Insomnia can be a particularly difficult problem when you work an early morning job and can’t sleep in on the nights when you’re struggling to get to sleep on time compared to other evenings.
I suffered through insomnia symptoms for years before I finally started taking the active ingredient in Benadryl, diphenhydramine, as a sleep aid.
I think I was at the age of 14 when I started consuming generic diphenhydramine on a daily basis. This persisted into my early 20s, and then I consumed it sporadically until my mid 20s when I stopped. It worries me now to think if I could have never quit taking it, as kids are consuming high doses of diphenhydramine to “trip,” although it becomes a deliriant when one consumes over 200mg, which is often described as a hellish and nightmarish version of a psychedelic but with a general sense of terror that one can’t really replicate with the latter. I’m happy I’m not even taking “safe” and “therapeutic” doses of diphenhydramine any longer if that’s what happens to the brain on higher doses. However, I made the mistake recently in buying a bunch of CBD products off the internet thinking that CBD by itself would be an amazing sleep aid for me. I talked to a cannabis doctor about it later on down the road and he explained that CBD by itself sometimes has the opposite of a sedating effect, but that you can add sedating terpenes like myrcene and linalool to CBD to get a more calming and sedating effect compared to a stimulating and energizing effect. THC by contrast is often much more sedating than CBD.