CBD Is Better For Sleep Than Ambien | Joe Rogan & Ben Greenfield

sleep like a baby. Like last night, I got the ring that I do my sleep squan. I slept eight and a half hours last night and I take a hundred milligrams of CBD. I take a little bit of melatonin and I'm just out. But you gotta take a lot of it and you wake up kind of groggy when you do. But if you're used to that and you know, like you get up, shake it off, 10 minutes later, you're good to go. What's the groggy that's coming from? Probably just overstimulation of the endocannabinoid system. You're just like super relaxed, which I want to be when I sleep. Right. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's how it works. What about regular marijuana? Does that affect your sleep? Do you find it beneficial or no? So CBD can enhance your deep sleep cycles, right? Which is, which is when a good majority of your neuronal repair and recovery occurs, THC allows you to sleep and it actually decreases sleep latency. How long it takes you to fall asleep, but it does reduce the amount of time you spend in deep sleep, right? So if you're, if you're one of those people whose mind races, who's hypercharged up when, you know, and you got to get to sleep at night, use THC, like, like, you know, hit a vape pen or whatever, but know that you might miss out on some of the things you want during deep sleep, memory, consolidation, neuronal repair and recovery, you know, nervous system repair, but it's still pretty decent sleep and you're not getting as much of a reduction in deep sleep as you would get if you were to be taking like Ambien or Valium or something that's literally just like a sledgehammer for your frontal cortex that knocks you out. But you almost get no deep sleep. So if you do this, if you were to get like a sleep tracker and test your deep sleep levels, you would find that with CBD, you don't fall asleep as fast, but you get higher deep sleep levels. And then with THC, you can fall asleep faster, but your deep sleep isn't quite as high. When you consider that CBD can counteract a lot of the effects of THC, then that means that what you could try is take THC to allow you to fall asleep faster, but then pile a whole bunch of CBD on top of that. And I've done that before too, where you just take a hit on a vape pen and then take a bunch of CBD and you shoot for the best of both worlds. Yeah. Folks that are taking Ambien, I mean, that is, I mean, especially people that are doing it virtually every night, that has got to have a profound effect on your brain's ability to recover. I think there are a lot of people shorting themselves on the life who are taking Ambien or Valium. I mean, I think to start with sleep, you need to rely on your body's own internal chemistry and that would be breathwork. Like I think everybody before they start taking whatever, phosphatidyl, serine and adaptogenic herbs and all this shit for cortisol. And before they start taking Valium or Ambien or anything else for, for sleep, you should learn how to control your physiology with your breath. I think that's the most powerful way to do it. I mean, your prana, your shock or whatever you want to call it, like being able to do things like breathwork, box breathing, alternate nostril breathing, even, even holotropic breathing. Like you can go some very interesting places in terms of DMT production by the pineal gland, by just doing holotropic breathwork. Like there's, there's a lot of very interesting things that you can do with your breath, but I think that for getting to sleep or for decreasing stress, you start with the breath and then you start to introduce some of these other molecules, but Ambien and Valium, like in the era of like readily available CBD and you know, all the other sleep compounds that we have available, like Valerian and Passionflower and Chamomile and you know, all of those are what are called gamma-aminobutyric acid or GABA precursors. They produce inhibitory neurotransmitters. Like I don't understand why people are still taking Ambien and Valium. Cause they're idiots. Yeah. They're just addicted to it or they just want to pill. I mean, that's essentially what it is. They want fat in their buttocks and they want Ambien and Valium. I don't know if it's the same folks, but many times it is. I think it's our president. I think our president takes that shit. He, I think he's sleeping with Ambien. I think a lot of politicians do that. Yeah. Well, they can't sleep otherwise. They're fucking ruining the world. I, um, I, I found that if my brain is racing, just completely concentrating on breathing in and breathing out and concentrating on just the breath itself, like really being cognizant of it and slow, deliberate breaths in and out and in and out by doing that over long periods of time, I've, I've found that I can, I can pretty much conk myself out. You can, but that takes focus. A lot of people are not willing to learn how to do that because they want the fast track out. They just want to take a drug and pass out. That is the thing, right? They just want to pill. Yeah. It's very unfortunate that those things exist