Can Cannabis Help you Sleep?

We’ve all found ourselves at the mercy of a sleepless night at one point or another. Maybe we slept into late, or had a big meal beforehand, or mixed up our melatonin capsules with our caffeine pills. Maybe all of the above (separate containers, folks). Whatever the reason for your shifting and shuffling, counting sheep isn’t cutting it anymore.

But where once a sleeping pill and a white noise machine would’ve been the norm, some of the green persuasion say they’ve found comfort in cannabis.

It makes perfect sense on paper: That relaxed feeling that a good many consumers experience after hitting their preferred instrument of consumption should lend itself to a better sleep; daily stresses and lingering anxieties receding to make way for a good night’s rest, leaving the mind and body to re-emerge untroubled and better equipped for the trials of the coming day.

If only it were so simple.

Cannabis may help you get to sleep faster

While we’re awaiting more widespread trials on cannabis and sleep, the existing findings might suggest the plant can decrease sleep onset latency by allowing users to fall asleep more quickly at low-to-moderate doses depending on their frequency of consumption. As has long been noted by lab-coats and cannabis consumers alike, THC and CBD can have a sedative effect that may help would-be sleepers cross the initial threshold. Be mindful, though… sedation doesn’t necessarily equal solid sleep. Almost paradoxically, high doses were found to increase onset latency, as well as the tendency to wake up mid-rest.

Cannabis may degrade sleep quality

Compared to an earlier report, researchers also found that frequent cannabis consumers – people with more than five uses per week – reported shorter total sleep times in general, less slow wave sleep, worse sleep efficiency, and longer sleep onset compared to those who didn’t use cannabis.

Sleep experts have also reported that cannabis may reduce the amount of REM (rapid eye movement) sleep: the last of four constantly repeating stages in which the human body experiences sleep. It’s the stage in which dreams most often occur, which may be why so many frequent cannabis users can’t remember their dreams, and why they start again after quitting. That may be a deal-breaker for some, as aside from revealing our darkest fears about giving a presentation while naked, REM sleep has been shown to be integral to engaging the learning and memory centers of the brain.

In fact, a 2017 review of 60-plus cannabis-and-sleep-adjacent studies concluded that while more testing was clearly necessary, cannabis had the potential to hurt sleep quality in the long term.

The bottom line (for now)

But for helping weary consumers hit the hay faster, it stands to reason that cannabis as we currently know it probably isn’t the best available option for troubled sleep. Until then, it seems going to sleep at the same time as often as possible and setting the screen aside at least an hour before bed remain the best choices for the average sleeper.

This article was written by David Wilson. David Wilson is a freelance writer and journalist, living and working in Toronto. He writes about cannabis, culture, and the intersection at which they meet.

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This article was published February 11th, 2020.