What Most THC-Users Don’t Experience When It Comes To Sleep

Sometimes, symptoms aren’t experientially there to experience—similar to how, for example, many people with certain kinds of amnesia can very easily forget that they have it.

Alcohol causing blackouts is the “bridging” example here: How Does Alcohol Cause Blackouts?

In this case, for most people, THC has somewhat more potent benefits, and relatively fewer/lesser risks, than alcohol, but it’s not exactly fabulous for the health either!

See: Alcohol vs THC

Nevertheless, 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, there may be a little more to it than that…

Don’t worry; be sleepy

Researchers (Dr. Kristen Knutson et al.) analyzed data from 1,266 adults followed for nearly 35 years, using long-term cannabis-use records (THC, specifically), wrist-worn sleep monitors, and sleep-quality surveys.

What they found is that greater lifetime cannabis exposure was associated with spending a lower percentage of the night asleep, more fragmented sleep and longer periods awake after initially falling asleep. And further, recent users were more likely than people who had never used cannabis to experience lower sleep efficiency, more fragmented sleep and longer periods of nighttime wakefulness, but were also more likely to sleep for more than eight hours.

None of which is surprising, based on the things we mentioned earlier.

However, there’s more: despite the objective differences detected by wearable monitors, cannabis users generally didn’t report feeling that they slept worse than non-users.

In terms of numbers:

❝After multivariable adjustment, each additional cannabis-year was associated with higher odds of low sleep percentage (odds ratio [OR], 1.10; 95% CI, 1.06-1.14), high sleep fragmentation (OR, 1.04; 95% CI, 1.01-1.08), and prolonged WASO (OR, 1.21; 95% CI, 1.10-1.34). Compared with participants with former use and never use status, those with recent use had higher odds of low sleep percentage, high fragmentation, prolonged WASO, and long (vs optimal) sleep duration (eg, vs never use, prolonged WASO: OR, 3.23 [95% CI, 1.44-7.27]; long sleep duration: OR, 4.60 [95% CI, 1.81-11.70]).

Cannabis use was not associated with subjective sleep quality.❞

Read in full: Recent and Cumulative Cannabis Use and Sleep in Middle-Aged Adults

And yes, the associations between cannabis use and poorer objectively measured sleep remained after researchers accounted for age, sex, race, cigarette smoking, alcohol use, physical activity, depression, chronic health conditions and other substance use.

So, in practical terms, there are alternatives you might want to consider: Safe Effective Sleep Aids For Seniors

Or, alternatively alternatively, if cannabis seems to you to be something good but THC isn’t, then:

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!