Peter Attia· MD
I think one of the major causes of insufficient sleep and poor sleep right now is that everyone is just cranked in terms of anxiety and that they wake up or you know we are constantly on reception in this modern day of life and the only time that our brain goes from reception to reflection is when our head hits the pillow and that's the last time that you need to be ruminating and catastrophizing and having that rolodex of anxiety so I think if CBD is efficacious for lowering anxiety and anxiety is one of the causes of poor sleep in society part of that benefit may not be through a direct mechanism on sleep regulating centers but instead a secondary benefit of lowering anxiety which perhaps lowers that sympathetic fight-or-flight branch of the nervous system which means that you shift into a more parasympathetic state and/or it drops core body temperature both of those routes I think are in my mind the tenable hypotheses that in you know a crowdsourced study that I would want to do and I don't know if people want to do that sitting you know comments in wherever comments can be by wooden house with one of myself I would love to see that study because anecdotally not so much in myself but I also think I'm I sleep reasonably well but in people who don't sleep that well I have anecdotally seen some pretty impressive results with CBD yeah and other times I've seen nothing and what's interesting is in some of the people in whom I've seen impressive results it's people who have been largely recalcitrant to other big guns again I think whenever you can sleep without pharmacology you're doing a good thing but I agree when you look at things like trazadone Thorazine with their anti ruminative properties and you see patients who even at 25 and 50 milligrams doesn't matter that's right you know it doesn't and I sleep and yet you know CBD is having yeah and at that point you start to think well it's less likely to be the placebo effect because you've tried all these other things that didn't work why would this silly little oil work and you know I'll sort of unrelated story that speaks to this role of anxiety because this kind of brings it back to this idea of mental health that I I think is such an important part of longevity