A joint at night, a coffee in the morning, and two bags under my eyes all the time

"Better living through chemistry!", I call it.

Weed reduces the quality of your sleep by shortening the length of REM sleep. If you regularly use weed to help you sleep you may be getting more sleep but you'll still be tired.

I have opinions about that: I think you should not go to bed high but after the main effects are gone. This improves a lot of the grogginess you might have in the morning.
This also means getting high earlier in the day, Carpe Diem!
Yeah but poor quality sleep is still better than no sleep at all.
I know that weed reduces REM cycles, but sleep specialists keep prescribing me antidepressants as sleep aids, and they also reduce your REM sleep. I've never understood why it's bad to use weed to kill my nightmares, but good to use pharmaceuticals to do the same thing.
Regardless, I've not had dreams since I started antidepressants as a teenager. I didn't start smoking weed until I was in my 30s, and that was for nerve pain after a car accident. I'm peeved that I needed to rely on my own street pharm knowledge that opiates don't work on nerve pain, because if I'd relied on the doctors, I'd be hooked on oxy right now.
My watch says I get a bit more than 2 hours of REM a night which the Internet says is plenty! The biggest changes to my sleep are not eating late and hitting fiber goals.
- Watch sleep trackers are absolute bullshit btw
I know someone who needs it to sleep due to PTSD. I think limiting REM sleep is actually the point for them. Their dreams are horrendous, wake them up, and sometimes trigger panic attacks which makes getting back to sleep quite difficult.
- This is how it is for me. Weed keeps me from having ptsd nightmares. I don’t even remember the last time i dreamed. It’s been so many years. I don’t notice any sleep problems though, just zero dreams.
📉

Reminds me of this quote from the opening scene of Wolf of Wall Street:

On a daily basis I consume enough drugs to sedate Manhattan, Long Island, and Queens for a month. I take Quaaludes 10-15 times a day for my "back pain", Adderall to stay focused, Xanax to take the edge off, pot to mellow me out, cocaine to wake me back up again, and morphine... Well, because it's awesome

Had a disc blow out last month, and I still have XR morphine from my friend dying of cancer, and whoa but this dude is right
But after a few days you really want a more potent opiate. Which, don't worry, you will still take with the morphine cause you're dependent now.
Thankfully they did emergency surgery or I'd be on the way to becoming a statistic.

Judy Garland has entered the chat.

The most important lesson of the Wizard of Oz is that it's very important that Hollywood has unions.

I know a girl which had a dear friend going down af. He could ring her in the middle of the night cause he had too much cocaine and couldn't hold himself.

So she usually had to get up and go at his place otherwise he used to get heroin in order to slow down himself. What a fucking life.

When she told me that I realized how some guys I used to know got into heroin addiction. It wasn't the drug itself, the were covaine abuset, but that triggered a secondary need that later on threw them in a even bigger problem.

My biological mom died from an overdose of a “speedball,” e.g. mixing heroin and cocaine at the same time.
And that was years after she went into the hospital for pancreatitis, and they just blanket prescribed her opioids. From there the doctors kept bumping her prescription up, and then from there she sought pills on the street, and then finally she moved to heroin. I guess if she was alive today fentanyl would have been the next jump.
She was a byproduct of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid_epidemic
And I blame the pharmaceutical companies like Purdue who profited off it more than anyone else.
This was exacerbated by the aggressive and misleading marketing of drug makers, e.g. Purdue Pharma. Purdue trained its sales representatives to convey to doctors that the risk of addiction from OxyContin was "less than one percent."
- Sorry for your loss dude. I also was an opioid addict because of those fuckers and partially because of myself. I wouldn't wish that hell on anyone. I hope you're healing okay.
- I understand your pov, consider I'm European, we didn't had the opioids wave. In Europe heroin unfortunately became more popular in the last decade but the problem is far away from the Us one.
  I've seen, listened and read a lot about the Us crisis and it's absolutely nasty. Maybe I should have thought about that before I dropped my post, but you know, we lives in our bubbles.
  A big hug to you mate.

Psychiatrists love this trick.

Some "make-me-awake"-drugs make me sleep. Take that, science!

You might have ADHD.
https://effectiveeffortconsulting.com/why-do-stimulants-make-me-sleepy-adhd/
- I know that I do, was kind of the joke. But thanks for suggesting.
- I pass out so hard after Vyvanse. I've literally taken it to sleep before. Not the best sleep but its sleep!
- As someone who was once told by a neurologist that I was the poster child for ADHD, I find it a lot less clean cut than "stimulants are basically downers for you." I took addy for school but I also partied fuckin' HARD on it. There's like a middle dose that mellowed me out, but ROI, dosage, and what was in my system had a lot to do with it. I don't take amphets anymore, medicinally or otherwise. Last time I tried I thought i was gonna have a heart attack.

Usually in the first session, a therapist will look at your sleeping habits. It is a major indicator of issues.

Whether it is stress, anxiety, PTSD, addiction, OCD, or any other mental disorders, If this meme applies to you, I suggest you talk to a therapist. Now a days, you can do sessions all online.

Very good advice. Actual, trained and licensed therapists can help everyone at some point. Unfortunately, the majority are severely overworked and underpaid, so finding a good therapist that has experience or familiarity with your particular circumstances may take time.
- That is very true. Especially since more and more people are putting their mental health as a priority. This is a good thing but this also means a lot less time for new patients.
Now a days, you can do sessions all online.
I wish. Germany usually has a combination of "bad internet", "tech illiteracy" and "no appointments in the next 2-4 years" .
- That's fair.
  I looked up Internet speed by country expecting to see Germany be in the top 25, because of their incredible engineering, then I see them at 56. That is shocking to me.
- Canada and Germany are so alike sometimes...
you missed the actual main one we use sleep habits to screen for: bipolar disorder!
- You are right.
  I even though I know people close to me diagnosed with bipolar, I don't really know much about it.
  I am going to guess sleep also indicates whether medication isn't working anymore.

As a pothead for decades recently cut down to just special occasions now. I can assure you that smoking a zoot before bed is not giving you a good sleep.

Can’t comment on the coffee as I don’t drink it.

Routine is the key. Same bed time and wake time every day. Never was a morning person now i wake up fresh before my alarm even goes off.

Oh boy when I do smoke a zoot now I suffer the next day.

Did you try getting high early and going to bed almost sober?
- I have not tried that but I do have some anecdotal data from this week.
  Been running and doing mainly easy runs to increase duration.
  Not smoked all week and been great. Had about 1g of bud last night and OMG I could not wake up this morning. I normally wake up 07:45 when working from home and log on at 08:00, but I can start anytime I want really. So today I ended snoozing alarm until 08:55. Frankly it’s a 3 hour day on Fridays.
  Then I was super groggy all morning and just fatigued, even after 8 hours sleep which the garmin said was not ideal and interrupted. Did not want to go for a run today but sucked it up and man it ruined me. HR kept spiking and had to keep walking to keep it low in zone 2/3. Whereas last run on Wednesday was just easy and no walking for 35 mins.
  Maybe next time I’ll try smoking earlier and letting it leave my system before bed cause I can’t go through that again and it’s crazy that I went decades with this brain fog.
  Do you have a time limit to stop before bed? Sorry for wall of text this is very interesting for me and now I’m unloading on you.

ITT: undiagnosed and unmedicated people