My Bedtime Routine: Jane Fonda on Vaping and Being Alone

We’re always on the hunt for the next great bedtime routine. In our Sleeping With… series, we ask people from different career paths, backgrounds, and stages of life how they make sleep magic happen.

Jane Fonda has been standing up for what she believes in long before hashtags and Instagram challenges. Though these days, some of us might recognize Fonda, 83, from her TikTok presence, her public arrest while protesting fossil fuel use in Washington, D.C., or her hit Netflix series, Grace and Frankie, others revel in Fonda’s classics: 9 to 5, Jane Fonda’s Workout, and her long history of activism.

SELF caught up with Fonda, who is currently promoting a line of hemp products from Uncle Bud’s, to talk all things self-care in quarantine. “I don’t smoke pot to get high anymore,” Fonda tells SELF. Now she uses CBD roll-ons in an effort to care for her osteoarthritis and smokes a Dosist pen before bed to help her fall asleep. Rad. Read on below for Fonda’s bedtime beauty routine, her thoughts on the weighted blanket trend, and why she absolutely loves being single at 83.

I’m totally alone three days a week. And I love being alone.

I have my dog. That’s important. And I’ve never minded being alone. I do not get lonely. I read a lot. I write a lot. I’m active on social media. I prepare for my Fire Drill Fridays [a weekly virtual rally for climate change]. So I like being alone. The rest of the week, there’s a pod. There’s my assistant and a man who handles house things, if something goes wrong with the house, and he also cooks. So I’m not 100% alone all of the time.

But when I say I’m alone, I mean there’s nobody in bed with me.

Oh, my God, I mean, one of my husbands liked to go to bed early like I did. But needless to say, when we got in bed together I wasn’t reading or watching TV very much. Another husband liked to write during the night. Two of my three husbands were night owls. So we didn’t often get in bed at the same time.

I sleep, on average, nine hours a night. My dad always told me as you get older, you don’t need to sleep as much. I find it’s not true for me. I really don’t do well unless I get a lot of sleep. I know it’s good for me, so I’m glad that’s the case.

I’m an early-to-bed kind of person.

Around 6 p.m I put Weleda Skin Food on my legs and arms. I used to get way too much sun, and on my legs and arms the skin gets dry, so I use a very rich cream. To clean my face off, I use a L’Oréal Paris Revitalift Makeup Removing Cleansing Towelette. It comes in a little package. So I use that. And then I have a tonic, from Mila Moursi. She is a French woman who has products. There’s a cleansing toner that I spray on my face, and while that’s drying I brush my teeth using Sensodyne.

Then I’ll put different things on my skin after it’s clean.

Sometimes I use Uncle Bud’s Organic Hemp Oil Overnight Face Mask. [Ed. note: Fonda is an Uncle Bud’s spokesperson.] Sometimes I use a product, again, from Mila Moursi. It’s called the Anti-Wrinkle Cream. And that’s what I put on my face.

I’m usually in bed by 6:30 or 7 p.m.

See, I live by myself. I don’t have a husband or a lover, so I can kind of do whatever I want. I’m usually in bed pretty early. I have a bed where you can lift up the head and lift up the feet. You know, like a hospital bed. It’s a very comfortable mattress. So I raise the head and I raise the feet, and I start to watch television.

I always watch Chris Hayes at 5 p.m., if I’m ready. Otherwise, I never miss Rachel Maddow. And then sometimes after her I watch Lawrence O’Donnell. And then I watch—especially now, because I’m a member of the Academy—I look at movies. Either I watch DVDs of movies that I’ve been sent, or I watch streaming things.

One other thing I do before I go to bed, because I have osteoarthritis, is I use a roll on, which I find takes away my muscle aches and pains. It’s Uncle Bud’s Roll-On Pain Cream.

I’ll usually go to sleep at about 9:30 or 10 p.m.

For Christmas, my niece, Bridget Fonda, gave me a weighted blanket. And it’s interesting, because I didn’t tell her this, but I like weight on me and for quite a long time I thought, I wonder if I should get a weighted blanket? Somebody told me about these blankets. They give them to people who suffer from anxiety, which I don’t. I just like the feeling of weight on me. So she gave me a 15-pound weighted blanket. I go to sleep so easily, and I sleep all night, and it’s divine.

I go to sleep with a vape pen, made by the company Dosist. And it’s called Sleep.

So it doesn’t get you high, but it’s four puffs and I’m asleep. I’m kind of obsessed with hemp. Not for the reasons that you might think, you know, because it makes you high. Because I don’t smoke pot to get high anymore.

Before I discovered Dosist Sleep vape pens, which I can get at stores here in Los Angeles called MedMen, I took sleeping pills. And I would be hungover the next day. When I was shooting Grace and Frankie, I would break a pill in half, so I’d take a very, very small dose. But the next day I would need to take a nap during the lunch break. I don’t need to do that anymore. When I wake up, I don’t have any need to sleep during the day.

The other thing that’s important for me is I have a ceiling fan in my bedroom.

I turn the temperature down to 68 and I turn the fan on so the air is always moving. It’s hard for me to sleep unless there’s air moving. Preferably cool air, so it’s nice that my bedroom has a ceiling fan. Well, I actually installed it—it wasn’t there before. It’s very quiet where I live, so there’s no outside noises that disturb me during the night. There’ve been a few earthquakes, but they weren’t big. That’s about it.