The associations with ADHD really are there, but that may just also be because a huge number of brain processes have a circadian regulation, and those get disrupted by whatever is causing ADHD.
The causality is also bidirectional, because whatever ADHD does could cause light exposure behavioral changes, which could leave a circadian phenotype.
In general, a huge number of diseases have circadian phenotypes. To be a circadian disorder, you’d have to have clock mutations, and ADHD really doesn’t have those. So calling it a circadian disorder feels off.
But from personal experience, the linkage is strong enough to warrant deeper research, and beyond that, there’s some steps we can take ourselves. Regular walks in nature, going out to get sun… all generally useful things to do that do seem to help ADHD as well.
> The causality is also bidirectional, because whatever ADHD does could cause light exposure behavioral changes, which could leave a circadian phenotype.
This seems the most likely given my own experience with ADHD and sleep issues. Good sleep alleviates some of the worse aspects of ADHD. Conversely bad sleep exacerbates ADHD symptoms which can also worsen sleep, etc.
My 23andme profile says I have genes associated with delayed sleep. ADHD (and autism) really seem like they're driven by a cluster of multiple genes with many overlapping between people with the condition(s), but not all.
One rationale for that is how surprisingly prevalent ADHD is across many societies, which only makes sense to me if there's multiple genes which combine and which together confer various advantages to societies as a whole (if not to the individuals). One of the gene sets seem to be sleep issues. It makes sense in a pop-psychology level evolutionary biology where the "creative" types also tend to stay up later which might give them more focus time, or perhaps for story tellers / poets recounting tribal history, etc.
I hope this area gets more research. These things are highly inheritable among families.
The night is my best time too, but I’d hesitate to say that for most folks this has to do with the night being quieter.
The clock just has that spread. And I’d argue it makes evolutionary sense. You want people who are alert later, in a group. But this holds for most animals too.
In my case I interpret it as my "safe time". At night, the world sleeps, and no one is waiting on me, or going to randomly interrupt me. When other people sleep, obligations sleep too.
There’s no clear set of genes that causes delayed sleep. You definitely have those rare mutations of core clock genes which causes their circadian cycle to have distinct properties, one of the outputs of which is a natural sleep preference that’s out of phase with typical societal rhythms, but is still a normal amount of sleep, and its consolidated and restful etc.
But the clock itself has a population wide variation in its actual period. It varies between 23.8 hours and 24.6 hours, and everyone far from the 24 hour ideal pays a tax. The clock either has to phase advance or phase delay to synchronize, and over time that has all kinds of impacts, including on sleep, but also memory and learning, stress, attention…
The whole system is clocked. Every cell in our body runs a 24 hour cycle, driven by the transcription, translation, inhibition and breakdown of the core clock proteins. They’re in a negative feedback loop, with a time delay, and all kinds of mutations can shift the overall period of the clock. If it’s of a core clock protein, the effect will be strong, but other genes cycle or have their functions in a cycle due to the clock, and feed back into the clock, so small mutations can accumulate to cause circadian period variation.
It’s also why you see circadian phenotypes in all kinds of diseases. Definitely needs more research, but the research is also hard. You need to observe the body in high resolution over many time points to start making sense of all this, and that’s expensive and exhausting. We’ll get there, though.
> It varies between 23.8 hours and 24.6 hours, and everyone far from the 24 hour ideal pays a tax.
As a person with ADHD and who noticed that whenever I have a few weeks off (so no schedule restrictions, so to speak) my sleep schedule seems to advance by almost an hour a day, this sounds like it might explain a few things.
Yeah if I allow it my sleep schedule shifts about 45 minutes a day. Eventually it'll "flip" my day after a month or so instead of going to bed late now I'm getting up early. However it also feels like not all the biological rhythms follow it.
I have had the opposite effect. The days where I get 8 hours of good quality sleep per Oura and Garmin have been some of my least productive days, which is always contrary to my expectations. My most productive and focused days are usually when I get 5 hours after a few nights of solid sleep. It might relate to the hangover effect, but I've never really been hung over before so I don't know if that would affect me.
