Category: Health & Wellness

New glasses!

My glasses broke several weeks ago, so I got my eyes examined and went shopping. I briefly entertained the idea of getting funky frames now that I’m retired and don’t have to fit in, but I’m kind of minimalist and like to keep things simple. As my mother used to say, you can’t go wrong with black.

I didn’t like any of the frames in the big eyewear stores, and I didn’t like any of the frames in the optometrist-owned enterprises, either. I searched on the Internet and found a place that looked promising in an artsy urban area near Sacramento, about 30 miles from my home. If you live in the area, I highly recommend That Guy Eyewear. The owner’s name is Dennis, and he’s awesome.

Dennis buys closeouts and overruns. These frames are made by someone I’ve never heard of … Michel Atlan. The shop carries tons of really cool frames, and the prices are so good, I might even consider another pair — perhaps funky? I have progressives, and the total price for frames and lenses was $339.

Most of you don’t live in the area, but I encourage you to look for small, independent shops. The service was great, and I consider these a bargain. I spent way more on glasses when I had cash flow.

Back to the eye exam. I did not want my eyes dilated, so I paid out-of-pocket for the fancy scan. The scan revealed calcifications in both eyes. According to 23andMe, I am at higher risk for age-related macular degeneration, so that was an unpleasant surprise. The optometrist said they could be nothing, and they aren’t near the retina. But, of course, now we have to watch it.

I studied up on macular degeneration, which can impair your vision and potentially lead to blindness. I’m seriously hoping I don’t get it. Even though the genetic test showed I’m at higher risk, no one in the family had it, so that’s good. But after surviving both ovarian cancer and breast cancer, I know I need to be vigilant and hope for the best. I take it seriously and will certainly follow up, but I put it in the bucket of things I refuse to worry about.

For now, anyway. My advice? Pay for the scan.

Getting out of task mode

Everything I’m reading says good health and happy retirements are associated with strong social networks. I’ve worked hard to stay healthy and am loving retirement, but I am failing as a friend, and I’m going to fix it.

About the only thing I can say in my defense is that we moved more than 20 times during our careers. We never established roots, never got to know people in the community. We met our friends at work, and now they are scattered. We haven’t always done a good job of staying in touch. But that’s not really the issue.

The crux of the problem seems to be how I approach life. I’m task-oriented, which can be a good thing. Until it goes bad. Early in my career I was all about the job, all about the work and didn’t pay much attention to relationships. After my first cancer experience, I figured out work wasn’t everything in life, and I started paying attention to people. I discovered I liked people more than the work itself. An unintended consequence? My career blossomed.

Yet I still struggle with this mentality of mine. Retirement. Do I just retire? No, I start a blog about retirement. Even my interest in medical cannabis is task-oriented. Most people just go out a buy some pot. Not me. I read all the literature, bookmark all the websites, subscribe to all the newsletters and attend specialized training in the cannabis industry.

And then there’s golf, my hobby of choice. For many years, I just went out as a single and played with strangers. I was all about golf, so that was fine with me. But in retirement, I play more golf and the singles lifestyle wasn’t cutting it.

Dale and I always joke the only thing we’ve ever joined was a wine club (because we’re joiners). However, I bit the bullet and joined several women’s golf leagues. I’m having a great time, but it has been an adjustment playing with the same people week after week. Relationships matter.

I’m friendly and have been told I’m fun to play with, but when I’m done, I’m ready to go home. My task is over. The other women like to gather in the clubhouse and socialize. I forced myself to join the party last week and realized this is a perfect opportunity to strengthen my social network. Friends! Right there, practically built-in. It’s time to get out of task mode.

The idea is to relax and have fun with real people in real life who have similar interests. How hard can it be? Just to make sure I’m fully prepared, I did some research and invested in a social lubricant we call birdie juice. Bird Dog Peach Whiskey. Someone makes a birdie, everyone gets a shot.

Baby steps.

Making noise about aging

I’m comfortably retired, healthy and active. We eat fantastic food we cook ourselves, buy wine at the local vineyard and fresh produce from the farmer’s market. There’s world-class beauty in every direction, yet getting out of the car yesterday, I heard myself grunt and groan as though I were miserable.

I can hike for miles, yet getting out of the Honda is a bridge too far?

