A recent letter
Sent 25 October 2026. This is the whole letter, sources included.
One idea about rest
Two reviews asked the same question this autumn, ten weeks apart, and came back with different answers. The gap between them is more useful than either one alone.
The question was whether cannabis helps people with insomnia sleep.
In August, a meta-analysis in Sleep Medicine pooled ten randomized trials covering 2,134 people and reported about thirty-four minutes more sleep a night, with better scores on two standard sleep questionnaires. Its authors concluded that cannabinoids improve sleep quality and duration with acceptable safety.
In October, a Cochrane review pooled nine trials of adults with insomnia, 537 people aged 18 to 76, most of them women. It found total sleep time about eight minutes longer than placebo, in a range running from twenty-three minutes less sleep to thirty-eight minutes more. A range that still includes losing sleep has not shown a gain. On how people rated their own sleep, and on how they managed the next day, it found little to no difference large enough to matter in a life.
Then it graded its confidence in all of that as very low, the bottom of the four grades reviewers use. Most of those trials ran under fifty people for a few weeks, and they disagreed with each other almost completely.
Both were reading a literature that stopped in early 2025, so neither had more to work with than the other.
There is a third review, in Sleep Medicine Reviews last September, which points at something that might explain the split. It gathered eighteen studies that measured sleep in a laboratory rather than by questionnaire, and could pool nine of them. On those recordings, cannabis did not consistently change how long people slept, how quickly they fell asleep, how much they woke, or how the night was shaped. Its authors name the gap themselves: the distance between the sleep people report and the sleep that gets measured.
I put more weight on the eight minutes than on the thirty-four, and not because it is the smaller number. It is that the review reporting it also published how little confidence it had in it. When an answer moves depending on which instrument you pick up, it is not an answer yet.
One thing worth trying
Find out what behavioral treatment you can actually get.
The Cochrane review's own account of the field names cognitive behavioral therapy as the main treatment for insomnia, and says it often works well. That is the comparison every sleep product is really measured against, and it is the thing most people are never offered. Ask whoever you would talk to about sleep what treatment options exist where you live, because what is on offer varies a lot depending on where you are.
One part of it costs nothing and you can try it tonight. If you have been lying awake a while, get up, sit somewhere else until you feel sleepy, then go back to bed. The point is to stop the bed from teaching you that it is the place where you lie awake. Plan the route and the chair before you need them, because a dark house in the small hours carries its own risk of a fall.
Stimulus Control: Why You Should Get Out of Bed has the trial record and the cautions.
One thing worth ignoring
Any confident claim that a cannabis or CBD product will fix your sleep.
In those nine trials of adults with insomnia aged 18 to 76, mostly women, the Cochrane reviewers found little to no difference that would matter on sleep quality, on total sleep time, or on the next day. The clearest signal in the review pointed the other way. Across three of the trials, 98 people in total, 37 reported an unwanted effect while on cannabis and not on placebo, 14 reported one during both, and nobody reported one on placebo alone. Dizziness, dry mouth and memory trouble are the effects listed. That was also the only outcome the review graded above its bottom rung of confidence.
None of this is a verdict on anyone's own experience, and it is not a reason to stop something you have been prescribed. If you use one of these products for sleep, that conversation belongs with whoever prescribes or dispenses it, not with a newsletter. The part that has not been established is the claim on the packaging.
The products across these trials varied widely, which is part of why the answer stays unsettled. Common myths about natural sleep aids covers the same move one aisle over, where the word "natural" does the work that evidence should be doing.
Sleep well,
Cricket and Moon
Educational only. This letter is not medical advice, and nothing in it is a substitute for talking to a clinician about your own sleep.
Sources
Retrieved 23 October 2026. Article records, author lists, journals, DOIs and abstracts were identified and verified through PubMed, and each paper's DOI is linked below.
- Varela LB, Miño Zambrano JE, Maura Goncalves Costa B, Santos Marques da Silva G, Escobar Liquitay CM, Díaz Menai S, Meza N, Garegnani LI. "Medical cannabis for the treatment of insomnia." Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2026, volume 10, issue 10, CD016216. Published online 13 October 2026. DOI [abstract only]
- Asim R, Azeem B, Wijdan SA, Hanafi MA, Mubarika M, Muneer SU, Abdalla MI, Ishtiaq S, Ashraf H. "Efficacy of cannabinoids for insomnia and sleep disturbance: A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials." Sleep Medicine, volume 148, 109193. Published 6 August 2026. DOI [abstract only]
- Velzeboer R, Malas A, Wei S, Berger R, Parmar V, Lai WWK. "Cannabis and sleep architecture: A systematic review and meta-analysis." Sleep Medicine Reviews, volume 84, 102164. Published 12 September 2025. DOI [abstract only]
- Cochrane Library record for the review above, read as a second pass on its figures: Cochrane Library
- Wang W, Qiu S. "Comment on 'Efficacy of cannabinoids for insomnia and sleep disturbance: A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials'." Sleep Medicine, volume 148, 109265. Published online 15 September 2026. DOI record only, content paywalled and not read. Not relied on in the letter.
- Cricket and Moon, "Stimulus Control: Why You Should Get Out of Bed": https://cricketandmoon.com/stimulus-control-insomnia.html
- Cricket and Moon, "Common myths about natural sleep aids": https://cricketandmoon.com/sleep-aid-myths.html