If you find that vaping makes you feel tired, you’re definitely not the only one to have experienced that problem. Nicotine is a powerful stimulant, and it can affect your sleep quality even if you’ve been using it for so long that you no longer feel a “rush” when you vape.
Here’s the good news. If you feel sleepy after switching from smoking to vaping, it’s an issue that’s either easily correctable or will go away on its own – so in either case, there’s really nothing to worry about. In this guide, we’ll tell you everything that you need to know. We’ll start with the main question that brought you here: Why does vaping make you tired in the first place?
Why Does Vaping Make You Tired?
You may feel tired from vaping if you’re using nicotine right before bedtime or if you’re still adjusting to the switch from cigarettes to vapes.
If you find that vaping seems to make you feel sleepy, you’re most likely experiencing one of these two scenarios.
- You’re feeling tired because you’ve just switched from smoking to vaping, and you’re adjusting to the different nicotine levels and the lack of certain chemicals in the vapor.
- You’re feeling tired because you’re consuming too much nicotine late at night, and it’s affecting your sleep quality.
It’ll be fairly easy to identify which of the above items applies to you because it’s simply a matter of how long you’ve been vaping. If you just switched, your body is still adjusting to the differences between cigarettes and vapes. It’s possible that you might also want to consider increasing your nicotine strength. If you’re not a recent switcher and have been vaping for a while, you need to examine your nicotine consumption at night. We’ll spend the rest of the guide addressing those two scenarios at greater length.
Feeling Tired as a New Convert to Vaping
Let’s begin with what you can do if you’ve just switched from smoking to vaping and find that vapes seem to make you feel tired.
Why Do You Feel Tired When You Switch from Smoking to Vaping?
Although vapes do contain nicotine, that’s just one of the many chemicals in cigarette smoke. It may take your body a few days to adjust to the switch.
To understand why you might feel sleepy after switching from smoking to vaping, consider how incredibly efficient cigarettes are when it comes to delivering nicotine. You might have felt a pleasant nicotine rush the first few times you smoked, but that was only temporary. By the time you finished your first several cigarettes, smoking already felt completely normal to you because physical addiction had already begun to set in. That’s how effective cigarettes are as nicotine delivery devices.
During the early days of vaping, people commonly reported not feeling very well for the first few days after making the switch from smoking because the e-cigarettes that were available at the time delivered only a small portion of the nicotine that you’d get from a tobacco cigarette. With today’s much more potent vapes, that problem isn’t as common as it used to be – but people do still experience it from time to time.
Even if you’re getting the right amount of nicotine for your needs, you may still feel a slight sense of fatigue or malaise when you first switch to vaping because cigarette smoke contains many chemicals, and nicotine is just one of them. Your body may need a few days to detoxify itself from all of the other chemicals that you’re no longer consuming.
What to Do About It
Feeling tired after switching to vaping may mean that you’re not getting enough nicotine, or it could just mean that you need to wait a few days for your body to normalize.
If you’re already using a vape with a nicotine strength of 5 percent or 50 mg/ml, you’re probably getting as much nicotine as you need because at that strength, the nicotine delivery of a vaping device is very similar to that of a cigarette. Most likely, you simply need to tough it out for a few days while your body adjusts. Since you should be getting enough nicotine, you won’t have to worry about experiencing severe withdrawal.
If you’re not using a nicotine strength of 50 mg/ml, though – or you’re continuing to experience cravings because you feel like you aren’t getting enough nicotine – it might be a good idea to try a different vape that packs a stronger punch. The Geek Bar Pulse is a very popular device right now because it has a dual-coil vaping mode that allows it to produce twice as much vapor as a traditional disposable vape. You can also learn about some of the other best disposable vapes on the market.
Feeling Tired as a Longer-Term Vaper
What if you’re not a new vaper? Maybe you switched a while ago, and you’re certain that detoxing from cigarettes isn’t the issue you’re experiencing. In this case, vaping is probably affecting your sleep quality. We’ll explain why.
Why Does Vaping Affect Sleep Quality?
Using nicotine late at night can affect your sleep because a significant amount of the nicotine may still be in your bloodstream when you go to bed.
To understand why vaping can have a negative effect on sleep quality, it’s important to know that nicotine has a half-life in the bloodstream of about two hours. In other words, two hours after your last vaping session, half of the nicotine will still be in your blood. Two hours after that, a quarter of the nicotine will still be there.
Why does that matter? It matters because nicotine is an extremely powerful stimulant. You may not think of it that way if you’re a long-term user because you no longer feel a rush, but it’s affecting your sleep all the same.
According to the Cureus Journal of Medical Science, nicotine use before bed can cause delayed sleep onset, meaning that it takes you longer to fall asleep because it disrupts your body’s natural circadian rhythm. Nicotine may also cause you to wake up during the night, reducing REM sleep and impeding your body’s rest and recovery processes. These things can happen even if you’re so used to nicotine that you don’t feel an overt stimulating effect. Since your sleep quality is reduced, you feel tired during the day – and the issue continues to compound over time.
What to Do About It
Finding a way to reduce your nicotine intake late at night may improve your sleep quality and help you to feel more energetic during the day.
In short, if you’re a long-term vaper and find that vaping seems to make you feel sleepy, the problem is that you’re consuming too much nicotine right before bed. The great thing, though, is that this is a very easy problem to fix – and there are three different ways of doing it.
- You can start monitoring your vaping more closely. If you always have your vaping device nearby and puff on it almost constantly throughout the day, it’s time to consider cutting back a little bit – especially right before going to bed. Keep track of how many times you puff on your vape during the last 2-4 hours before bedtime and start reducing it by a few puffs per day. With just a little time and effort, you can greatly reduce your late-night vaping and will have significantly less nicotine in your system when you go to bed.
- You can switch to a low-nicotine vape when it gets close to bedtime. If you begin using a lower-nicotine device about 2-4 hours before bedtime and don’t increase the number of times you puff on the device, you’ll reduce your nicotine intake at night significantly. If you like disposable vapes, the Flonq Max Pro is a good option because it’s available in a strength of 20 mg/ml. If you prefer something a bit more environmentally friendly, try the 7 Daze Clickmate. It uses pre-filled swappable pods, and it’s also available in a strength of 20 mg/ml.
- If you want to reduce your nicotine intake even further, try switching to a nicotine-free vape at nighttime. The Flonq Max Pro is another popular option here because many of its flavors are available without nicotine. If you can’t find your favorite flavor, try the Flonq Max Smart. If you switch to a nicotine-free vape at least two hours before bedtime, the amount of nicotine remaining in your system when you go to sleep should be much lower than it currently is, and you’ll probably find yourself feeling much better rested.
Wrapping Up: Tiredness from Vaping Is Common but Fixable
As you’ve learned from this article, tiredness is one of the most common side effects that people report from vaping, and you’re likely to experience it either because you’ve just switched from smoking to vaping or because you’re using too much nicotine right before going to bed. With the solutions we’ve provided, you should have no trouble getting yourself back to normal.