Without a healthy night’s sleep, your focus and mood can be significantly affected the next day, and this can lead to more serious medical conditions in the future. The NHS claim that one in three people suffer from poor sleep and that most people need a solid eight hours per night to function properly.
If you’re struggling to sleep, you’ll want to find a solution that gets you the quality and quantity of rest that you need. Despite it being a relatively new development, preliminary research has suggested that CBD could help ensure a better night’s sleep.
In this blog, we look at methods of improving your sleep pattern and explore the potential benefits of CBD in helping you sleep.
Can you improve your sleep?
Before taking anything to improve your sleep, you could consider traditional options. For example, setting a regular bedtime and checking that your bedroom is a good temperature and free of light, noise and electronic gadgets can be enough to get you into a better routine for sleep.
Failure to properly relax is often a reason for trouble sleeping, as you may need to be completely rested in order to drift off into a natural slumber. If you feel that this is the problem you’re having, you could try keeping a journal to get your thoughts, worries and anxieties on paper. Alternatively you could try exercising, reading a book, having a bath or avoiding the use of smartphones and other electronic devices an hour before you’re planning on going to sleep.
If none of these tips have the desired effect, you could consider a CBD product, where research has suggested that it could be a suitable option.
In 2019, research into how CBD could affect sleep – as well as anxiety – was published in the winter edition of The Permanente Journal. In this article, titled ‘Cannabidol in Anxiety and Sleep: A Large Case Series’, it was suggested that CBD capsules were helping many of the subjects, with 66.7 per cent of participants who had problems sleeping reporting an improvement.
The potential benefits of using CBD to improve sleep have also been found during studies around other medical conditions. For example, a case report detailed in the October 2014 edition of The Journal of Clinical Pharmacy and Therapeutics suggested that the negative symptoms of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep such as nightmares and poor sleep were reduced by CBD.
What is the best way to take CBD for sleep?
There are many different CBD products, allowing for a choice when it comes to how you take it. Although you could choose to ingest CBD oil orally by dropping it directly under your tongue or take CBD supplements, much of the research points towards taking CBD capsules, as this is how many of the clinical trials were held.
When to take CBD for sleep
As CBD doesn’t always have an immediate impact, it’s often advisable to take it at least an hour before you plan on going to sleep. It could also take a couple of weeks for it to take effect, but in order for it to stand a chance of working, you’ll need to take it regularly for your body to get used to it.
