The pregnancy stage is crucial to every woman as it signifies the beginning of a new life. Most women go through pregnancy well, but that does not mean that it is usually a walk in the park. Pregnancy comes with different symptoms, from morning sickness to anxiety, which makes this stage even more complicated and exhausting.
Many medications offer to help with minimizing these symptoms, but most of them cause side effects. One effective medication alternative that women opt for nowadays is cannabis. Like many people, you might be skeptical about using cannabis. Well, CBD products from cannabis contain no psychoactive elements, which makes it good for medicinal purposes.
But in this guide, we hope to make things simple by highlighting to you some of the facts that you don’t know about cannabis and pregnancy.
What is CBD?
CBD is the abbreviation of cannabidiol, one of the dominant chemical elements found in the cannabis plant. When extracted from the cannabis plant, this natural substance is useful in making various medicinal products. Some of the products include edibles and oils. What makes it popular is the lack of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), which is the compound responsible for mind-altering sensation in cannabis.
Growing cannabis is a great way of enjoying cannabis products in the comfort of your home. But make sure that you streamline your farming by using high-quality feminized cannabis seeds to get good yields.
Helps in Treating Nausea and Vomiting
Nausea is among the first major signs of pregnancy and usually starts after around six weeks. It is a normal condition that stops after around 12 weeks of pregnancy. However, you might need to consult a doctor or get proper medication if it is too much. Luckily, using CBD can help to manage nausea.
CBD contains some anti-nausea effects. So, consuming it activates the somatodendritic autoreceptors, which helps to regulate how you feel. Doing so reduces nausea hence making it possible to avoid or minimize vomiting. CBD also treats nausea faster compared to other regular medications, thus making it more reliable.
Treats Anxiety
As your pregnancy heads to the end, some symptoms might lessen. However, that is not always the case for anxiety. Your pregnancy might cause hormonal changes, thus making you feel anxious most of the time. This anxiety can sometimes be excessive and might affect your life by even causing sleeplessness.
CBD is effective in reducing anxiety as it has many anti-anxiety effects, which allow it to interact with the brain and help you feel better quickly. Although current studies do not explain the exact way that CBD reduces anxiety, they show that using cannabis lowers anxiety more efficiently.
Reduces Insomnia
The first pregnancy stages cause random hormonal changes that can affect sleep. Other factors like heartburn and congestion that are normal during pregnancy might also cause insomnia making your nights somehow miserable. The good news is that using cannabis can help you to reduce insomnia.
Cannabis contains CBD that has a positive impact on serotonin, which is a brain chemical that determines your wellbeing and happiness. CBD boosts serotonin levels helping you relax more and feel happy, which makes it easy for you to sleep.
Helps Alleviate Depression
Most women face depression after giving birth (postpartum depression). However, some experience it during pregnancy. Many things from poor social support to stress can lead you into depression during pregnancy, but having low serotonin levels is the primary cause.
Serotonin receptors are vital as they affect how you feel and determine the likelihood of getting depression. Using cannabis does not increase serotonin levels. However, the rich CBD content in cannabis can enable you to influence how the brain chemical receptors collaborate with the available serotonin. So, if you have low serotonin levels, using CBD makes these receptors to respond more positively to your serotonin levels, thus reducing depression effectively.
Enables You to Manage Pain
During pregnancy, you undergo many physical changes, like adding weight and experience digestive issues, which might cause pain. Although feeling pain might be normal during pregnancy, you must take it seriously as it can kill your joy, causing stress.
The best thing about using CBD is that it does not need to make you high to minimize pain. Using cannabis rich in CBD enables you to limit the amount of anandamide that your body absorbs. Anandamide is a significant compound that is responsible for regulating pain. So, consuming CBD ensures the bloodstream has enough anandamide, which relieves the pain you are experiencing.
Helps in Weight Loss
Pregnancy, especially in the middle and final stages, can affect your ability to exercise often hence making you overweight or even obese. Being obese is dangerous as it can affect both you and the baby and cause some complications like gestational diabetes, sleep apnea, and cardiac dysfunction.
Studies show that using CBD enhances how the body uses fat. Consuming CBD helps the body to convert the white fat (bad fat) into brown fat (good fat), which is more useful. Doing so allows you to burn more calories, thus losing some weight.
CBD also interacts with CB1 and CB2 receptors, which are usually responsible for food intake and metabolism, in your brain and lymphoid tissue. Proper interaction of these receptors enhances metabolism and reduces food intake hence enabling you to lose weight more effectively.
Reduces the Risk of High Blood Pressure
During pregnancy, most women are susceptible to high blood pressure due to stress. Having this disease is dangerous as it can cause other severe conditions like stroke, eclampsia, and preeclampsia.
Consuming cannabis regularly will help you to keep your blood pressure down hence preventing other complications. However, there is a need for more research to determine how exactly CBD reduces blood pressure.
Conclusion
As you can see, cannabis and pregnancy have a close relationship more than you imagined. Cannabis can help pregnant women to manage various conditions without causing side effects like pharmaceuticals.
Credit:
Tammy Taylor
Content Marketing Specialist