I asked Dale. “I don’t know,” he said with a heavy sigh, “but we both do it all the time.” To be honest, I noticed Dale’s excessive noise. He’ll be pulling a pot out of the cupboard, and then you hear all this ugh, huh, whoo. Heart attack? Stroke? Aliens?

Are you OK?

Yes! Stop asking me that.

Sure, but try not to act like you’re dying. Unless you really are, and then you’d better tell me or I’ll kill you myself.

Maybe it’s just part of aging. Old people noises? But it doesn’t matter, because we both agreed we’re not going to do it anymore. Oh, there will be those who say it’s impossible to quit, that grunting, groaning and heavy sighs are unavoidable. Yet … I feel certain we purred like finely tuned machines while hiking among the Sequoias last weekend.

As for quitting, we’ll see. I’m thinking abstinence will be hard for Dale, who is not what we’ll call task-oriented. He might think he wants to stop, but that moment will pass, and then he’ll be proud of his little noises. He’ll brag about them at parties, like he saw Janis at Woodstock.

On the other hand, I feel certain I can nip this in the bud. You give me a goal, and I will die trying, even if I make unpleasant sounds along the way.

What do you think? Are these annoying audibles a biological response hard-wired into our aging bodies or a habit we can unlearn?

The 40-year diet plan

People sometimes say how lucky I am to be thin. What’s my secret? While many adults face down mid-life weight gain, I’ve slowly lost 60 pounds over time. I call it the 40-year diet plan.

As for the backstory, I was a thin adolescent but exploded breasts and hips when I turned 14. I struggled with my weight throughout high school. My mom and I joined Weight Watchers together, and that worked … until it didn’t.

I joined the Army at 18 and had to lose 15 pounds just to get in. Then I started eating my way through the mess hall and ballooned to my highest weight – 195 pounds. Fortunately, the Army made us run, and I began a lifelong love of fitness. Running eventually gave way to walking, but once I started moving, I never stopped. I lost 50 pounds over four years.

Then I relapsed in my late 20s. I gained about half the weight back and hated it. I went on crazy diets. Remember the Beverly Hills Diet? I lost weight, lost my periods, lost my good sense. My husband was so pissed at me, and my mother said, “You’ve been obsessed with your weight since high school, don’t you think it’s time you figured this out?”

I decided to accept myself exactly as I was. I vowed I would never go on another diet … ever. I would eat delicious and healthy food, and if I gained weight, fine. If I lost weight, fine. I was not going to ruin my life over this. I started walking more, thinking of it as much-needed mental therapy not exercise.

Over three years, I lost the weight I had gained and kept it off for the next 30 years. I continued to exercise and eat well – focusing on health but never saying no to anything I really wanted. I thought, well, just keep doing what you’re doing, and who knows? You might look pretty good in 40 years.

When I was 59, a routine physical led to a diagnosis of breast cancer. That same physical revealed slightly elevated blood sugar, so I started reducing sugar and carbohydrates. I lost another 10 pounds over two years. At age 62, I’m holding steady at 135 on my 5’7” frame.

I still exercise (mostly walking) and eat everything I want, but mostly I want real food that doesn’t come in a package. I wouldn’t waste my calories on a store-bought cookie. Pass on fast food. Haven’t had a soda, diet or otherwise, in at least 10 years. On the other hand, we eat pizza every Friday!

My breasts are gone, and I did not have reconstruction. Just flatness and a lattice of scars. There’s a humongous vertical scar up my belly from ovarian cancer in 1999. I love my body for surviving all that, and after all those years of beating myself up, I love how I look! Best of all, I feel great.

But I don’t feel worthy of praise simply for being thinnish, just as people who are bigger or weigh more are not worthy of shame. This is just who I am now, who I became because of lifestyle choices and possibly wear and tear.

It’s never too late. You can learn to love your body. It’s not about losing weight as much as it’s about being happy and celebrating life. Move your body as much as you can and continue to enjoy delicious healthy food. See what happens. That’s my 40-year diet plan, which of course, isn’t a diet and isn’t a plan.

A first-timer visits the cannabis dispensary

Although I have been using medical cannabis for about six months, until yesterday, I had never visited a dispensary in person. I order online, and the cannabis is delivered to my house. The dispensary visit went about as expected, if you expect that, somehow, I will mess things up.

