Insomnia is more than just sleeplessness. It can be a chronic condition that dramatically reduces your quality of life. Lack of sleep can also lead to long-term health impacts, such as increasing your risk for dementia-related diseases and even heart attacks and strokes. The good news is that there’s help available, and it comes in the form of an all-natural supplement: CBD.

How Does CBD Help with Insomnia?

It is important to understand that CBD is not a sleep aid, nor is it a soporific. It also does not make you sleepy the way that THC can. Instead, CBD helps alleviate the underlying conditions that may be causing your insomnia, such as pain, anxiety, depression, or even the effects of conditions like Parkinson’s disease.

 Research has found that when patients suffering from both anxiety and insomnia took just 25 mg of CBD per day, they reported both lower levels of anxiety and better quality sleep. Another study found that CBD was able to alleviate the pain that prevented people from getting good quality sleep.

 Another study, albeit one limited in scope, found that patients with Parkinson’s disease who took a CBD supplement before bed were able to improve the quality of their REM sleep while reducing other symptoms.

How Does It Work?

Unfortunately, scientists are not entirely sure how CBD improves the symptoms discussed above. They simply know that it does. This is because it works through the human endocannabinoid system, which was only discovered in the 1990s. Researchers are still studying the endocannabinoid system to understand how it works. However, it looks like CBD works by alleviating the underlying causes of insomnia, rather than inducing an artificial sleep state the way pharmaceuticals do.

How Much CBD to Take for Insomnia?

There is no one-size-fits-all solution here. Each person will need to find their own optimum dosage level. Ideally, you’ll start small, between 20 and 40 mg per day. Slowly increase the dosage by 5 mg per week until you find the one that helps you sleep. Over time, you may need to increase or decrease your dosage for optimum results.