Phil Smyth

speaker

410 appearances 4 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 8 Sep

Phil Smyth’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.

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The Claire Byrne Show · Why do we have nightmares? · 7 Aug 2026 podcast

act as kind of a threat simulation allowing you to to practice dangerous uh situations and get through it.

But these are kind of theories rather than than facts.

And sometimes a nightmare can simply be the product of just an emotional, highly active brain stitching together kind of recent experiences, old memories, anxieties.

These kind of things can be triggered by stress, trauma, illness, exhaustion, all those types of things, or just maybe the three coffees you had at lunchtime or later in the day that you potentially shouldn't have.

Sure.

Yeah, and I suppose the important qualification of this is this is not a study of just ordinary bad dreams.

And it was not a study of people people uh casually smoking cannabis before bed and just seeing what happened.

What they did is they took 170 adults with PTSD, so post-traumatic stress disorder, uh, who experienced frequent severe trauma-led and related nightmares.

So they received either a prescription which is

uh the prescription was uh dronabinodol uh which is a medication that contains this THC and they were given the drops before bed and then or the or the control group was given an identical looking cannabis free uh flavored placebo so no one knew what was going on so neither professionals nor the health or the patients knew who was receiving it uh the medication and then they did this for 10 weeks so making

A kind of a double diamond or double blind controlled, which is really what you want to see in some kind of a test like this.

Now, what they saw, the results were actually genuinely promising.

So nightmare burden was measured on a scale of zero to eight, and it dropped by about 3.7 points with the group who were on the THC, compared to about two points, 2.2 with the placebo group.

So more than one-third of the patients receiving the

cannabis were no longer experiencing nightmares.

And for people with

Like PTSD, this is a massive deal.

And a further 21% said that the nightmare burden had been decreased by half.

Like the placebo group did have a uh a group that uh they did improve as well, which is interesting itself, because a lot of this stuff is linked to stress, and but the fact that they thought that they might be getting something that would actually calm them, they actually had a less likely chance of having another nightmare.

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