Dr. Matt Walker

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

Alcohol and THC are both very potent ways that will remove or obliterate your REM sleep.

And we spoke about this in the episode on THC when we discussed this.

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,

they end up having this intense REM sleep.

By the way, to your point about reward and addiction sensitivity with sleep deprivation, one of the things that we did in a collaboration, gosh, this was years ago when I was at Harvard with Carl Hart, who I think you, I don't know if you- Yeah, Columbia.

Yeah, Columbia, you know him.

Yeah, he's a fantastic researcher, a very interesting man too.

And what we found was that a lack of sleep

was not only predictive of your addiction potential, but when you went into a clinic to abstain and trying to come off, some of those in here, we were looking at cocaine addiction, a lack of sleep was a strong predictor of your abstinence and you falling off the wagon and going back to you.

So sleep is so critical, not just for

um maintaining or pushing you away from that addiction potential but once you are addicted and you're trying to abstain it gives you that lift of altitude to try to resist falling off the wagon and when sleep gets short that's when you become vulnerable again probably because your reward circuitry becomes enhanced and all of a sudden you just cannot resist the temptation anymore

Yeah, get as much sleep.