Busy schedules sometimes makes for rough nights. The phrases “I am so tired when I hit the pillow I’m out” doesn’t work for everyone. Chronic stress or busyness increases the risk of insomnia.  While episodes of acute stress, can throw sleep out for days, once those episodes pass, sleep usually returns to normal. But sometimes you need a little help. This quick marijuana tea will help you sleep.

Avoid caffeine and go with mint teas, hops teas, chamomile, and other herbs which natural relax the body. During the holiday season, peppermint can help you nod off and sleep for longer, the essential oils in peppermint tea can help relax your muscles, setting the scene for a peaceful night of sleep. Rich in antioxidants, there are lots of other benefits of peppermint tea too. Make a  tea blend with precisely the flavors you enjoy with the dose of THC you may have been having anyway.

Quick Nighttime Team

Ingredients:
• 1 teabag or 1 teaspoon loose-leaf tea of your choice
• 1½ cups water
• ¼ teaspoon, or desired amount, of cannabis oil or ticture
• Any other ingredients for flavor such as honey, milk, or sugar

DIY​ ​Sleepy​ ​Eyes​ ​Tea

Danielle Guercio

Blend makes 2 cups of tea
With tincture: 3mg THC per cup estimated
Loose leaf: Omg THC, CBD potential depends on strain

• ¼ c rose buds
• 1 Tbsp lavender
• 2 Tbsp chamomile
• 1 Tbsp hops
• 1 Tbsp dried mint
• ½ g cannabis and/or 1 tsp cannabis glycerin tincture*

Deciding on your flower/herb ratio is crucial. It’s quite easy to get these flowers online or in most grocery stores, having them on hand can make lots of recipes more special.

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It’s also worth keeping these items around, as they are wonderful for garnishing and engaging your sense of smell. For a tea blend, their pleasant flavors help to relax and surround you with their smell, taste, and potentially sleep serenading properties.

Decide on finely ground decarboxylated cannabis stirred into hot milk as your cannabis dose, or you can use tincture for THC. Both are OK, but don’t forget you won’t get any THC from just pouring water over ground cannabis, though you might get some terpenes and lower on the heat spectrum cannabinoids, and those also have their own sleep magic to them.

Use either the proportions above, or prepare a blend to your liking of lightly chopped flowers. You can leave them whole for prettiness if you wish. Anything that is good for sleep can go in this blend. If using ground cannabis add to the blend, make sure it’s very finely ground and has been heated as if you were making cannabutter. Divide the tea blend into two portions or put into a classic teapot. Pour over water and allow to brew for 5 minutes before adding sweetener and sipping. If using tincture add now.

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Alternatively, you can prepare a milky tea concentrate in the style of an Indian chai latte or Middle Eastern rose tea. Add aromatics and cannabis to a saucepan with milk, and some honey, simmer for 5-10 minutes, strain, serve with sweeteners and add hot water. This will get you a bit more cannabinoids, and if you simmer longer you’ll eventually get THC as well. Always use care with milk on a stovetop.

*Cannabis​ ​Glycerin​ ​Tincture

Decarboxylate 3.5g of finely ground cannabis at 225 degrees for 20 minutes in a tightly sealed, oven safe container. Put cannabis in lidded mason jar or vacuum sealed bag with cannabis and ½ cup vegetable glycerin. Heat in water bath just under boiling for at least 1 hour. Strain and chill to use in recipes Get to sleep faster when you have a busy day ahead, and if you’re trying to keep the bedroom smoke free but need that helper, this way is an excellent choice. You can make the dry herb blend in big batches, if you like it, and either add tincture for a medicated sweetener or steamed milk to wake up the lower cannabinoids.

Photos: Maria Penaloza

Nothing sets the mood better than music – and Yacht Rock is still a star

The anthem is Come Sail Away by Styx is the perfect anthem for a dark, cold winter night.  Dreams of a beach, a boat, and escaping helps some survive the winter.  Well, Yacht Rock pairs perfect with cocktails in the summer and evening. Yacht rock is unique music style and aesthetic commonly associated with soft rock, one of the most commercially successful genres from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. Millennials to boomers have savored the sounds while enjoying drink.

Typified by artists like Christopher Cross, Rupert Holmes, and Pablo Cruise, Yacht Rock is  highlight the casual approach to love, life and a laid back life. Despite being a un-pc, the stuff is irresistible on days you are craving escape. It reeks of sunshine and laziness.

