Dr. Matt Walker

That's the equivalent of you and I flying back and forth from Los Angeles to New York every single weekend in terms of our circadian rhythm.

And it's brutal on it.

But this is separate from

this notion of your timing, the final part of the QQRT.

And by pushing your timing a little bit later into the morning when you wake up, you will experience more REM sleep.

And as I said, when people sleep later, they go to bed later at night and they wake up much later in the morning at the weekend.

I strongly suspect that if they paid attention, they would say, at weekends, I always dream more.

I always can remember my dreams and they're more intense.

It's not because there's something magical about how your memory recollection of dreams operates on Saturdays and Sundays.

It's because you've slept in later.

You've gone into that REM sleep rich preferential phase in the morning and therefore you've increased your REM sleep.

So I would say that that's probably the easiest way that you can start to modulate REM sleep.

I think just yesterday I got a very long email and I'm sure you get lots of emails from delightful people in the public and a gentleman just saying, you know, I was using cannabis for probably about seven years and then I watched or listened to some of your content and I stopped and I just had this explosion of dreams and I was never recollecting any of my dreams before.

But now they came back and goodness, were they vivid, they were rich, they were, and I could not believe it.

And that's because during the cannabis use by way of the THC, not the CBD, you've been blocking that REM sleep.

You've built up that pressure just as we described in the dementia studies.

And then when you finally do take away the agent that is blocking the generation of REM sleep, the THC,

All of a sudden, your brain doesn't just go back to having its standard amount of REM sleep and dreaming.

It has that, plus it tries to get back as much of it as it possibly can by having what we call a REM sleep rebound.

And that's why people, when they stop using it,