Can't speak for you but at least myself I find there's a delay of 24 to 48 hours before either sufficient or lack of sleep really catches up with me. It takes 2 to 3 nights of good sleep (unfortunately somewhat difficult to pull off) before I feel fully functional.
I did not see environmental factors in your consideration.
I got ADHD and Autism diagnosed as teen, the diagnostic was rather solid. Got methylphenidate for some months. I ran away from home with 17, i moved together with my girlfriend (at 26) into an emotionally stable environment and... the symptoms disappeared. No jactation, no special interests, no masking. Everything just disappeared. A bit of stimming remains. And a horribly fucked up sleep cycles.
Had undiagnosed RAD and CPTSD for longer than i'm self-aware. Severe emotional neglect for my first 17 years. Parental rejection plays a big part in here.
I'd be like, maybe i'm just a special case, and nothing of this applies to other people. But i see other ADHD-havers being too similar to me, and that includes hypervigilance and silent walking, which are apt adaptions to certain kind of childhood environments.
Maybe too much gets diagnosed as ADHD that is not genetic at all...
CPTSD literally rewires your brain and "appears" in diagnostic tests as ADHD: lower arousal in prefrontal cortex, overactive amygdala causing fast emotional response, impacted hippocampus, dopamine disregulation, etc.
Stress changes the layout of your brain along with your body's chemical responses. With ADHD, genetics seem to play a larger role where you can lack the stressors and still end up with the same end result. I wouldn't be surprised that treatments would work across both CPTSD and ADHD.
> CPTSD literally rewires your brain and "appears" in diagnostic tests as ADHD
This seems unexpectedly one-sided to me. It could equally be that ADHD is CPTSD from something that current knowledge does not consider traumatic (yet).
I am not sure the distinction goes in this direction. Rather than "shouldn't be diagnosed as ADHD" I would sooner say "ADHD should be treated in multiple ways"
It's very typical for there to be overlap between inevitability and environmental circumstances
Exactly I’m glad to hear it from chronologist. I have schizoaffective, bipolar type, very affected by light changes.
I also have polymorphism in my melatonin, receptor genetics that are linked to this disorder. But I have several other genetics that make this a definite polygenic disease. So I highly doubt chronology efforts are going to work in a holistic way.
My heritage is from the Sami people of Finland. And my disorder is most likely related to that heritage and my sensitivity to light changes. But also changes in my diet. Specifically higher omega-3 fatty acids, and I mean really high.
Yes. Our rhythms tend to pattern the environment. And generations with the kinds of seasonal light changes you have close to the poles likely had a broad impact on many genes.
> Specifically higher omega-3 fatty acids, and I mean really high.
How much & for what? I remember seeing a paper many years ago which claimed better depression at about 2g+ EPA/day.
> But also changes in my diet.
You should seriously try "metabolic psychiatry" for at least 6months with daily blood tests on GKI 1-2 (what children with epilepsy do). Most popular is for bipolar.
Well I do not really count, but I only eat seafood or venison, which bothy have higher long chain omega 3 and omega 6. I really have an issue with short chain PUFAs like from vegetables. I started this mainly because of my lipid profile. Very low HDL, high LDL, and a family history of herat attacks in our early 50's.
I found it helped my mood disorder stabilize and also my IBS-D.
I would say I get well over 2 grams a day though but to my the length and balance or omega 3/6 is important for me genetically.
> You should seriously try "metabolic psychiatry"
I would say I am doing it, only better, because I know my genetics and what some people miss is the type of fats they need due to polymorphism in FADS1 and FADS2.
Hmm… surprisingly sparse. Some chronobiology labs have good outlines. YouTube has a few good videos, including some from the Royal Society Lectures that walk you through the basics of the clock, this one especially:
This one is a very approachable one on sleep and rhythms, and especially talks about why mental health disorders and sleep disruption tend to co-occur.
A few years I was playing around with analyzing my own genome and found a needle in the haystack: an unstudied clock gene mutation (in CRY2), which, after correspondence and tests from scientists in the field, is effectively confirmed to delay the clock. Sort of unbelievable story, will write it all up some day.
