Nicotine and Sleep - What's the Relationship?

"Does nicotine make you tired?" is a question that many people have asked, and the answer is that it doesn’t. It tends to disrupt sleep patterns and make you more likely to sleep for fewer hours during the night. 

But there are steps you can take to mitigate this and make your experience easier to deal with. We’ll cover some of these later in the article, and they will be very helpful if you’re a regular smoker trying to quit. 

Besides that, we’ll also explore the topic of ‘does nicotine wake you up or make you tired’ in greater detail so that you know as much as possible about it. 

Does Nicotine Affect Sleep?

If you’ve ever wondered does nicotine make you tired or awake, then you’ll know the answer is it keeps you awake. But what’s more important is knowing precisely how that occurs so that you can understand the process and take steps to withdraw from nicotine use or improve your sleep with other approaches. 

There are certain consequences from being a regular smoker when it comes to the amount of sleep you’re getting, and these are as follows:

• Smokers take longer to drift off to sleep at night 
• Smokers will lay in bed awake for a long time before sleeping 
• Smokers will have fewer hours of sleep in total
• The sleep that smokers do have will be of a lower quality

These consequences sound pretty severe, but they don’t apply to everyone. There are some circumstances where smoking nicotine can actually help you get to sleep. In that case, when you’re asking does nicotine make you tired, the answer will be yes. One example of this is depression. If you suffer from this, then nicotine can improve the sleep you’re getting. So it’s worth investigating if that’s the situation you’re in. 

However, if you’re a regular smoker who doesn’t suffer from depression, then you may find that you have trouble waking up in the morning and feel tired throughout the day. This can have a significant impact on your productivity and cause you to feel like you cannot meet your obligations. 

Some people have even claimed that the severity of nicotine’s impact on sleep cycles is greater than harder drugs like cocaine. Plus, insomnia can be a frequent problem if you’ve smoked for many decades or started when you were young. But if you’ve read about this before and tried to solve it, you’ll experience nicotine withdrawal. In the next section, we’ll cover how to manage that. 

Managing Nicotine Withdrawal

If you’re convinced that the answer to does smoking nicotine make you tired is yes, then you’ll either have tried reducing your nicotine consumption already, or you’ll have read about the difficulties that come with that and avoided it. Those difficulties relate to nicotine withdrawal. 

Nicotine is an addictive substance, and both the mind and body form a strong attachment to it. Getting over that is a challenge that all smokers have either avoided, attempted, or conquered. It’s become easier in recent years thanks to the introduction of vaping, which we’ll mention later. 

But it’s still a challenge regardless of the approach you take. It has an effect on your emotions, your body, and your thought patterns. It’s most intense in the days immediately following your withdrawal. You’ll often experience headaches, insomnia, and intense cravings. 

Smokers will often relapse and fall back into the habit within two weeks, but many have got past this point without fail. But long-term problems can manifest, like anxiety and irritability. 

Nicotine Withdrawal Symptoms 

Managing nicotine withdrawal is crucial in the first 5 weeks, and that’s because of the nicotine withdrawal timeline, which is as follows:

• - Within 4 hours, you’ll want another cigarette 
• - Within 10 hours, you’ll be restless 
• - Within 24 hours, you’ll get irritated 
• - After 2 days, the headaches will begin 
• - After 3 days, anxiety will manifest 
• - After 1 week, you’ll be past the worst of  it 
• - After 2-4 weeks, your emotional and physical state will improve 
• - After 5 weeks, the challenge will simply be one of willpower 

The best way to manage these symptoms is to use cessation aids. These include nicotine gum, patches, sprays, and inhalers. Small doses of nicotine will help wean your body and mind off of cigarettes. 

You can also try natural alternatives like exercising more, sleeping more, and finding ways to indulge in pleasant activities as a distraction. Examples might be reading, going for a walk, or playing a musical instrument. 

4 Tips for Getting Better Sleep

Now that you know the reasons why people ask does nicotine make you tired and that extra sleep is crucial regardless of whether you want to quit nicotine or continue smoking it, we’ll give you a selection of tips on how to get better sleep.

1. Get More Bright Light 

Adding more bright light to your everyday routines helps improve your circadian rhythms, which regulate your body’s functions. Bright light affects hormone release, which in turn affects the body and brain. If you can get sunlight, that’s the best kind of light there is, but you can also find natural lights that simulate the sun.

2. Take Away Blue Light At Night  

Blue light is a stimulant because the body believes it is coming from a blue sky, so when it exists late at night, your body is tricked into staying awake. So even if you ask ‘does smoking nicotine make you tired’ and receive no as the answer, you can still take action to improve sleep.  Blue light is frequently found in smartphones and computers, so you should minimize your use of these devices at least two hours before going to bed. 

3. Don’t Sleep During The Day 

If you know about the debate surrounding ‘does nicotine make you tired or awake,’ then you’ll also know the more you sleep during the day, the more alert and awake you’ll be at night. Not only that, napping can confuse your body and make it feel out of sync with the time of day. When that happens, you can feel tired during the day and find it a struggle to stay awake.

4. Be Consistent 

If you’ve decided the answer regarding does nicotine wake you up or make you tired, then you’ll know how important it is to get high-quality sleep. But this won’t be possible if you’re sleeping at different times each day. When that happens, your body and brain will be heavily confused, and you won’t feel right. Therefore, you should wake up and go to bed at roughly the same time each day.

Best Nicotine Vape Juices

If you know the facts around the ‘does nicotine make you tired’ debate, one alternative is to take up vaping instead. There are many vape juices available, and vaping is a way to move away from cigarettes and experiment with an alternative method of consuming nicotine if you don’t want to give it up.