The Cannabis Boomer Podcast is not just for baby boomers and older adults, but also for adults of all ages who are interested in the science of cannabis. Key words for the podcast, in general ,are: baby boomers, cannabis, boomers, marijuana, THC, CBD, health, wellness, science, and aging.

For this particular episode, key words are: cannabis, sleep science, marijuana, THC, CBD, CBN, REM. non-REM, and sleep.

Cannabis, particularly THC, alters sleep architecture by increasing non-REM sleep and decreasing REM sleep. While this may be beneficial for conditions like PTSD or insomnia, it could be detrimental for healthy individuals as REM sleep is crucial for learning and memory. The effects of cannabis on sleep diminish over time due to tolerance, and the method of consumption may also impact sleep quality.

Dr. Andrew Kesner discusses his research on cannabis and sleep, particularly focusing on sleep disruption as a withdrawal symptom. He highlights the need for more research on cannabis and sleep, emphasizing the importance of studying sex differences. While acknowledging the potential benefits of cannabis for sleep, he emphasizes the need for further research to understand its effects and potential risks.

The effects of cannabis on sleep are complex and multifaceted, influenced by factors like preexisting pain, anxiety, and age. Animal studies, particularly those using mice, are crucial for understanding the specific brain pathways and mechanisms involved, as they allow for controlled experiments and the use of sophisticated genetic tools. While human studies often rely on self-reported measures, animal research can utilize EEG recordings to provide a more detailed and objective analysis of sleep architecture and quality.

Dr. Isobel Lavender discusses the complexity of studying cannabis and sleep, highlighting the diverse effects of different cannabinoids and the variability in sleep patterns among individuals. She emphasizes the need for consistent research methods and doses to better understand the impact of cannabis on sleep, particularly in relation to sleep disorders like insomnia. Lavender also explores the potential benefits of CBN for reducing sleep onset latency.

The Cannabis Boomer Podcast is not just for baby boomers and older adults, but also for adults of all ages who are interested in the science of cannabis. Key words for the podcast, in general ,are: baby boomers, cannabis, boomers, marijuana, THC, CBD, health, wellness, science, and aging.

For this particular episode, key words are: cannabis, sleep science, marijuana, THC, CBD, CBN, REM. non-REM, and sleep.​

And now, your host, The Cannabis Boomer, Alex Terrazas, PhD.

That's important because too much trash in your neurons is bad for you and contributes to some brain diseases. But how good is the evidence that cannabis improves sleep? There is, without question, good evidence that cannabis alters sleep, and in some cases can help promote sleep. But the story is not cut and dry.

To evaluate whether to try cannabis for your own sleep problems, it helps to understand the two basic stages of sleep. Rapid eye movement, REM, and non-rem. Non-REM sleep is the kind of sleep where you wake up and say, "I slept like a log!", while REM is the stage of sleep when your eyes go wild and you can be awakened easily. If awakened during REM sleep, you tend to remember your dreams vividly. During a night of uninterrupted sleep, we alternate between REM and non REM stages.

When scientists discuss cannabis and sleep, they are really focused on two chemical components of cannabis, the cannabinoids tetrahydrocannabinol, THC, and more recently, its lesser known cousin Cannabinol, CBN. The other well-known cannabinoid cannabidiol, CBD, does not seem to impact sleep even at very high doses. THC-containing cannabis can help you fall asleep more easily and enter that first deep non-REM stage, but that comes at the expense of some REM sleep. Having less REM sleep can reduce emotional and memory processing in the brain. It is best to have a good balance between REM and non-REM sleep.

It should also be noted that although evidence is limited, some terpenes, especially myrcene, seem to also promote sleepiness. Other terpenes to consider are linalol, which is also a component of lavender and terpinolene. It is always best to consider a holistic sleep plan that includes good sleep hygiene, reducing coffee and alcohol intake, especially before bed and other techniques.

Cannabis can help in some cases, but shouldn't be the only tool you try.

Dr. Drew Kesner. Thanks for joining us. The topic of today's episode is cannabis and sleep, and you're one of the top people on that topic, so I'm very happy to have you. I know people can get very sleepy after consuming certain types of cannabis, but that doesn't necessarily mean cannabis improves their sleep. The real question is sleep architecture. So what is the consensus on how cannabis affects sleep?

So I think most people know that when you go to sleep, and mice are a great model to study this 'cause they have very similar sort of patterns of sleep as humans and their brain does sort of similar things.

So in humans, we all need our consolidated sleep in, the healthy eight hours that you should be getting. And some people more, some people a little less, but somewhere around that eight hours mark during the nighttime when the lights are off. So that's how humans sleep.