As far as ADHD is concerned, I’ve never been officially diagnosed but certainly have some traits (and notably missing others); it makes me suspect that ADHD is probably a cluster of different etiologies, some caused by circadian issues, some not.
I’ve often wondered if having this variant would be useful at all for chronobiologists in the field to study / observe. Feel free to shoot me an email (in bio).
This was before AI got good, so I would do it differently today.
Back then, I got my genome sequenced via nebula genomics (no longer around). I found a lab that screens ~150 genes that potentially contribute to circadian disturbances. I punched all of those genes into this software called gene.iobio that came with the nebula report, which reports any potentially interesting variants and links out to Clinvar. There were a ton of results, everyone carries loads of these harmless variants, but the one that jumped out was in a gene I knew played a critical role in clock timing, and amazingly, that was it.
Oh wow! I congratulate you on your efforts and curiousity.
Cry2, or Cryptochrome2, is from a fascinating family of genes. I’m a chronobiologist by training and pursuing independent research in it, so I’m always fascinated to hear more about how it feels like from the inside.
Looking forward to the write up, and would you provide some info before that happens, like how does one even start analyzing your own genome, where do you even sequence it? Isn't it supposed to be huge?
You find a (preferably local, clinical grade so HIPAA/GDPR applies) lab to do a sequence of your DNA. There's some parameters (e.g. coverage rate of your sample) to consider so you might want to look around as prices and services offered will vary.
They'll return a BAM file to you which contains your genome, consider this the raw data. You can take this data to screening services that specialize in analyzing your genome for specific purposes. E.g. here's a service that specifically analysis for the sake of genealogy: https://www.yfull.com/
I've only dipped my toes into the topic but that's my base understanding so far, it's pretty intimidating at times but quite interesting.
being a night owl isn't the same as suffering from circadian rhythm disorder. it just means that you are a night person. the suffering happens if you are a larch but live like a night owl because your circadian rhythm is messed up. and adhd messes that rhythm up.
Wow that's insane. For me, if I sleep too late, regardless of how much I sleep, I still feel tired. But I'm definitely not a morning person because I just hate going to bed early. It might be a work thing too, idk.
You might try intentionally getting excess sleep and going for a reasonably high intensity run as soon as you get up. If you do decide to test that be sure to give it at least a few days to adjust before coming to any conclusions.
got this same issue. as a teen I'd just sleep 13 hours and then be groggy and in pain for the rest of the day. now I'm just incapable of sleeping more than 7 hours, I have to wake up, do something else for an hour, then go back to sleep for 1-2 hours to be finally rested.
Similar here, but it’s not a headache, it’s a feeling of tiredness and unease with too much sleep (8+ hours).
I average about 6 and it gets as low as 3.5-4.5 during the week, with a catch up 8 every so often. I get wicked and debilitating migraines which relate to missing the catch up 8 hours or missing my daily bike rides (30-40km).
Potentially sleep apnea? Doctors will tell you it doesn't cause headaches, but getting low oxygen sleep definitely caused headaches for my wife. She didn't have any of the classic risk signs (young, normal weight, did not complain of tiredness) but had nearly constant headaches. The CPAP was life changing, turns out she was tired and the headaches basically went away forever.
What about something hormonal ? I feel like colloquially we think of just the obvious ones but don't vitamin D and Melatonin potentially have links here ?
It seems like you might know - is there any correlation or information to read around light sensitivity and ADHD?
I don't know if it's because I'm in my 40s, have ADHD, or got on the meds. But it's becoming more noticeable the last couple of years.
I'm very sensitive to light in the morning and can't get back to sleep when the sun peeks in. And at night if my wife left her phone face up, I know when she gets a notification. I see the screen light up through my shut eyelids.
I've long since had to wear an eye mask to bed, which I hated until I found one I liked. The ones that do it for me are the weighted ones, in case you've never tried.
