Marijuana & Sleep
Often used to help people fall asleep, weed is rather bad for REM sleep
Of the 50 American states, 24 have now made the recreational use of marijuana legal. I’m all for ending prohibition on weed but there are a few things that smokers of the ganja need to be aware of. First though, a note on alcohol.
Alcohol
Recently I saw a YouTube shorts video, made by Dr Daniel Amen, an American doctor who is both a psychiatrist and a brain order specialist.
The video is about whether alcohol or marijuana is worse for you and he starts by saying that neither one are particularly good for you but when it comes to alcohol there are far more deaths connected to it. They include accidents from drunk driving, domestic violence, and bad decision-making.
Interestingly, he did a brain-imagining study of over 62,000 people looking at how the brain ages and what speeds up aging. He found that both accelerate aging but marijuana was worse.
I reckon this may be connected to how marijuana affects how regular users sleep. Using weed has a rather strong effect on our rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. In a recently published study, Dr. Rubin Naiman from the University of Arizona’s Center for Integrative Medicine said that we are in the midst of an epidemic of REM sleep deprivation. The reason behind this is both the usage of marijuana and over-the-counter sleep medications.
REM Sleep
Why is REM sleep so important then? To put it simply, during REM we dream and regular cannabis users will often go long stretches of sleeping both without remembering their dreams and not dreaming as much as non-marijuana users.
The reason REM is so important is because while it allows the mind to create dreams there’s also something else going on. Think of it like a memory storage device. When you dream, while you’re experiencing what your mind sees, in the background other parts of your mind are backing up memories of what happened during the day and connecting them with other previous events.
Indeed there’s some solid research out there that suggests that writing a journal entry of your daily events before going to sleep helps with this too and can lead to having more vivid, even lucid dreams.
So, REM sleep is incredibly important for our development, and going without dreams basically means that our memories aren’t being backed up.
Rebound
There’s some other research that shows that when regular marijuana users stop partaking they can experience incredibly vivid dreams. This happens because for a long time, they’ve not been dreaming and now that they’ve stopped the part of their minds that creates dreams goes into overtime in an attempt to catch up and store memories.
This might sound positive but in many cases it can actually mean an increase in both nightmares and in the length of time it takes people to fall asleep because they’d usually fallen asleep quickly thanks to being high.
There is though some benefit when it comes to having no dreams. Although it is quite specific. People with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) often have to endure horrifying nightmares and using marijuana in those cases can very much help them to avoid such events.
This, however, should go hand-in-hand with person-centered therapy so that they can speak about their issues with professionals and a nighttime journal will also be of benefit.
CBD
In most countries worldwide now, CBD is fully legal. It’s basically weed but it contains no THC, the psychoactive element in marijuana. It is used for a variety of reasons including pain relief, anxiety and depression relief, and help with sleeping.
From the same research in the previous section, it has been found that CBD can both increase and decrease the amount of REM sleep users can have depending on the dosage.
Hi, I’m Paddy. Thanks for reading my article. I’m a counselor, coach, and meditation teacher. If you’d like to read my latest articles on Medium you can subscribe here. If you’d like to contact me regarding a counseling session or about writing, you can contact me here. My different social media channels are here.