Other tips to practice excellent sleep hygiene: if you find yourself lying in bed for more than 20 minutes, get up and do something else until you feel sleepy again. Instituting a sleep-promoting routine-a warm bath, stretching, meditation, or reading-can help as well. Keep your bedroom environment reserved only for sleep and sex and ensure that lighting is low, and sound is minimized.

Regular exercise can also produce a healthy physical fatigue that helps promote sleep. This again creates a vicious cycle: cannabis disrupts sleep and contributes to feelings of tiredness, which motivates users to smoke more due to the perception that they achieve better sleep.įinding strategies to compensate for sleep disruptions during withdrawal and improving the routines you have when it’s time for bed can be a major predictor of how likely you are to relapse ( Angarita, Addiction Science & Clinical Practice, 2016).Įnsuring that you have a healthy routine surrounding sleep, or “sleep hygiene”, is vital to minimizing the sleep disturbances that may be exacerbated by marijuana withdrawal.įirst, avoiding caffeine, large meals, or screen time immediately before bed can eliminate confusing signals to your body that it should stay awake. What’s more, increased time in REM sleep likely contributes to vivid and disturbing dreams ( Gates, Subst Abus, 2016 Garcia, Am J Addict, 2015). In fact, sleep studies of people in the first week of marijuana withdrawal have shown changes in almost every phase of sleep, including longer time to fall asleep, decreased total sleep time, and poorer sleep efficiency. Regular marijuana use, however, is actually disruptive to sleep, by interrupting normal sleep architecture, in part through its actions at the CB1 receptor ( Kesner, Front Mol Neurosci, 2020). Many individuals smoke before bed, and even infrequent users report subjective improvements in sleep quality after smoking, likening marijuana to a sleep aid.

The biological and psychosocial factors that drive sleep changes in marijuana withdrawal are complex.

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