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How CBD Works in the Body to Help You Sleep Better Leave a comment
How CBD Works in the Body to Help You Sleep Better. Cannabidiol (CBD) is a natural cannabinoid found in hemp and cannabis. It is the second-most common cannabinoid, but it is quite different from THC in that it doesn’t make you feel high.
Many claim that CBD helps them sleep at night, but is it all true, or is the placebo effect at least partially attributable? While we might not know everything there is to know about CBD yet, it certainly seems there’s at least some merit to claims that it might improve your sleep at night. Learn more about CBD, and find out if you should try CBD gummies for insomnia.
How CBD Works in the Body to Help You Sleep Better
What Is CBD?
Instead, CBD has lightly relaxing effects that many users indicate help them relax and get to sleep at night. Even when you aren’t trying to go to sleep, one of the common side effects of CBD is unexpected sleepiness during the day.
Does CBD Help with Sleep?
Based simply on product reviews and other types of anecdotal evidence, CBD certainly appears to have great potential to help with insomnia and other sleep disorders. So far, scientific evidence appears to support this position, but results are admittedly inconclusive. What seems certain is that something is going on with CBD and sleep, and it’s important we find out exactly what.
CBD Sleep Studies
So far, CBD has only been the subject of one clinical study related to sleep. Consisting of 72 subjects with anxiety-related sleep conditions, the study ended up reporting that 66.7% of the subjects reported improvements in sleep after taking between 50mg and 175mg of CBD per day.
This study, however, didn’t elucidate the mechanisms in the human body that might support such an effect. To shed further light on that subject, we’ll have to take a look at CBD studies that aren’t related to sleep whatsoever.
How Does CBD Work in the Body?
To understand how CBD works for sleep, we’ll first need to understand how CBD works in general. Scientists have determined that CBD has a remarkably complex mechanism of action, meaning that it interacts with many different systems in your body at once.
Mostly, though, CBD acts on receptors in your 5-HT and TRP systems, which control serotonin management and inflammation respectively. It’s these interactions that best explain CBD’s apparent usefulness for sleep.
Serotonin & Sleep
For decades, scientists have known that serotonin plays a major role in regulating your sleep-wake cycle. Researchers aren’t exactly sure how serotonin affects your sleep, but it’s certainly important to have balanced serotonin levels if you want to get good sleep every night.
It’s not exactly clear how, but it’s possible that CBD might exert some of its observed sleep-promoting properties via some as-yet unknown interaction with your serotonergic system. Since serotonin affects far more than sleep, it’s clear that we’ve only just started scratching the surface of the wide-ranging effects CBD might exert throughout the body.
Sleep & Pain Relief
Whether or not CBD has a direct impact on your sleep cycle via your serotonergic system, it’s a fact that pain can make it hard to get to sleep at night. In the body, pain is usually caused by one of two factors — inflammation or neurological damage.
Neuropathic pain, or pain caused by neurological damage, is mainly controlled by your serotonergic system. Inflammatory pain, on the other hand, is mainly controlled by your TRP receptors, which happen to be the other main targets of CBD.
Coincidentally, pain relief is one of the most commonly reported effects of CBD. So, everything is in place to theorize that CBD might help you sleep by reducing pain via inflammation reduction.
How to Use CBD for Sleep
Even if CBD is effective for sleep, that doesn’t necessarily mean you know how to use it. To give you an idea of how many people take CBD for sleep, it’s common to take 1-2 CBD gummies around half an hour before turning off the light.
In most cases, 10-50mg will be plenty of CBD to achieve the effect you’re looking for. Other product types you can try aside from gummies are CBD tinctures and capsules.
How CBD Works in the Body to Help You Sleep Better