I tend to sleep with my arm over my face like a cat in the sun, which has messed up my shoulder a bit. So thanks, weighted makes a lot of sense, I didn't know they make them.
40s but no diagnosis of ADHD. I have a mask for summer time as I'm the same when the light peeks in. I bought a pair of cheap ones off amazon. I usually wake at dawn and put them on, then sleep hog-like.
Hello chronobiologist. First time I read that noun, and had to look it up on wikipedia. Very interesting domain of sciences. What are you working on? What methods are you using?
For a long time I had a really annoying issue where I would not be able to sleep because of a post-nasal drip cough that only appeared at night. During the day, I had no nasal congestion, runny nose, etc. Turns out I'm allergic to lavender and there is a lavender bush that blooms at night outside my bedroom window.
> To be a circadian disorder, you’d have to have clock mutations, and ADHD really doesn’t have those.
Can you expand upon this? Because to my layperson eyes, this statement directly contradicts the content of the study. E.g.
> Brain and Muscle ARNT-like 1 (BMAL1) and Period circadian protein homolog 2 (PER2) are core components of the circadian clock in humans, which form a feedback loop to control gene expression in a cyclical manner. Downstream, attenuated BMAL1/PER2 rhythms in oral mucosa indicate weaker or desynchronized peripheral clocks, and symptom severity tracks with reduced PER2 rhythmicity, tying molecular clock strength to the clinical phenotype. Together, these data support a model in which individuals with ADHD consistently experience shifted endocrine signals (melatonin/cortisol) coupled with molecular disruptions via the loss of the rhythmic expression of clock genes.
Beware that Frontiers In is a very low quality outlet and most scientists stay far far away from it (unless they really need a publication the next three weeks since they have that tenure track review coming up).
> Frontiers has an artificial intelligence review system for submitted manuscripts, which now includes verification of the reviewers’ and handling editors’ conflict of interest statements, the company said.
> The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Then what, the AI queries latest real-time status of their bank account to validate this? What a waste of GPU float computations.
Ok after reading a chunk of this the correlation is pretty wild. Having the data it’s quite striking. Sleep intervention as a form of ADHD treatment has always seemed reasonable to me but this gives a lot more clarity to the approach and mechanisms.
For me, the seasonal aspect of it aligns with their blue light findings (both driving symptoms and aligning with improvement under the intervention of having a grow-LED garden setup on my desk), and in a second maybe related matter we’ve found using blue light blocking glasses an hour before bed to be the most impactful single intervention around sleep quality and onset (the ones that are like orange laser safety glasses, not the mildly reflective desk-work glasses)
The following (informally described) symptoms are well-known consequences of ADHD:
- Delayed Sleep Phase [1]
- Staying Up Late [2]
- Revenge Bedtime Procrastination [3]
Newsflash, getting a full night's sleep helps alleviate ADHD symptoms, while being perpetually sleep-deprived wrecks us.
But there are reasons why we stay up late. Simply forcing us to sleep doesn't address those reasons.
Which is why I wrote about it so much, and keep spamming these links even though it feels so darn obvious. Not to the authors of the study, it appears.
I'm not sure that's an entirely fair way to frame that. ADHD people can be highly motivated by reward, but being motivated isn't enough to consistently navigate the path from wanting something to getting something. Reward can make you want something more, and even try harder for it, but ADHD means that sometimes no matter how much you want something and how hard you try it just doesn't happen.
I'd frame it differently: ADHD people are highly motivated by reward, but like, actual reward, not an uncertain promise of unclear reward at indeterminate point in the future, whose causal connection with motivated behavior is tenuous at best - which is, somehow, how most people apparently motivate themselves.
N=1 here, but for me, anything that's more than an hour or two in the future rapidly loses any motivating power; any reward that happens after more than a day may as well happen at infinity.
It's more literal than that. The prospect of reward is very literally not motivating. It does not provide motive force. It does not make us move.
We consciously want the thing, but that isn't enough for executive function to kick in, so "I need to get off the sofa so I can make tasty dinner" results in not having moved two hours later.