in that, that, that sort of thinking is, uh, you know, it's reinforced. Yeah. Yeah. It's encouraged. In fact, you know, all these. Ads and all these doctors and different people, well, if you have a hard time sleeping, I'll just write your prescription. And the next thing you know. And I mean, you look at the animal world, like they self-medicate, they'll use clay for parasites and, you know, dogs will eat grass for stomach issues. And you know, I guess birds now are putting like nicotine and cigarettes in their nests because there's some kind of benefit to that. And you see animals self-medicating. You see our ancestors using everything from, you know, cannabis to Ceylon cinnamon to, you know, all sorts of different derivatives for thousands of years. So it's not like supplementation or self-medication or the, or the whole creation of pharmaceuticals is something that's unnatural or not an acceptable human activity, but once you start to use it as a crutch, I think that's where you run into issues. Like once, once you deny the human body's ability to be able to heal itself or to be able to decrease stress on its own and you begin to rely on these exogenous chemicals, I think that's where you start playing with fire. I just wonder what's happening to people's minds over long-term use of this stuff where you're not going into these deep sleep cycles and you're using it every night because essentially once you get hooked on it, a lot of people have a really hard time sleeping without it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they're shorting themselves, right? Right. But I mean, I wonder what studies... Big part is the memory, it's learning, like that, that's where a lot of that type of stuff happens. I mean, it's the same thing with, with, what's it called? Glimphatic drainage, like this, this new drainage system for the brain that they've just discovered in recent years, this idea that you actually detoxify the brain during these sleep cycles. And it's even enhanced when you sleep on your side. They even looked at sleeping positions in this thing called Glimphatic drainage. And when you're not going through proper sleep cycles or you're constantly waking because you're on your back and you have, you know, a lot of people have sleep apnea where you'll look at their sleep charts and they'll frequently wake during the night or you'll see periods where they just get ripped out of deep sleep. Yeah. You wake up and you don't have memory consolidation or you don't have the type of neuronal repair and recovery that you'd want or, you know, you can even short yourself on muscle repair, you know? And there's, there's probably a lot that we don't know about just dreaming and its ability to be able to, you know, do things like help form memories or, or make, you know, learning or experiences more deeply rooted. But yeah, I mean, it's, it's, I think sleep architecture is something that just gets super fucked up in a modern post-industrial era. We've got access to pharmaceuticals that just take a sledgehammer to our heads. Yeah. No question about it. And it's also, there's been a lot of work done on actually going to sleep with a problem, this whole idea of sleep on it. Like there's, there's actually something real to that, that there are some, there's some cognitive balancing that's going on while you're sleeping, where your mind is actually going over whatever issues you might have and trying to come up with a problem during sleep time, during your subconscious. You don't want to know how many times now, and I'm, I'm learning this as I get older, that you delay a decision or you delay replying to an email or delay responding to a text message or what have you until you've gotten a full night of sleep on it. And the clarity that you get after that, I mean, you just basically you think about it a little bit before you fall asleep, then you go to sleep and you wake up with such a better answer. The same thing with walk on it. Like walk on it is another thing. We know you, you make more nerve growth factor and more brain-derived neurotrophic factor when you walk while you're learning. I recently gave a TEDx talk and I just, I made the whole TEDx talk and I learned the whole thing while I was walking up on the farm road back behind my house. I'd just walk up through the forest, pop out into the sunshine, walk up and down that road and just listen to my TED talk on my earbuds and give my talk. And it's just, it's a, it's amazing for the brain. But yeah, I agree. Dwelling on something before you go to sleep, it does the trick. I always, if I do that, I always have a response the next day that's kinder, less emotional, more understanding, friendlier. You know, reciprocating any, any sort of good vibes. It's, it's, it's really interesting. It's really, really interesting how there is some sort of a wisdom that's imparted on you while you're sleeping. There is. And now what I do is I'll think about what it is, but I am a big fan of fiction before you fall asleep. It just lets you escape to a whole different world. I took my kids on this giant tour of New York city. Like we went.