain why, if you go off schedule, either in dosage or frequency, you might not notice a decrease in effectiveness at first, and, when you do resume your schedule, may not see a noticeable improvement until levels rise back up again.

So many people we’ve talked to, once CBD began working for them, reduced the dosage, experienced a large drop-off in effectiveness, started up again, but not seeing an immediate improvement, decided, “CBD no longer works for me”, and stopped taking it altogether  Our constant counsel is take it twice a day – morning and evening.  A few hours either way probably won’t matter, but be consistent – if it is effective for you, plan on making it part of your life.

Note: Penny sometimes suggests to people that they take coloradoCBD three times a day for the first week – sort of a “kick-start” – to get to that steady-state a little more quickly.