> E.g., you have a family to feed, and your ability hold a well-paying job hinges on your performance.
I can do all of these things anyway. Of course, this does present the potential reality that were I able to sleep like people, I could be even more successful, but after a near death experience, then disability, I've learned to be happy with where I am.
> E.g., you have a family to feed, and your ability hold a well-paying job hinges on your performance.
I am in this situation, forcing me to adapt and get up early like most normies.
My job performance did not improve. And going to sleep early only makes me more miserable, because now I have exactly zero personal, interrupt-risk-free time.
Or just: you have a family, including children who need you to be a responsible adult first thing in the morning (every morning) whether you like it or not
It's hard to interface with society this way. I'm the same as you and have waxed and waned many times. There are periods where I'm all about being social and living a normal life. There are other times where I'm just down to only sleep when I'm dead tired (as opposed to using drugs to keep me in normal rhythm). There are tradeoffs
A delayed sleep/wake cycle is only relevant in the context of a society where people are forced on an unnatural sleep schedule. You could get a full 9 hours of high quality sleep every single night and still be considered to have a delayed sleep/wake cycle disorder.
Some people are just night owls. A large percentage of night owls have ADHD. I think they can linked without it meaning that people with ADHD have to learn to get up at 5AM.
Keep staying up late if that's what feels natural for you, but it's probably worth making sure that you're still getting enough sleep and that you don't have other issues (like sleep apnea) keeping you from getting the quality of sleep you need. There's a lot of other health issues associated with sleep disorders and sleep problems will tank people's ability to focus even when they have non-ADHD brains.
This is my feeling too, going to sleep early feels like I’m missing out on so much. My entire family other than my late father has been this way since forever, we almost never go to bed till 2-3 am.
>Lots of the things on this site are normal things that everyone experiences to some degree ...right?
Everyone may experience some of those things some of the time, particularly if they are overwhelmed, overworked, overstressed, etc.
ADHD is experiencing most of these most of the time - as in all the time - for your entire life.
As an analogy: everyone may experience toe pain sometimes if and when they stub their toe on kitchen table leg.
But if it hurts like that all the time, for your entire life - you'd get it checked out, right? There are solid chances something is different about your body.
Now multiply that by 100.
To reword this: say, each relatable entry on that page is a 2% likelihood of ADHD.
If you relate to 100 of them, the chances you're not ADHD drop to 13%.
I've got enough people through an official diagnosis this way that this page, in itself, is a decent enough diagnostic tool.
How much do you think ADHD is a specific mental condition that one either has or doesn't have, versus a set of common symptoms that can have many causes? I wonder which direction a causal relationship between sleep and ADHD might be.
Pretty much anything we don't have a detailed mechanistic understanding of falls into the latter category - an arbitrary bag of sometimes unrelated symptoms, ie a fundamentally statistical categorization - regardless of what anyone might try to claim. This applies to everything across the natural sciences and medicine. If we can't model it in minute detail then we do not truly understand it and anyone attempting to claim otherwise is full of shit regardless of whatever credentials they might have somehow managed to stumble into holding.
Exactly this. Particularly in mental health, where verifying a mechanistic explanation is hard (at least doing so ethically is), many of the well-known problems are defined as clusters of highly correlated symptoms, because that's the best we can do at this point - but this is useful.
Not all highly correlated symptoms will turn out to have a common mechanistically-explainable cause, but all symptoms of a mechanistically-explainable cause obviously are highly correlated.
> Newsflash, getting a full night's sleep helps alleviate ADHD symptoms, while being perpetually sleep-deprived wrecks us.
being perpetually sleep-deprived wrecks everyone. If you've got ADHD getting the sleep you need won't cure it, but it will make it easier to manage. If you don't have ADHD, but a lot of the symptoms fit for you, getting sleep might those all go away.
Then add in the use of powerful stimulants (e.g. Adderall) to power through a workday, only to have that cause insomnia that night, and a wrecked sleep schedule for the following 3 days.
