Sleep Smarter: 5 ADHD Friendly Tips for Better Sleep

How can I get good, restful, restorative sleep when I have ADHD?” That’s the million-dollar question. Here are five possible answers to that question…

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It’s the middle of the night, the city sleeps, not us we’re awake, we’re alert, we’re watching cat videos.

The fact is when you have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) getting deep, restorative, restful sleep, can be as difficult as climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, or running a marathon, or remembering to close the doors on the kitchen cupboard so I don’t hit my head.

With ADHD getting high quality sleep is not easy, or very likely, as I’m sure you well know.

We’re wide-eyed while everyone else enjoys some shut eye, my wife’s sawing logs and I’m mentally building a log cabin, or maybe a log house boat, or a sailboat, no not a sailboat that’s you have to wait for the, I know let’s turn a school bus into an RV, and then we could add a sauna and I don’t like sauna.

Poor sleep, running on empty, it’s a huge problem for almost everyone, not just ADDers, and that’s good news, actually the need for sleep has fuelled a ton of research and produced many solutions, and strategies, and tricks, and sleep aids, and gadgets, and apps, you name it.

All designed to help you enjoy restful restorative sleep, yes even with ADHD.

So without further Ado because who needs more Ado, here are five simple ideas to help your ADHD brain relax into a deep restorative sleep, knowing that the cat videos will be there in the morning.

First tip, create some context, have realistic expectations, aim to achieve better sleep, Improvement is always doable, Perfection just doesn’t exist.

Many of us are prone to uh impulsivity imp patience we want it now, when we find something that really helps our mood will swing from this is the best thing ever this will transform my life, I should become a sales affiliate for this company, until it doesn’t work as well as you’d hoped and then it’s, that was useless, I’m useless, everything’s useless, I need chocolate.

So when you’re trying out a new tool, a practice, or a strategy for your ADHD, avoid all or nothing thinking, as my friend the esteemed author and ADHD specialist Dr Ari Tuckman notes.

We have multiple points of intervention, so whatever it is we might be doing about your ADHD, if we can also help you get more sleep, maybe not perfect eight hours every night, but you know I got clients who are getting five hours a night most nights, how they don’t drive into trees I don’t even know, because I would be driving into trees if I got five hours every night, but if we can get them from five to six, or seven, again that’s still not eight, but it’s better than five. Where there’s fewer nights that they’re getting five, there’s more nights in there that they’re getting seven or eight.

Embrace simple practices that you can stick with, one change at a time, and give it time success means constant improvement, you want to avoid the, well I tried out this app is it working, is it helping, do I feel any different, it’s been 3 minutes am I’m still awake, it’s been 5 hours and I’m still awake and I don’t know why and everyone’s telling me to stop yelling.

Yeah fretting and stressing out, prevents the brain from surrendering to slumberland, so chill, deep breath, and another, and another, just keep doing them until the sleep comes.

Sleeping tip number two, a regular bedtime, oh I know, go to sleep and wake up at regular hours, how does that strike you?

Yeah yeah I don’t want to, you’re not the boss of me, I want to stay up late.

Welcome to the Paradox of ADHD, I want to be more accomplished and happier and healthier but when it comes time to do something that’s vaguely uncomfortable, I’ll start tomorrow, I promise.

If you work Monday to Friday then getting to bed at a regular time is probably a bit easier, and obviously more beneficial, but if you stay up late on Friday night and Saturday night, you undo the good habit you’ve been building.

DR Roberto Olivardia: And even for me every night, it is a battle to get to sleep, it will never come naturally for me to go to bed early, it won’t come naturally for me, I’m not a morning person, but I function very well in the morning, but it’s literally a training, it’s an effort to to do that.

Tip number three, naps, 10 to 30 minutes long.

Kathleen Nadeau, Ph.D: It’s really better to get up at 7 and take a nap, than to sleep until 9 and stay up all day. Studies have shown that if you take a nap before 4 p.m. that tends to not interfere with getting to sleep at your standard time.

Even if you don’t fall asleep, just laying down, eyes closed, can be refreshing and re-energizing.

The fourth strategy, a dose of tryptophan, eating within 3 hours of going to bed will interfere with your sleep as your body then has to spend energy digesting the late night mac and cheese, when it could be focusing on restoring and cleaning out, it literally flushing out your brain.

That said if you can’t sleep give yourself a of the sleep chemical tryptophan, it’s one that you produce naturally, there’s no prescription necessary, and it can be found in your body and in certain foods, bananas, peanut butter, a glass of warm milk, it’s also found in among other foods, turkey which is why after Thanksgiving dinner everyone loosens their belt, and the vegans, who didn’t have the turkey, have to do all the dishes.

And yeah there are prescription medicines, but you know a lot of us resist taking yet another medication, especially since there are natural alternatives, melatonin is a sleep chemical your body produces naturally, and if you need more melatonin’s available in a little jar in the vitamin section of your pharmacy.

A lot of people know that it works, and it makes them sleep like a log, a log that snores, but that’s okay.

Finally sleep secret number five, if you can’t sleep, don’t just lay there stewing about it, or letting your mind wander around, because our minds will tend to wander onto something, something upsetting, worrying, emotional triggering or otherwise negative.

Instead read, reading takes effort, and by the end of the day it can magically drain my brain into a soaparific, is that the right word? So into a stupor, but be warned don’t select anything too exciting, no horror, romance, True Crime, spy novels, for example my friend Lynnwood Barkley writes Thrillers, and they’re really really good, Stephen King praises them, they’re very, very, good ,they are page turners, and I don’t want to be turning pages, I want to be asleep, so I don’t read those books at night.

Instead read about something like, I don’t know, art history travel, the life of John Philip Sousa, unless you really love art history, or travel, or Brass Band music, pick something dull or mildly interesting, the history of canals, oh, a guide book to seabirds, the owner’s manual for your car, these days I read every night, a book soon becomes heavy in my hands, my eyelids grow heavy, leaden, sagging down until I’m almost comatose, and then it’s just lights out, and I’m slumbering in less than a minute.

So now you have five possible solutions to the problem of sleep deprivation, and the secret is consistency, the same, the regular routine, the well, you see, let me know in the comments which if any of these strategies you’ve used, or are going to try, and do like and share, and of course if you want more exclusive videos. and a supportive tribe of fellow ADDers become a patreon, for a few dollars a month you’ll enjoy extra benefits, all, I won’t get into them, to learn more about how you can become a patron, it’s somewhere up here, there’s something on the screen you click, not me the boxes.