Andrew Weil on Kava Kava

ANDREW WEIL:

Kava is the major psychoactive plant that is used in Oceania in many islands throughout the Pacific.

It is a very large root of a large plant in the black pepper family. It has a unique chemistry. In many of these islands, people make a beverage from it, originally by chewing the root and spitting it into a bowl and mixing it with water or coconut juice. Or now more often drying it and powdering it and mixing into a liquid.

And it functions as a social stimulant and lubricant but it is a natural sedative and cognitive, probably the most important anti-anxiety natural product out there. Extremely useful and essentially no toxicity. It does not interact with alcohol it does not interact with other sedatives. It’s quite safe and i recommend it very frequently to people.

TIM FERRISS:

Do you know what effect, if any it has on sleep quality? My friend has the subjective experience of it helping him to wind down and go to sleep but i wonder what effect it has on sleep quality. Because you look at some sleep aids, like ambien and so on, which help you to fall asleep, but they affect the cycles of sleep and depth.

ANDREW WEIL:

That’s putting it mildly. You know all of these sleep aids – whether over-the-counter or prescribed: I think are dangerous drugs. First of all they don’t reproduce natural sleep. All of them suppress dreaming which is an essential component of good sleep. They distort sleep architecture. They are addictive and they interfere with cognitive functions. so i think there is really no justification for using them unless for very short-term use, because of situational insomnia. But Kava has none of these ill effects. It can be used long-term regularly.

I don’t know that we have good studies on how it affects sleep quality. But I don’t know of any indications that it has any of those adverse effects that the usual sleep aids do.