It’s never too late, to get good REM sleep.
How often do you find yourself waking up groggy, unfocused? If you are a habitual marijuana smoker I’m guessing that might be the default.
The best thing you can do for your mental clarity/sleep quality is space out your use. Leave room for the brain to revamp. The perils of overuse-hyper emotionality, psychological disturbances, mental instability are byproducts of the brain not reaching REM sleep. Why is this so?
REM (Rapid eye movement) sleep is the brain's way to process what happens in your waking life. It connects meanings that matter and makes sense of your experiences and interactions. During that sleep stage, the brain dampens hormones like epinephrine/adrenaline so it could more easily attach emotions to particular experiences. Better yet, detach useless emotions. Remove meaning where there is none. It does this without the excitement you might feel when awake, making sure the right emotions are attached to the right experiences. It also serves as a clean-up of inappropriate, too strong emotions that might have a hold on you. It cleanses to better serve a wholesome waking life.
These benefits are lost if we never reach REM sleep.
The sleep cycle functions in 90 min cycles. First slow-wave sleep, then REM sleep. Our dreams tend to happen in the REM stage, and coincidentally, loss of dreams due to chronic marijuana use is indicative of not reaching REM.
Through REM the brain deploys its own sort of therapy for us, its host. It goes through our experiences and makes the best of them. When we sabotage its ability to do so, we start influencing ourselves inadvertently, we develop differently. The connections we form, the meaning we read into starts becoming jumbled. The more we mess up our REM sleep, the more our brain loses the ability to purposefully connect experiences to meaning. Essentially, it is about the elimination of connections between things. Smoking opens us up, stimulating brain pathways and connecting new neural routes. If we overuse its magic we withhold ourselves the ability to fully make sense of our lives.
Sleep research is booming right now, and this is what the data is saying.
It’s never too late, to get a good night’s sleep.