Yacht Rock is nuanced and usually one of the key themes. They are finding the love of your life, having a memorable one-night stand or doing something nautical. Jimmy Buffet and the beach focus is not usually in the genre.

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Yacht rock is the new hipster music. We have a yacht rock playlist at one of our restaurants, Huckleberry Square and we constantly get comments from all generations about how great the music is. At another one of our places, the notorious dove diner The 5 Point Cafe, when the music switches from the usual punk and metal, to yacht rock, people think it’s amazing, like something they’ve never heard. It’s chill nostalgic and fun goes great with cocktails, what more can you ask for?

“The Pina Colada Song” is arguably the most perfect embodiment of yacht rock, fulfilling, as it does, all three of the qualifications cited above. Holmes sings about making love in the dunes, attempts to cheat on his wife, then ultimately, rediscovers that his “old lady” is actually the love he’s been searching for all along. That’s the holy trinity of Yacht Rock themes, all wrapped up in a breezy story of casual adultery.

To set the mood, here is a recipe for the ideal yacht rock drinks

Easy Pina Coloda

Ingredients

• 1 pound (about 3 cups) frozen pineapple chunks
• 3 ounces (1/3 cup) white rum
• 2/3 cup coconut milk
• Optional garnishes: fresh pineapple slices, maraschino cherries, cute paper umbrellas

Create

• Combine all ingredients together in a blender, and puree until smooth.  If the mixture is too thick, feel free to add in extra rum or coconut milk to help it blend.
• Serve immediately, topped with your desired garnishes.

They are incredibly disablitating, migraines occurs most often among people aged 20 – 50 years, and are 3 times more common with women.  Roughly 10% of the population will get one.  Around 95% of the population will get a headache.  The most common headaches include tension-type headaches (must frequent), cluster headaches, and persistent headaches (NDPH). This doesn’t include alcohol and food related headaches.  A migraine  differed stands out since it is neurological condition causing a variety of symptoms, most notably a throbbing headache on one side of your head. Migraines often get worse with physical activity, lights, sounds or smells. They usually last at least four hours or even days.

Data suggests marijuana may reduce migraine pain and be the best over the counter relief. More research needs to be done, but early studies show promise. Published in The Journal of Pain, the first study to utilize big data in analyzing the role cannabis plays in managing pain from headaches and migraines. Using archival data from the Strainprint—an app in which patients track their symptoms before and after using medical marijuana—scientists determined inhaled marijuana reduced the severity of self-reported pain 47.3% for headaches and 49.6% for migraines.

“We were motivated to do this study because a substantial number of people say they use cannabis for headache and migraine, but surprisingly few studies had addressed the topic,” said study lead author Carrie Cuttler, an assistant professor of psychology at Washington State University.

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Instead of documenting the before and after data points in real time, previous research asked patients to recall how marijuana affected the severity of past headaches. A clinical trial, as Science Daily first reported, found that cannabis could be more effective at reducing headache pain than ibuprofen, though the researchers used nabilone, a synthetic cannabinoid drug, in the trial.

However, in the Washington State study, 1,300 patients who used the app more than 12,200 times submitted information about their headache before and after marijuana use, while 653 patients used the app over 7,400 times to track their changes in migraine pain.

More conventional treatments can cause an “overuse headache,” which can cause patients’ headaches to worsen over time. But researchers found no such result in patients using cannabis. They did, however, find patients consuming more marijuana over time, indicating they may be developing a tolerance to the plant. In addition, the study reported a difference in headache reduction between genders, with significantly more sessions involving men (90%) than women (89.1%).

RELATED: Consuming Medical Marijuana Is Proven To Help Migraine Sufferers

Patients received no additional benefits when using cannabis strains with higher or lower THC and CBD concentrations. As the plant contains more than 100 cannabinoids outside THC and CBD, researchers believe this indicates other cannabis elements like terpenes could be playing a factor. The study did report concentrates, like oil, elicited stronger decreases in headache severity than marijuana flower.

“I suspect there are some slight overestimates of effectiveness,” Cuttler said. “My hope is this research will motivate researchers to take on the difficult work of conducting placebo-controlled trials. In the meantime, this at least gives medical cannabis patients and their doctors a little more information about what they might expect from using cannabis to manage these conditions.”