And as humans go to sleep, the get into this phase of kind of quiet wakefulness, and then they go fall asleep and they start off in non-REM sleep. So is called slow wave sleep and it's thought to be mostly involved in sort of the restorative aspects of sleep. And then you cycle from there to REM sleep, which is that rapid eye movement sleep, where your eyes are moving back and forth. And this is the part of sleep that's important for learning and memory. Your brain is kind of replaying the things that it did during the day, helping you take these kind of shorter term daily memories and storing them so you can remember things in, in the long term. We do that cycle, several times throughout the night. So in humans, these non REM sleep can last on the order of tens of minutes. And then REM sleep can, can last for a while. And then these kind of cycle in and out of those things throughout the night. Mice do a very similar thing. But their sleep is more during the daytime when the lights are on. But they do take naps throughout the night as well. But in terms of what cannabis does, the, the main things that we know are when you, a human or an animal gets that first kind of dose of, of THC or, or cannabis we know that that has very strong effects on non-REM sleep. It'll increase non-REM sleep. and it reduces REM sleep. when you first take cannabis, and this is why I think a lot of people report kind of getting knocked out, feeling like they, they slept very deeply. I slept like a log. It's because it's promoting that non REM sleep, that very deep of restorative type sleep. But like I said, it, it reduces REM sleep, could be a problem. Right. So, we know that that happens in, in humans. My own studies and other people have shown that also happens in mice when we record from mice while they're sleeping. We have little electrodes in their brain and it's very similar to what we do in humans where you might have seen someone wearing like an EEG head cap doing a sleep study, right? And they're recording the brainwaves and, and they can, we can score which stage of sleep a person is in. We can do the same thing in mice. And when we do it in mice, we see that that non REM sleep is, is much stronger. It lasts longer. But the REM sleep, the amount of time that mice spend in REM sleep, it goes down. So those are kind of the easier studies to do. What I think is really important is what happens after a long time as you're taking cannabis. know, we call it chronically over longer periods of time. We see the effects begin to diminish and this could be due to several reasons. So, the same amount of THC that someone might take or that we might give to a mouse early on, has much less effects the longer we give it, and that's a term we, we use called tolerance, right? All sorts of drugs and sleep aids and all these kind of medical sleep aids and things like that, you, you can develop tolerance to them. But particular with cannabis tolerance seems to happen relatively quickly. So someone might need to take more and more and more of the same type of, of THC or cannabis to get those same effects that they might be looking for or chasing after, early on when it really knocked them out cold at first, right? Yeah, that's kind of like the bird's eye view of what we know on a basic level of how cannabis affects sleep. It's gonna be increasing non-REM sleep and decreasing REM sleep. So my opinion is, not someone that has decent sleep already. I like to think of sleep as, as we have a set point, kind of a homeostatic place that we like our amount of non REM sleep and amount of REM sleep throughout the, the night. I think it would be kind of foolish to say that changing that in any way, if that's your body's set point is, is kind of a good thing.

Right. But there are certainly, pathological conditions. One, one thing that really pops into my head is PTSD, right? And so PTSD is this condition where folks that have that report having really. and unpleasant dreams throughout the night. And it could make people not wanna go to sleep because they wake up with having these horrible nightmares. And like I said, REM sleep is the time where we have dreams. so for someone who's that condition, I could see maybe dampening rem sleep a little bit. And, and non REM sleep could help them, right? But for, I think a normal, healthy person, REM sleep is very, very important.

So anything you do that sort of diminishes that I'm not sure is the best thing. Sleep health wise. So and no. I suppose if certainly conditions and times when I think having that little extra boost to help you fall asleep, for insomnia where you're laying in bed and just can't fall asleep. Having a little kick to help you to sleep at first could be very useful. 'Cause you can't get any of the healthy sleep if you can't fall asleep in the first place, right?

So maybe if, if the cannabis is helping you fall asleep and, and stay asleep, maybe something like an edible, which has kind of a slower component due to metabolism. And it, and it kind of is in your body a little bit longer after you've fallen asleep because it's being digested and kind of released more slowly a little bit. That might be a better way if the benefits are helping you fall asleep and stay asleep to kind of have it last a little bit longer. But, this is gonna be the end of a lot of the things I say. A lot more research needs to be done on that. It's still very early on. With any cannabis research because it, it had been very difficult for us to study it in the lab because of its criminalization. We're playing catch up a lot and so things like roots of administration and how that affects sleep is still very much up in the air. But if I was gonna kind of hedge my bets, I would say probably an edible or something like that might be better to help stay asleep longer if it's helping you fall asleep.

So that's kind of the angle I am taking in my research is that if we can understand the sleep disruption component of withdrawal from any drugs, but, but I'm primarily focusing on cannabis. Can we help treat the other withdrawal symptoms? Can we make people abstain longer by helping them sleep better when they stop taking a drug?

So, I don't think there's a lot of really strong evidence that these other phytocannabinoids or terpenes do, so, so much to sleep. Certainly THC does, I mean that that's by far the most major player. We did a few studies looking at CBD and sleep in, in mice and we saw little to no effect when we gave, pretty high levels of CBD to mice. So yeah, I, long story short, not sure exactly.

