For millions of people, cannabis has become the . But what feels like a solution may be quietly making the problem worse.
Consider these two cases:
She is 15 and has been lying in bed for the past hour. It is past midnight, and her brain will not quiet down. Her school bus comes at 6:20 a.m. She is getting anxious, knowing that she needs to wake up in six hours. She did all the right things: turned off her phone at 10 p.m., tried . So tonight she tries something a friend recommended: a cannabis gummy. Within 20 minutes, she’s asleep.
He is 34, a veteran who did two tours and has struggled with sleep since coming home. It takes him two hours to fall asleep, and when he does, he is jolted awake by relentless nightmares. He hasn’t slept more than three hours a night in months, and it’s catching up with him. His buddy swears that cannabis helped him, and with a six-month waiting list for a sleep consultation at the Veteran’s Affairs medical center and a cannabis dispensary six blocks away that’s open until 10 p.m., the decision doesn’t feel complicated.
Both will tell you cannabis works for their specific needs. They are not entirely wrong. But no one has told them what is actually happening inside the brain when the lights go out. It’s complex, and for them – as for many others – ultimately it’s a trap.
, I write this not as someone opposed to cannabis but as someone who regularly sees patients whose sleep has quietly unraveled after months or years of use, especially teenagers and veterans.
I believe the public deserves a more complete picture than they currently have due to the limited research that’s available.
Why the teenage brain is especially vulnerable
From the early teens through the mid-20s, the , clearing out weak or redundant connections and reinforcing the circuits responsible for .
, the psychoactive component of cannabis, directly by acting on the , one of the primary regulatory networks guiding it.
A 2021 brain imaging study of 799 teenagers found that cannabis use was associated with dose-dependent – meaning the more cannabis a teenager used, the thinner their prefrontal cortex became. The prefrontal cortex is the region of the brain responsible for . in this region has been associated with increased impulsivity, poorer decision-making and reduced inhibitory control.
Another seldom-discussed factor is how puberty affects sleep. Hormonal changes and brain maturation in adolescence shift the , toward a later sleep schedule.
And teenagers are far from alone. A 2025 study found that more than 1 in 5 young adults in the U.S. . For teenagers who are already , cannabis can become its own nightly fix.
What cannabis is doing while you sleep
Sleep is not passive. It is well-organized, purposeful and .
Every night, , each serving a specific function. All sleep stages matter, but the one that matters most is , the dreaming stage. This is when the brain , and resets the brain circuits that govern mood, judgment and resilience.
THC has a sedative effect at low doses but is stimulating at high doses. Cannabis also contains other – plant-derived compounds such as CBD and CBN that interact with a system in the body that produces its own cannabinoids and of cannabis.
Here is where it gets complicated.
THC does help people fall asleep faster, but as the body adapts to regular use. The same gummy that once helped someone fall asleep quickly does less. They .
In addition, falling asleep quicker is not the same as sleeping well. A 2025 review of the research to date found that cannabis does not consistently improve sleep overall, including how long people stay asleep or .
In a separate study, chronic daily users spent significantly more time compared with nonusers; another study found that using cannabis close to bedtime .
In other words, the subjective sense of sleeping better does not match .
When relief becomes reliance
At this point many people are using cannabis not because it is working well, but because .
Even when chronic cannabis users have the willpower to stop, they often face that are more severe than what drove them to cannabis in the first place. Sleep disturbance, including insomnia and disturbing dreams, is described as a . In addition, two-thirds of users report other symptoms such as anxiety, depressed mood, restlessness, irritability, decreased appetite or a combination of these symptoms that .
The drives many people to keep using it.
This is the trap – it’s quiet and insidious, which makes it harder to see.
Cannabis works just enough to feel like a solution. Night after night it dulls the problem without fixing it, until stopping feels unthinkable. When someone finally tries to quit, their sleep falls apart. So they go back. The original reason they could not sleep has not been identified or treated, and it hasn’t gone away.
Veterans and the need for long-term recovery
The developing brain is one kind of vulnerability. The traumatized brain is another.
Post-traumatic stress disorder affects an estimated , compared with 6% to 8% of the general population. Sleep disturbances affect 70% to 90% of military personnel with PTSD. People with PTSD commonly have . They might be jolted awake with a pounding heart, multiple times a night, for years.
As a result, many veterans . It’s understandable, especially when it can take with a mental health practitioner.
But the data on outcomes for veterans is sobering. Those with – meaning cannabis use they struggle to control despite negative consequences, which affects roughly who use cannabis nonmedically – have and respond much .
And then there is withdrawal. When a veteran tries to stop, the same symptoms that cannabis seemed to quiet come – rebound insomnia and nightmares, worsening depression and, in some cases, thoughts of suicide.
Because these withdrawal symptoms so closely mirror PTSD itself, many veterans interpret the return of symptoms as their condition worsening, not as withdrawal, so they go back to cannabis. And the cycle continues.
What actually works, and why it’s so hard to get
Cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, or CBT-I, is considered the first-line treatment for persistent insomnia. Research shows that it .
This therapy works by , regulating sleep-wake schedules, reducing arousal and reframing unhelpful beliefs about sleep. A form of treatment known as , in which patients rewrite the storyline of a recurring nightmare and mentally rehearse the new version while awake, has been shown to be with trauma-related nightmares. But trained , and most primary care settings do not offer it.
In other words, the people most vulnerable to the sleep-related harms of cannabis use are the least likely to have access to treatments that address the underlying problem, and the most likely to get caught in a negative cycle.
For those already caught in that cycle, quitting abruptly rarely works and often makes things worse. Research shows that CBT-I can reduce both insomnia and cannabis use at the same time – treating the root problem so cannabis no longer feels necessary.
Sleep is the foundation on which memory, mood, judgment and recovery are built.
The 15-year-old who cannot fall asleep and the veteran who wakes gasping at 3 a.m. both deserve evidence-based information about what is happening in their brains, and real access to care that treats the root cause.
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