
The way CBD works on our brain and body seems to be tailored to deal with the exact issues we experience from a disrupted sleep cycle
“If you can’t handle being up all night, work a different job!” Someone left this comment on a video clip I had posted on Instagram.
The video clip is of me saying it’s unnatural for the human body to regularly run calls in the nighttime hours of our job. Which is undeniably true. The person who made the comment completely missed that I had been trying to say we need to fix our sleep habits off duty.
I recommend the CRACKYL article by Ryan Provencher titled, 6 Sleep Strategies Especially For Firefighters. It showed how to correct sleep issues in the best way possible: naturally. You should read that article if you haven’t already because it leads to what I want to address in this article, and that’s CBD.
Disclaimer: I’m not a physician, none of this is meant to be considered medical advice. Speak with your physician about taking CBD.
How Does CBD Work?
While the best way to correct bad sleep is with good sleep, the job we signed up for doesn’t allow us to have a regular schedule of normal, quality sleep. We can’t recover from a disrupted sleep cycle when we have it every third day (for most of us on a 24/48).
Luckily, we have a secret weapon in our arsenal to combat sleep issues, and I’d like to explain how and why it is so well-suited for us. The way CBD works on our brain and body seems to be tailored to deal with the exact issues we experience from a disrupted sleep cycle.
A note before talking about CBD: In a perfect world, we wouldn’t need to use CBD or any supplement to correct our sleep. I’d much rather have all of us balance a healthy lifestyle, diet and exercise. But, I also want to be a firefighter at a busy firehouse. If you’re like me, you have to figure out how to make it all work and not shorten your lifespan. So, here we go!
Setting the Master Clock
First, CBD may help set the “master clock” of our brain. This is what tells your body systems what is day and what is night, when it’s time to wake up and when it’s time to go to bed. It’s an area of your brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (or SCN for short).
According to sleep experts like Dr. Matt Walker, (author of Why We Sleep) the most important marker for setting the master clock of your brain is light. It’s so simple, but light wreaks havoc on our sleep-wake cycle because of how we’re hit with it during the nighttime hours.
According to recent research, this master clock is set by cannabinoids. Your body naturally produces cannabinoids, a family of compounds found in cannabis (CBD and THC are cannabinoids). And, more importantly, these cannabinoids have been shown to be at very low levels when humans are sleep-deprived, and they’re at optimal levels during sleep. While we don’t understand the exact mechanism of CBD on sleep, we know cannabinoids are an important factor in some way.
Keeping You Cool
The next factor is body temperature. Additionally, several research papers have pointed out that CBD slightly decreases body temperature at night, which turns out to be crucial for sleep. At the end of the day, our metabolism and all the body’s functions slow down. This decreases our body temperature and when this happens, the pineal gland in your brain starts spiking melatonin to tell you “it’s probably close to bedtime, get tired and go to sleep.”
But, again, all of this centers around that master clock being set properly. Someone whose master clock is set by the tones going off and getting spikes of adrenaline and bright lights throughout the nighttime hours will have this all screwed up. Having the ability to naturally and peacefully descend into a sleep mode is something the job takes from many of us. CBD’s natural mode of action can help us correct this without having to change our career.
Reducing Anxiety
Lastly, CBD reduces anxiety. Anxiety is a pretty widely used term, maybe even overused because it describes feelings like fear, envy, impatience, or regret. All of these things pop into our heads at night in what’s known as ruminating.
At bedtime, ruminating will ruin that peaceful feeling of falling into a sleep state. There are great tactics for reducing or even eliminating rumination, like meditation, journaling or reading, and you should absolutely practice some or all of these. But, as a benefit to those other great physiological things that CBD does, it has this positive effect on feelings of anxiousness.
What About Drug Testing?
We all want the benefits of CBD, but we can’t fail a drug test. My department has a zero-tolerance policy for testing positive for marijuana, and we get three random tests a year per person. So, I get it.
However, drug testing looks for the metabolites of THC, not CBD. And to reinforce that point, initial studies have shown CBD doesn’t cause a failed drug test when it’s pure. But, you have to know and trust the brand you’re purchasing from. The industry standard for “zero THC” is 0.02% THC by weight. So, their standard for zero THC and your standard for zero THC are very different.
Ask for lab tests and do your homework on the brand. I founded Rescue 1 CBD for this exact reason – there has to be an overwhelming amount of effort put into making sure the product is meticulously tested for purity.
Final Thoughts on CBD and Sleep
CBD increases overall sleep time in REM and nREM sleep. The key is to take at least 25 mg, since anything less than that seems to have a wake-promoting effect, which would be terrible right before bed.
Sleep hygiene also has a lot of really low-hanging fruit for us to pick. Little things like keeping the room cool and dark, having a routine at night to prepare for bed, and exercising regularly are fundamental.
I feel we should challenge ourselves to get better sleep and stop resigning to the conventional thinking that poor sleep at home is part of the job. The solutions are way easier than we think, it just takes some consistency, and therefore, discipline.
Educate yourself on the effects of CBD on the circadian rhythm and sleep. CBD is a powerful tool for people who work shifts because of its effects on the “master clock” of the brain, and CBD can be made to pass drug tests, so it can be taken by active duty members of the fire service and first-responder communities.
Any way you slice it, we have to address the poor quality sleep we get on shift. Either you tackle it preventatively or your body will take the hit over the years. When we look at solutions like sleep medication versus something like CBD, the choice seems very obvious to me.
For more information:
- Insulin/IGF-1 Drives PERIOD Synthesis to Entrain Circadian Rhythms with Feeding Time – Crosby et al. MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge UK 2019
- The Influence of Meal Frequency and Timing on Health in Humans: The Role of Fasting – Paoli et al. – University of Padova, Italy 2019
- Is Eating Before Bed Bad for You?
- Endocannabinoid signaling: has it got rhythm? – Marquette University 2010
- Orchestration of the circadian clock and its association with Alzheimer’s disease: Role of endocannabinoid signaling – Shoolini University, India 2022
- The role of endocannabinoids in the hypothalamic regulation of visceral function- Semmelweis University (Hungary) 2002
- Sleep and thermoregulation Harding et al.- Imperial College London 2022