I had my Medical Marijuana Recommendation, which is still required in many places throughout California. I got mine from HelloMD. Not all dispensaries (including the one I visited) are licensed to sell retail. They copied my documentation and driver’s license while I sat in the nicely appointed waiting room filling out a form with address, etc.

When all was ready, a click opened the door to an inner chamber, a small store with glass-covered display cases. A young man (the budtender) waited on me. I said I was looking for Kiva Terra Bites, chocolate-covered dried blueberries that are supposed to be good for insomnia. I’ve written about other sleep remedies here and here, but I wanted to compare and contrast.

Check, he says, they have the Terra Bites, and if I like them, I should come back on Mondays, when they’re on sale. Nice.

While I was there, I checked out the displays to see what else looked fetching. I saw a small jar of a topical cream called Dabba. A brochure on the counter said it provides natural pain relief for 34 different conditions, from arthritis and eczema to neuropathy, phantom limb syndrome, sunburn, gun shot wounds and menstrual cramps. Obviously, I need this product.

I paid for my purchase in cash as required (I saw an ATM machine in the lobby). The budtender put my goods in childproof packaging and gave me a quick tutorial on how to open it. I also got two free pre-rolls and a little loose bud. Free pre-rolls seem to be common. I don’t smoke the joints, but they mysteriously disappear from the cabinet where I put them, so I’m pretty sure Dale is up to no good.

It looked as though I would get out of there without incident, when I saw two doors that appeared to be exits. One door was clearly marked, “Not an Exit.” Two guys were standing there, talking in front of the other door. Door number two did NOT have a sign regarding its role in life, so I assumed it WAS an exit and said excuse me, as I went to turn the handle.

No alarms actually went off, but I can still hear the sirens in my head. One of the guys said, stop! Miss, you cannot go in there! I’m freaking out. I guess this is the door to the mother lode? I backed away slowly and said in the same voice I use with TSA agents, “Can you please tell me where the exit is?”

They point to a door at the opposite end of the room. The exit, by the way, did not say, “Exit.”

I will have a full report on the blueberries in due time. They are 5 MG of THC per blueberry. That’s considered low-dose, but I ate one last night before bed, and it was too much for me. I felt dizzy and slept weird. Cutting a blueberry in half sounds dumb, but that’s what I will try next. I do believe they make them in 2.5 MG, which is probably better for my dainty self.

As far as the topical goes, I put it on my knees, my back and my mastectomy scars. I felt almost immediate relief – very similar to Penetrex but better. As it happens, I was on HelloMD chatting with one of the doctors, and she said topicals are a must for treating my post-mastectomy pain. She said to put it on several times a day for a week, and it might even make the pain go away permanently.

This is my first experiment with topical cannabis, which may be the best thing yet for older adults suffering from a variety of ailments. Cannabis creams will show up in a drug test, but they do not get you high. If you are open to the idea of using cannabis to treat pain and inflammation but don’t want to consume it, topicals are a good option.

I’ll keep you posted on my progress. So far, the only downside is a pungent odor for a couple of hours after you apply it – not offensive to me but definitely cannabis – to the point where I didn’t think I should go to the supermarket with Dale. It’s perfectly legal, not like they are going to kick me out of Whole Foods, but I really don’t want cannabis to be my signature scent.

 

The man on the train

Like many adults from dysfunctional families, I was angry with my father for years over his failings as a parent. With counseling and a one-time encounter with him 35 years after he died, I found peace.

My father, Bill, drank and was emotionally and verbally abusive. Much of the time, it seemed he wanted nothing to do with his wife and kids. For as long as I can remember, he slept in a camper parked in the backyard.

As a teenager, Bill left an impoverished home in Cleveland during the Great Depression and road the rails. He bummed his way around the country and was on his own for years when he got drafted. While AWOL, he met my mother in a bar back home. Married her, and after the war, he went back to Cleveland to pick her up and take the train out to California.

The newlyweds landed in Los Angeles with a little money saved up and bought a corner store that sold candy and cigarettes. Bill ran the store, and Mom worked in a bank.

Bill was notorious for closing the store and going to the movies or hanging out in bars. My mom went to check on him during a lunch break and found a stranger behind the counter. The man said Bill gave him the store, and it turned out to be true. That is when they headed for the suburbs, where he started sleeping in the backyard.

I happened to mention the camper to my counselor.

Why do you think he slept out there?

