2 Detrimental Ways Weed Affects Your Sleep

People often use cannabis as a sleep aid, saying that it allows them to fall asleep faster. Until recently, we didn’t have a good understanding of how weed affects sleep. However, emerging evidence shows that using cannabis as a sleep aid could be detrimental to sleep.

Former pot heads always tell me about how much better their sleep is after they abstain from weed for at least 2 weeks or quit completely. They also say that their brain fog disappears, their anxiety is better, and their memory improves significantly. Funny enough, all of these can be tied to the improvement in sleep quality.

Chronic use of cannabis has two distinct effects on your sleep.

Cannabis Disrupts Dream Sleep

First, weed dramatically reduces the time spent in dream sleep, or rapid eye-movement (REM) sleep. That may sound very benign at first, but each phase of sleep is critical for our health in some way.

Dreaming is associated with learning, memory, and creativity. Maybe more importantly, it is important for our mental health. Dreaming allows your brain to process emotionally turbulent events from the day and make them feel less stressful in the subsequent days.

The importance of dreaming is well demonstrated by individuals who suffer from PTSD. One characteristic of PTSD is the inability to stay asleep because of recurring nightmares. This disrupts the cycle of sleep, specifically REM sleep.

When given medication that allows them to sleep through a full sleep cycle, especially REM sleep, their PTSD symptoms improve.

Dreaming is like counseling for your brain and when we take that away, we become more irritable and less resilient to stress.

Cannabis Disrupts Normal Sleep Duration

The second thing that cannabis does to your sleep is that it will cause you to either short-sleep or over-sleep. Specifically, most people will either sleep for less than 6 hours or more than 10. Both of these durations are associated with poor health outcomes.

Cannabis will prevent you from achieving normal sleep durations. Our brain and body undergo significant repair, clean up, and organization during sleep. Our sleep affects every process in our body. When we cut our sleep short, we are headed into a bad place.

When combined with the reduction of REM sleep, the result is very poor sleep quality overall.

Sleep is the Foundation of Health

Considering all of the things that can go wrong when sleep suffers, my personal recommendation will be to avoid consuming cannabis if you already have problems with your sleep. Trust me, your sleep quality will significantly improve when your system is cleared of cannabis products. You may even notice that your anxiety and brain fog improves as THC has been shown to worsen anxiety at high doses.

In fact, you may notice that you suddenly have more dreams and dreams that are incredibly vivid. This is called REM rebound and is a phenomenon that is observed after a time of REM deprivation. Your brain will take what it needs. If you deprive it of dream sleep, it will recoup its losses in vengeful fashion.

Just a quick note that I have no moral objections to cannabis products. People just need to be informed about what happens to their body when they consume certain products. This is especially important for individuals less than 25 years old whose brains and bodies are still developing.

Now before anyone comes at me for this stance on weed, I should also say that my thoughts on alcohol is very similar as far as sleep health goes. Both weed and alcohol destroy sleep quality. When you destroy your sleep, your health will inevitably suffer. I would rather be frank about the science than beat around the bush.

For more information on improving sleep quality and sleep hygiene, check out this post.