Yup I absolutely fall off a cliff if I'm consistently consuming a stimulant. That includes caffeine. It's actually a problem where I have to be careful that I'm not having it too early (as opposed to late) in the day otherwise it will wreak havoc on my life.
in my case I need to take it at a perfect time where it stops working just after I go to bed. Take it too early and it will stop working before I go to bed and I won't fall asleep because my mind will distract me from it. Take it too late and I technically will sleep, but I won't actually feel rested in the morning.
Nah, I'm taking a very minimal dose (adjusted) and I know that my sleep is less deep and shorter. Without medication I sleep around 8 hours, with 6:30-7 hours.
The best that helps sleep in my experience is doing sports. Lots of it.
When are you taking it? There are a lot of studies that indicate that stimulants HELP sleep.
You should re-evaluate what is happening to you as it is not an ideal situation: it may be possible you have something else instead of ADHD (or together with ADHD) or you maybe taking it too late in the day.
I had great success reflecting 80,000 lumens of work lights off my living rooms ceiling during winter for a couple years.
At a new home, I remodeled four rooms to have three bands wide of LED lighting surrounding the ceilings, hidden from below by cove molding. It is an actual sunny day, with an “an actual” sunny sky inside. Winter, midnight, eclipse? Not a concern.
Having all that intense light reflecting off entire ceilings creates soft diffuse lighting, no shadows, even though it is extremely bright.
Helped a lot with waking up and avoiding depression, all year round.
On the sleep treatment, anything that can help sleep is good, my body has always operated well on a 30 hour day, which means terribly almost all the time, by default. But I do a lot of things that help, so my sleep is pretty good most of the time.
I would see sleep aids as a pretty narrow interventions relative to my ADHD.
I had a contractor and an electrician! There is some significant power draw.
It’s been five years, so I expect the best components are different, more efficient and cheaper.
In winter, the lights can be considered part of my heating system. In summer, windows get opened. If I did it again, I would have some little fans up there expelling air from the cove directly outside.
But that is fine tuning. I am really happy. (When the lights are on. /h)
The 30 hour day feeling resonates. If I have no external schedule or I'm just living as I see fit, I end up gravitating to 3am bed, ~12pm wake sorta schedule. The only real problem is that it's functionally incompatible with jobs and many other services, even fully remote
I also work best in long bursts of up to 12 hours, with days of full rest in between bursts. I don't do well with a five days a week 9-5 work schedule.
And timeline urgency / time pressure tends to do well at putting me into deep flow state, whereas it can be hard for me to get into flow state for work otherwise.
I'd love to find myself a situation in which I can work like you describe and have it now be side-eyed by normies. That's exactly how I want to live/work, and I've never really found a place that will let me do it, so I just keep rolling through these completely incompatible arrangements that eventually kick me out.
> And timeline urgency / time pressure tends to do well at putting me into deep flow state, whereas it can be hard for me to get into flow state for work otherwise.
As long as there's a tangible reason the deadline is urgent, then I feel the same way. If it's just an arbitrary demand then I don't respond like they'd hope. My brain knows when something is truly urgent and when it's not.
I noticed that my bedtime drifts because after 11PM it's finally quiet enough to do anything productive. Before that it's just impossible to work. After I started living alone, I finally could go to sleep at a sane time since I didn't have to wait hours for everyone else to calm down enough to let me think.
I can confirm this effect. One winter I left 2x300w living room lights on perm, and it had a dramatic effect. The only issue is that its nice to turn lights off at night, and if you do that, now you're in habit-dependent territory.
one thing i've been paying the adhd tax on is automating / making habits lower activation energy. smart bulbs / blinds are a great thing for me especially when i am already in bed and have too much executive dysfunction to walk 3 feet to the light switch / shade
Ah on the 30 hour day: I had some success living a 28 hour day for a few months, which has the nice property of meaning your awake hours are identical week to week making it at least somewhat possible to interface with polite circadian society.
6x 28 hour days pack cleanly into a 7-day week, so all Mondays you wake at the same time, then all Tuesdays you wake 4 hours later and so on. It was one of the most productive times of my life but ultimately left my partner feeling unhappy and lonely.