He was a ramblin’ man.

Dad rode the rails and struggled to accept the responsibilities of family life. Sleeping in the camper made him feel unbridled.

Counseling helped me forgive my father, who died when I was in my early 20s. I saw him for the first time not as a broken child but as an adult, and I saw he had many wonderful qualities. Not that his behavior was justified, but at some point, you realize people can only do so much with what they have. Still, I wondered how my life might be different if I had felt a father’s love.

I left California shortly after high school and only came back about five years ago when I thought it was safe. I used to ride the bus to work. Most mornings, I walked to the Caltrain station to catch the early bus, which left at 5:30 a.m. A handful of us would gather in the dark at our stop near the train tracks and wait for the bus to pull up.

One morning, a freight train zoomed by headed south, toward Los Angeles. I looked up to watch it pass. As the last car pulled into view, I saw a young man in clothes that looked to be from the 1940s, sitting on the back smiling and waving at me.

It was my father, and I suddenly felt engulfed in his love.

 

A message of faith and hope

On April 1, 2015, I was in the hospital having my breasts amputated. Mastectomy is such a nice word, but the only thing nice about this procedure is its potential to cure or prevent cancer. I’m happy to be celebrating my three-year anniversary. For those of you who are celebrating Easter today, perhaps my message of faith and hope will resonate.

My first cancer came out of nowhere. I was 43 years old and having vague abdominal pain. I already had a hysterectomy due to painful periods and wanted to be done with all that. My ovaries were removed during that operation. No ovaries but weird stuff going on. I had an exploratory surgery where they go in with a scope through the naval, and that’s when they found cancer.

The doctor said it was ovarian, which kind of blew me away, but it turns out a small percentage of women will get a kind of cancer almost identical to ovarian even without ovaries. That would be me. It’s officially called Primary Peritoneal Cancer (PPC). Most days I just say ovarian, although they are distinct.

It was advanced. Stage 3, Grade 3. The five-year survival rate is about 25-30 percent. The treatment was surgery to remove the tumors and other miscellaneous parts and then six months of chemotherapy. Following the chemo, I had another surgery to see if microscopic cancer remained. I was clear, and here I am, 18 years later with no recurrences.

I never thought about breast cancer, assuming my earlier cancer was a fluke. But I did go every year for a mammogram, and in 2015, it came back with a suspicious mass. After additional tests, I was diagnosed with Ductal Carcinoma In Situ (DCIS), which means the cells that line the milk ducts of the breast have become cancer, but they have not spread into surrounding breast tissue. DCIS is considered non-invasive or pre-invasive breast cancer.

If you’re going to get breast cancer, this is the one you want. Standard treatment is lumpectomy and radiation. However, I had that nasty history, so after all these years, it occurred to the doctors I should be genetically tested. It came back positive for the BRCA1 gene mutation. As the genetic counselor explained it to me, this mutation caused both my cancers and puts me at higher risk of cancer maybe forever.

The doctor advised me to have a bilateral mastectomy, and I agreed. It’s about reducing risk. I also decided not to get reconstruction or wear a prosthesis. I choose to be flat. You can read about that decision here.

In the early years after my first cancer, I had boatloads of check-ups because of the high recurrence rate. Now I go for check-ups twice a year, where they poke around and draw some blood to test for a cancer antigen that could indicate a recurrence.

That’s my cancer story in a nutshell. There are stories within the story, and I will probably write about them at some point. I was unlucky to get cancer but very lucky to survive it. As for the BRCA mutation, no one else in the family had ovarian or breast cancer. My relatives were tested after my diagnosis, and no one came back positive. The best we can figure is that I inherited it from my father, who had prostate cancer in his 50s but died many years ago from something else.

No cancer is good. And there are plenty of other terrible ailments that plague people and have nothing to do with cancer. If you are suffering, I know it’s a struggle to stay positive, but I always had faith as long as I was still alive, I would grow and learn and love and find happiness no matter what. You just keep going.

As for hope, I believe somebody, somewhere beats the odds and from day one, I said, “Why can’t it be me?”

 

Eat your beans

I’m here to sing the praises of eating more beans and legumes. I can’t think of a single food that has had more impact on my life – and not always in a good way.

As a child, I hated beans. I remember going to my friend Becky’s house for a sleepover, and for dinner, her mother made some sort of dish with macaroni and kidney beans. I vividly recall puking it up in Becky’s bedroom a couple of hours later. I was not invited back.

