Matt: We know that sleeping pills are associated with a markedly higher risk of death, as well as cancer, as well as your susceptibility to infection, particularly in pneumonia.

But returning to alcohol, it is definitely one of the most, I think, misunderstood drugs. But what I was saying regarding THC, alcohol, sleeping pills, if you are using anything to help you sleep, I think you have to ask yourself, are you just really treating, you know, an open wound and not really actually trying to stitch it up? Because what that is simply doing is masking a problem that you're not dealing with, you know. Why is it, like...?

And this is not a criticism, I'm sorry if my voice sounds like that, and it's not, you know, I'm so sympathetic to people who have sleep problems. We see them all of the time here. But you have to ask why. Why is it that you're struggling with sleep? Is it because you're of a certain chronotype and you don't understand your chronotype and you're sleeping at the wrong phase of the 24-hour period and it's masquerading as insomnia. Or do you have too much anxiety in your life and you're blunting that anxiety with things like alcohol or THC or sleeping pills? You know, you're just kicking the can down the road. You're just hitting the mute button. But the movie is still playing of damage. Whatever is causing that sleep disruption, you know, is still there. You're just sedating your brain and trying to mask it.

So I think people who are using those things, if they're having sleep difficulties, you should ask yourself, could I examine my life and really think more about what it is that is preventing me from sleeping. What's good is that you don't have to turn to any of those because there is a non-pharmacological treatment but is just as effective as sleeping pills in the short-term. It is completely safe. And it is more efficacious in the long-term. And it's called cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia or CBTI.

Based on its efficacious nature, and they've been done lots of randomized clinical control trials, it is just as powerful as sleeping pills in the short-term. But when you stop working with your therapist, and you work with a therapist for several sessions across several weeks, when you stop working with a therapist, you don't go back to the bad sleep that you have. You continue on with your good sleep. Unlike sleeping pills, which is when you stop them, you have what we call rebound insomnia, which is that you tend to go back to the bad sleep that you are having, if not worse sleep that you are having before you started taking sleeping pills.

And the danger surround sleeping pills and their lack of true benefit above and beyond placebo, which is, if you look at these meta-analyses, in 2015 or 2016, the American College of Physicians made a landmark recommendation. They said that sleeping pills must no longer be the first-line recommended treatment for insomnia. It must be cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia because of both the deleterious, deathly, and carcinogenic consequences of...or association with...I shouldn't say cause because we don't yet know cause. But certainly they are associated with higher mortality risk and higher cancer rates. CBTI, this cognitive behavioral therapy, must be the first-line recommendation treatment.