> ultimately left my partner feeling unhappy and lonely.. do our best with 24 hour days
Impossible to express just how deeply frustrating it is to have the “sleep when I want you to, not when you want to” kind of fight. Over and over. For decades after being a grown ass adult.
It’s weird that it has to be explained to 24h normies but pressuring someone to alter a part of their biology like this is wrong. Gosh honey, plastic surgery might be uncomfortable in an ongoing way for you, but I’m willing to take that risk. Gee babe, I see you need a vegan/carnivore lifestyle but please change this just doesn’t work for me.
People can always make these things their red line and force the issue I guess, find out where the other person’s red line is. The weird part is that the sleep thing is generally accepted as reasonable and polite society kinda regards the other behaviors as very unacceptable
This is all well and good until you have children to look after. Expecting one parent to pick up the slack because you want to go to bed at 4am is not fair.
I didn't read the person's story that way. I took it that the other partner felt unhappy and alone, which is a reasonable way to feel. It doesn't sound like it was a fight to me, but a discussion.
Has anyone considered that one reason for being/staying awake late at night that's very salient for ADHD people is that night tends to be much quieter, so it's a period when it's much easier to think/read/work without constant interruptions. Noise pollution isn't taken seriously enough.
That's a good point, although at the same time, even the most quiet environment can only help so much to stave off distraction and once hyperfocus starts there's very little that can pull you away.
It's not just a lack of interruptions or even the lack of potential interruptions, but that I can let my guard down knowing that I'm not inadvertently ignoring someone.
That's why I'm reading this at 1:55AM local time! It definitely gets quieter, though, I'm in the suburbs so not that noisy to begin with. But now, no cars, animals outside mostly asleep (hear an owl sometimes), cell phone stops trying to scam me via voice and text messages, not even aircraft flying overhead (they start between 4-5 am, which is also when the first cars can be heard). Can hear my heartbeat in my ears. But my tinnitus is a lot louder. No job, so no need to get up early though I typically manage before noon.
I wouldn't say I "have ADHD" but I do have a what I call an "attention prioritization and low energy disorder" that nothing i've ever tried has helped. I hear stimulants might help, but never tried em, can't get em.
I agree that that worsens the problems, but I grew up in a quiet, boring village before internet distractions or mobile phones, where this could not have been a factor, and I still had/have insomnia issues (and ADHD).
I'm in my late 40s, which meant that childhood didn't have internet and folks didn't start getting it in their homes more commonly til my late teens.
That doesn't mean distractions weren't there, and those distractions are still around if I live with other people. Growing up, a lot of distractions were parents and siblings. Exciting things on television with lots of noise that I'd notice. Libraries were brutal - quiet places where I would notice people shuffling papers, turning pages, and going about their activities in "silence". I was always better off when folks would just leave me alone to do stuff with lots of background noise so I wouldn't notice stuff - or just being alone. Staying up late gave me that.
It doesn't take modern life or a boring place to be free from distractions.
Ok, that is your situation, and you have my sympathies, but that doesn't change the fact that I didn't have those issues, and grew up in an very calm environment without noisy distractions. And that's not just memory, if visit my family it's still a very quiet and calm space, including during the daytime, and it still doesn't fix my insomnia.
I'm not saying that these can't be factors, but the original question was asked in a way that suggests it might be a general explanation, and it clearly cannot explain everything.
- My time in the field of psychology has made me think that the use of imprecise language for describing psychology has a large and problematic societal impact
ADHD is correlated with but is NOT a "circadian rhythm disorder". This is definitionally true.
There are many causes of ADHD. One of them is likely sleep issues.
I absolutely have ADHD that impacts my life, but I sleep like an absolute stone, and unlike my partner, can fall asleep within minutes of my head hitting the pillow most of the time. I get 6-8 hours of sleep per night, and it does not seem to have cured me.
I found that more than 8 hours made a massive difference to me. That being said the only way I could maintain this was having a toddler who wakes up every night.
Intuitively this intersects seamlessly with the rise of device usage.