My taste buds evolved as I got older, but I still didn’t eat beans or other legumes because I had what we used to call a sensitive stomach. I had trouble digesting beans and vegetables such as cauliflower, broccoli and cabbage, which I nicknamed, “Death Vegetable.” I would have horrible gas pain and bloating, and to me, it wasn’t worth it.

In the category of strange but true, my digestive issues resolved after my cancer surgery in 1999. The operation included removing my omentum, which is a curtain of fatty tissue that hangs down from the stomach and liver and wraps around the intestines. The omentum is thought to aid in digestion, but maybe because mine was diseased it had the opposite effect? Or maybe whilst tooling around in my gut, the surgeon unkinked something that now allowed me to enjoy beans and cruciferous vegetables?

I don’t know what happened, but after the surgery at age 43, I began to slowly introduce these foods into my diet. And then later in my 50s, I read about people in the Blue Zones of the world who live long, healthy lives. Most of them eat a lot of beans. Additionally, eating a daily serving of cooked beans is linked with lower levels of “bad” low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol. I upped my game.

My husband always loved beans and legumes, so it made dinner easier. We discovered a mutual tolerance for unpleasant odors, since it did take time for my body to adjust as I increased fiber in my diet. No horrible bloating gas like I had when I was young – just painless flatulence, which Dale says is the sign of a healthy metabolism. But this comes from a guy who would sign his farts if he could.

We all know something will get us eventually, but since improving my diet by reducing sugar, eating more fruits and vegetables, eating oatmeal for breakfast several days a week and consuming beans or legumes daily, all the numbers in my lipid profile markedly improved, and my bad cholesterol dropped by 17 percent. After a lifetime fooling around with irritable bowel syndrome, I have no issues with either constipation or diarrhea.

Black beans, pinto beans, kidney beans, chickpeas, black-eyed peas and all kinds of lentils are now pantry staples. Hearty bean soups make an especially good lunch – I cook big batches to freeze in individual servings. If you’re working, you can defrost at home and put it in a wide-mouth mason jar to reheat in the microwave at the office. I kept a little squirt bottle of good olive oil in my credenza as a topper!

Cookbooks and websites are loaded with recipes that use legumes, but here are three new favorites:

In my opinion, all beans and legumes taste better if you make them from scratch. Once you get used to cooking dry beans, you will never want to use canned again. The Instant Pot®, which is an electric pressure cooker, makes it fast and easy – we would starve without ours.

I pretty much love all food, but if I had to, I would give up meat before I’d give up beans. Just don’t make me think about giving up cheese.

Experiments with cannabis gummies

I continue to use homemade CBD-dominant cannabis tincture to ease anxiety and reduce inflammation associated with post-mastectomy pain. All is well, but I wanted to share a couple of updates from the field!

First, always be cautious with your dosage. Cannabis is medicine not candy, and our goal here is to feel better without feeling stoned. Second, back away from the gummi bears.

My preferred delivery system is a little juice shooter in the morning with a bit of cannabis tincture. I’ve been adding a dropperful to my shooter. When I finally finished my first bottle of homemade cannabis tincture, I opened a new bottle and squeezed out a dropperful.

Whoa! There’s a reason I’m not a professional cannabis chef. My quality control apparently sucks. A dropperful of the new bottle from the same batch of tincture gave me what is lovingly called, “Couch Lock.” Except I was at my desk, so it was more “Chair Lock.”

Under the effects of too much cannabis, I sat there for a couple of hours mindlessly staring at my computer. So, yes, you might think of it as just another day in the office. But I’m retired, and I have more important things to do.

Such as making cannabis gummi bears! My tincture was a success, so I got to thinking how much fun it would be to try some other sort of cannabis recipe. I was immediately attracted to the idea of making cannabis gummies. I found a recipe using tincture, I ordered the molds, bought gelatin and sour cherry juice, because I thought that sounded like a good flavor.

Gummi bears were easy to make, but at the end of the day, you are stuck with boatloads of cannabis gummi bears. Oh, and I ran out of space in the bear molds, so I used silicone cupcake molds instead. That resulted it big globs of gelatin with cannabis in them. They look sort of like peanut butter cups.

