I've been working on switching most drinking for weed—for health reasons. Seriously. It's the best and lowest-side-effect sleep aid I've used. Hopefully it's not secretly doing horrible things to me, but my sleep quality's been amazing since I started to take a little a couple nights a week. Most consistently-decent sleep of my life.

Weed inhibits REM sleep. You may feel rested, but you're actually harming yourself long term.

You're also inhibiting your ability to dream (and your ability to remember them). That is a lot of critical emotional processing not happening. Dreams matter, even if they don't make rational sense.

Damnit. Well, it's that or lots of 5-6 hour nights, or worse. Or bad hangovers and other weird shit from sleeping pills. Maybe time to get a sleep-tracker watch.

Do you drink a lot of coffee or other caffeinated drinks, especially later in the day? I used to think caffeine didn't have much affect on my sleep, until I cut it out. Old habits die hard, but I just drink decaf coffee now and am getting better sleep then I can remember.

~2 cups of coffee probably 5-6 days a week, sometimes tea instead, rarely past noon and never past ~2:00PM (I only drink it as late as, say, 1:00PM if I happen not to realize how late it is). Maybe one soda per month, tops, don't really pay attention to when I have those, though. I'd guess afternoon/evening mostly, but it's rare enough that I doubt it's doing anything meaningful to my overall sleep-trends.

I could try cutting it out, but I've had trouble falling asleep my entire life, and my average annual caffeine intake was very low until my mid-teens. I'm actually much better about sleep now than I used to be, even without meds. Worth a shot, though, I guess. I'd been thinking about dropping my intake to one cup per day, alternating coffee and green tea (which would represent a large increase in my consumption of green tea) anyway. Hell, at lower volume I could justify buying the expensive, low-package-weight, really, really good beans, so the flavor of the coffee I'm drinking would improve, though I might have to group coffee-days rather than alternate them, to avoid issues with beans going stale. Seems like ~halving my caffeine would be an OK start.

Sigh. Guess I'm going to be spending a lot of money on sparkling water, just like when I kicked my soda habit :-)

It might be worth going to a specialist for help.

I've had a similar experience. I've been using delta-8 at night for sleep and I've added 1-2 hrs a night according to my fitbit. I don't feel "hungover" or similar like I would from alcohol or OTC sleeping meds.

I haven’t replaced it with anything else. At some point I will try to kick caffeine but one vice at a time. :-)