So, I Think that, that those compounds, something interesting like you get more CBN in the cannabis plan if it's aged longer, you like that. I believe the anecdote was that people were finding that cannabis, flower that they had sitting around for a long time seemed to make them sleepier than I guess fresher flowers, something along those lines. And it turned out that there's more CBN and when it's kind of been aged for a while. And so that's why these folks were kind of looking at CBN. Certainly it seemed in this data set to be sleep promoting in mice. Again, not a lot of research in the, in the human world as to what these are doing, but I think we're getting there.

And when they stop taking the THC and the pain comes back, is it because they had pain before? Or is something weird going on? If you're treating pain and pain is causing you a problem during nighttime and you're waking up from it, absolutely that could help. Treating sleep or treating the pain could help your sleep. And, and that's kind of getting back to what I said about, if you're kind of have healthy sleep to begin with, I'm not sure cannabis is the right thing to be, to be using to. Make your sleep even better or something like that, right? But, but certainly if sort of preexisting thing like anxiety or pain and the cannabis is, is helping that I think it could indirectly help sleep as well. But for my own research, we know that cannabis is affecting sleep directly even beyond the context of pain or anxiety. It's going to be doing something to sleep on its own.

And then when we give them THC, the effect looks a little bit different. So we're starting to tease out the pathways of the brain. And this is why I think, animal research is very important because we can do those sorts of things. We can't do those things in humans. We can't really tease out, this crazy pasta bowl of neurons in our brain and untangle exactly what's going on in, in humans. And that's why using animal models is particularly important tool. The other thing with that, if I'll follow up on that, is, like I said, there's a big chicken and egg question with humans, in particularly when it comes to sleep and the effects of drugs on sleep. Because you can't take a healthy person who sleeps fine and say, we wanna give you cannabis for, a year and then test your sleep afterwards. With mice, we can record their baseline sleep, their normal sleep. This mouth sleeps like this without. Anything going on right? Then we can treat it with cannabis or THC for however long so that they begin to develop that tolerance to the drug and then see how does their sleep look after we stop giving the drug or during giving the drug and compare that to their normal sleep. And I think this is extremely powerful way to begin to understand what are the changes in the brain that happen from cannabis or anything that we're doing. Are causing the changes in sleep. So with animals, we can begin to tease out that chicken and egg question of, in a human that slept poorly before then we give the drug and then we stop giving the drug and they sleep poorly again is that from something that happened because of the drug? Is it a withdrawal symptom from the drug, or is it just them reverting back to their original? Kind of, I don't sleep well to begin with. And, and so those type of questions I think are really important to sort of figure out.

There was a study that came out of my old lab where they were giving drugs, so not phytocannabinoids but different pharmacological compounds that affect the endocannabinoid system. So different drugs that either. Block the breakdown of endocannabinoids or stimulate the same, cannabinoid receptors that, that are normal cannabinoids stimulate. One of the interesting things for that was when they gave one of these compounds, it didn't change necessarily the overall percent time in the different stages of sleep. So for example, the non-REM sleep percentage was fairly similar. But what they saw was that it was fragmented, so there was more of these bouts of non-REM sleep in the mice than there was with, without the drug. So it's, it's sort of saying that the endocannabinoid system is important for the stability sleep.

But of course that doesn't necessarily mean cannabis doesn't have an effect on sleep. Do you think there's any good mechanistic evidence that cannabis can help with sleep?

It actually reduced total sleep time. We were speculating as to whether because it was administered immediately pre sleep, it was that ascending arm of intoxication, which was a bit more stimulatory. Within our CDN trial administered the active medication two hours prior to sleep. And as I mentioned it really did. Reduce the sleep onset latency. So maybe this is very speculative, but potentially if someone wanted to have a quicker time to fall asleep, they might take the medication earlier and if they wanted to stay asleep, they could take the medication immediately, pres sleep. But that is just a hypothesis.

So of course you've got these different measures, which are thought to, to measure the single construct, but they produced a diverse, Profile of results. And then you get to the cannabinoids, right, or the cannabis sativa. And there are 140 different cannabinoids and they've all got very distinct effects on the body and, and also sleep.

So we know THC has an effect on sleep, whereas CBD is actually looking like. doesn't have an effect on sleep in isolation at the doses tested so below 400 milligrams orally. We haven't really seen any effect on sleep architecture, which is interesting people, there's a, there's a strong hyper around CBD being a sedative. And then we've got CBM, which, is only in its infancy in terms of investigation, but looking like it also behaves differently to THC. you've got these different studies which are employing different cannabinoids, different doses, different rate regimens, different administration periods, menstruation periods with different measurements of sleep. of course that's, that's gonna produce a variable finding. So there is a need for consistency in measures and doses so that we can try and really ascertain what are the effects.

People who choose to use cannabis need to be aware of what they consume. This podcast is intended to make users better informed about cannabis and its effects. The information shared on this podcast is meant as current opinion in science and should not be considered medical advice.