They taste OK, but again, dosage is a problem. Those bears are so tiny! And the faux peanut butter cups are huge! And for some of us, who shall remain nameless, it’s difficult to remember they aren’t candy. For me, it’s safer to rely on the precision of a medical dropper. It even looks like medicine.

In hindsight, I would say, what’s the point? I don’t eat regular gummi bears, so the medicated variety don’t fit into my routine. And it occurred to me later I don’t actually like gummi bears. The only way I would want a product like this is if I were very sick and this was the only way I could take my medication.

Even then, I would advise all to proceed with caution. Overdoing it can lead to wasted hours in front of the computer, and that sounds too much like work.

Adventures with cannabis concentrate for insomnia

I was always a sleeper – used to say when the going gets tough, the tough go to sleep. Stress? Sadness? Pain? Checking out now, thank you. See you in the morning. But like everything else, all that changed with menopause, age, etc. Some nights my brain lights up with activity just as my head hits the pillow.

By design, I never tried prescription sleep medications. Too fraught with peril for me, typically a belt and suspenders kind of gal. That’s why I tried cannabis tea, which is legal where I live. As a novice user of medical cannabis, I wanted something easy and predictable. Kikoko Tranquili-Tea is exactly that. But it’s close to $5 a pop, so I began to research alternatives.

There are many indica-dominant strains to treat insomnia, but one that stood out for me was Granddaddy Purple. Up until this time, I had only used cannabis as tea or dried herb in my PAX vaporizer, and I didn’t see Granddaddy anywhere in the lineup on the dispensary website where I shop. Then one day I saw it.

Granddaddy Purple was listed under “concentrates.” The specific product was a cartridge. I was excited to see it, so I just ordered and didn’t think about the delivery system, other than it sure was cool to have it delivered to my house.

When it arrived, I opened the package and realized I had no idea what to do with it. I showed it to my husband, and he said I think you need a vape pen. I’m like, snap, I don’t want to be the cannabis paraphernalia queen, but there I was with Granddaddy Purple in a cartridge and no way to tap it.

If you are an inexperienced cannabis user, you might ask, um, tap what? What’s in the cartridge? In this case, it was cannabis oil, a concentrate made with a botanical extractor that uses pressure and carbon dioxide to separate the plant material. It produces an amber oil that is vaporized in a portable vape pen.

Which I did not have.

Here it is, the slippery slope, I thought, as I drove to the smoke shop. The hopelessly young clerk asked if he could help me. I had taken a picture of the cartridge with my phone and decided to lay my cards on the table.

I’m kind of new at this. I bought a cartridge, and I think I need a vape pen to use it. Are they universal – will my cartridge work in any vape pen, or do I need something special for this cartridge?

He was super nice. He looked at the picture probably just out of curiosity, wondering what an old lady smokes. But then said, yes, they’re universal. He showed me a selection of vape pens, and I picked a gpen slim for about $25.

Took it home and then had a hell of a time figuring out how to put it on the pen. Incredibly easy, but you know, beginner’s mind. The pen comes with a mouthpiece to use when you put your own oil in there, so think of the cartridge as a replacement mouthpiece. You screw it on, you push a button and you inhale.

On the first night I was still, uh, testing the tool and took several hearty puffs. Whomp. I slept, oh baby, I slept and had a hard time getting out of bed the next morning. No hangover or anything, which is the gift of cannabis. Just a bit groggy.

The next night I tried two very gentle puffs and got a wonderful night’s sleep. I woke up feeling refreshed, and there are none of those odd nocturnal behaviors associated with prescription meds. In terms of cost, a .05 ML cartridge is $40. I’m on night 11, and there seems to be plenty left. Already, it’s cheaper than tea.

The verdict? It’s a personal preference. I like both, but then here I am, a professional cannabis advocate. The tea is a delicious sensory experience, but concentrate is more to the point. I felt like an elegant lady drinking the tea – mother’s little helper – and I feel like more of a druggie vaping the concentrate. But the vape is easy, just keep it by the side of the bed, take two gentle puffs and pretty soon I’m falling asleep. And it’s cheaper, so for me, value wins.

What’s more important, though, is the value of getting a good night’s sleep, especially if you are in pain. Your body needs rest. I feel great! You can follow all the advice and turn off your cell phones, fluff your pillow, darken the room or whatever, but none of that did the job for me. Cannabis is a game changer.