What Cannabis Does For Your Sleep (& Your Mornings)

Many people use cannabis to help them sleep (indeed, it’s even sometimes prescribed for some sleep disorders), and we’ve written about that here: Sweet Dreams Are Made of THC (Or Are They?)

The short version is that it works to improve sleep in general, at the cost of reducing your REM sleep specifically, which has pros and cons (pro: no nightmares, in people for whom that was a problem keeping them from restful sleep; con: we do need sufficient REM sleep in order to function normally, including storing and organizing memories)

See also: The Strange Things That THC Does To Memory

However, now another interesting association has been found:

Cannabis & Cortisol

Cortisol has a bad reputation these days, as it gets blamed for a lot of ills; sometimes fairly, sometimes less so.

When it’s a problem: cortisol becomes a problem when it’s chronically elevated. This means our body is in high-stress mode at all times, and it’s the biological equivalent of driving your car in the wrong gear (alarming experience and also it’ll damage your car).

When it’s usually not a problem: cortisol is supposed to spike sometimes. One of the times it’s supposed to spike is when we wake up; this is called the “cortisol awakening response“, or “CAR”, and it’s part of what gets us ready for the day’s action, instead of remaining groggy and sleepy all morning.

Researchers (Dr. Anita Cservenka et al.) examined whether frequent cannabis use is associated with changes in the body’s stress-response system, particularly the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, and did this by means of a sleep (or rather, waking) study.

How they did this: the study (n=82) included 39 frequent cannabis users and 43 healthy controls. Participants collected saliva samples when they woke up, and then 30 minutes later, and then in the evening on consecutive weekdays, while also reporting their subjective stress levels.

The results, in a nutshell:

• Morning cortisol: frequent cannabis users had significantly higher cortisol levels immediately upon awakening than non-users (p=0.047).
• Cortisol awakening response (CAR): despite the higher starting cortisol level, the increase in cortisol during the first 30 minutes after waking was not significantly different between cannabis users and non-users (p=0.23).
• Stress and cortisol: among participants, higher subjective stress was associated with higher cortisol levels at awakening (p=0.001).
• Cannabis-related consequences: higher awakening cortisol in frequent cannabis users was significantly associated with greater consequences related to cannabis use (p=0.007).

How to read those p-values: it’s a way of expressing what the probability was of getting that result by chance. So p=1 would mean “this is a pre-determined guaranteed result”, p=0 would mean “this is a pre-determined impossible result”, and p=0.5 would mean “this result had a 50:50 chance of happening by chance”. In science, a result is generally considered statistically significant if p<0.05. So those in the bullet points are all statistically significant, some of them exceedingly so, apart from the CAR one (where p=0.23).

You can read the paper in full, here: Subjective Stress and Diurnal Salivary Cortisol in Adults with Frequent Cannabis Use

What this means in practical terms: while many might expect that cannabis use would lead to slower, groggier mornings much like alcohol does (just without the hangover), the reality seems to be the opposite.

Superficially, this could even have been interpreted as a benefit, if it weren’t for those “cannabis-related consequences” which, to be clear, were not good consequences. You can read about them on page 4 of the above-linked paper.

Want to try for the benefits without the downsides?

It’s worth bearing in mind that CBD alone (without THC) does seem to improve sleep, and has additional possible benefits too:

CBD Oil: What Does The Science Say?

Take care!