Dr. Michael Grandner

Yeah.

Yeah, THC is a good place to start because THC seems to have pretty reliable effects on sleep.

Surprises nobody who's used it when I say that, but it can help you fall asleep, can help you stay asleep, can help you feel more refreshed.

THC does.

However, there's three downsides of THC.

Four, if you're an athlete.

One is that the sleep promoting effects fade over time.

So often it works great for a period of maybe a few weeks, but then you'll notice that it stops working in the same way.

And so people start escalating doses for that reason.

And so maybe, you know, it's short-term benefits and long-term benefits are different.

That's number one.

Number two, in a lot of people, not doesn't seem to be everybody, but in a lot of people can be a very potent REM sleep suppressor.

A lot of people don't realize that antidepressants also, most antidepressants are potent REM suppressors.

Like you can knock out 50 to 75% of all your REM sleep of the night by taking like a Lexapro or an SSRI or THC.

Like, why is it, if REM sleep is so critically important, and we'll get to this when we talk about sleep stages on wearables, if REM sleep was so critically important for what it seems to do, why is it that when all these people who are taking antidepressants are not falling down, not being able to remember things?

Don't know.

My hypothesis is these processes are way more complicated than we realize.

And when we see a decrease in REM sleep, we're not seeing a decrease in the process itself.

We're seeing a decrease in an effect of the process.

What we call REM sleep as these physiologic signals and brainwave patterns,