Blue light, but perhaps even more impactful is the regular night-time creation and release of up-regulating biochemistry. That lingers well into sleep hours.
I can imagine smart phones being introduced to communities has a linear correlation with the rise of ADHD there.
Walk outside so that the morning sun can directly hit your eyeballs. Don't stare directly into the sun. Try to look at something a little bit off axis. Your eyes should feel somewhat uncomfortable if you are doing this correctly. Do this every day for 3-5 minutes. You can accomplish this incidentally by just doing normal stuff like taking care of your own lawn and going for a run.
Light coming in from a window is generally filtered. Light being bright can be very deceptive. Even if the temperature is correct. Your eyes crave that deep infrared energy that LEDs and energy efficient windows actively reject.
Dr. Sandra Kooij is a good person to look up if you are interested in adult ADHD and sleep. She has a book about it. From what I remember, there are a few things that are known:
1. a large majority of ADHD sufferers are phase-delayed and struggle with insomnia
2. you can induce ADHD-like symptoms in normal people by restricting sleep
3. Some of the interventions that improve sleep timing and quality affect ADHD (but it isn't a total cure)
> 1. a large majority of ADHD sufferers are phase-delayed and struggle with insomnia
I would think this wouldn't be such a problem if society would acknowledge night owls exist and allow work to adjust accordingly. Forcing a night owl to live the life of a morning lark is likely not the best way to get their best work. The person suffers who has to try and live in a world not designed for when they sleep, and the employer suffers by getting less out of those people.
I have ADHD and left to my own devices I would go to sleep somewhere between 2-4am. At work, I don't function so well before about 2pm some days... and by that point that day is almost over.
Completely agree, and tend towards the same schedule. I don't even mind working in-person with people, but this idea that everyone should just be uniformly aligned to operate on the same hours is alienating and humiliating at times.
This would depend on the individual, or so my sleep team, including my sleep doctor suggest.
It is better for me to align with a pattern where I get some level of restful sleep, as opposed to one where I do not ultimately.
In an ideal world, you are obviously correct, but in the world between a severely disturbed sleep where I get a handful of hours of actually restorative sleep, vs once where I actually sleep for 7 hours? One wins over the other.
And yes, given I have an entire medical team (for other reasons, I have a SCI) I have done about everything you can to resolve sleep. Between ADHD however, symptoms related to the SCI etc, we really do just have to go with whatever we can reasonably get.
As long as you're getting enough sleep and some sunlight what's the problem? I'm guessing that a lot of people who are night owls aren't getting that, and that a lot of people who have other health issues (especially sleep disorders) end up living the night owl lifestyle, but I don't see why it should matter what specific times you go to bed.
> I have ADHD and left to my own devices I would go to sleep somewhere between 2-4am. At work, I don't function so well before about 2pm some days... and by that point that day is almost over.
Indeed. I've struggled with it since childhood, not only me. The same "symptoms" for lack of a better word are seen with my mother, my aunt and my grandmother. All are night owls, all sleep poorly etc.
For whatever reason, regardless of how much sleep i've had, my brain begins to kick into high gear with a clarity of thought and capacity to dedicate myself to things starting at about 9PM. This remains true REGARDLESS of sleep, how well rested I am, general health, etc. I could have had NO sleep for 24 hours, still be away at 9PM the next night, and it's like a switch.
The ONLY time this ever differs, for reasons still unknown, and where I fit into "normal society" is for whatever reason, when I visit Russia (which I have not done for some time for obvious reasons.)
When I am in Russia, with no effort at all, I sleep normal hours without issue, and wake up during the day time actually well rested. This ceases once I return to my timezone. This same pattern is not seen when say, I visit the US instead.
I go to bed at 9pm and wake up 3-4am. As a person with ADHD, this schedule helped me the most. Hardest part is not easily being able to go to sleep if I'm awake in the middle of my sleep.
Before this I used to sleep very late, even when I was a kid, and morning schedules were too hard. This way, there's no oversleep risk.
Three things that helped me with my circadian phase (to certin extend)
1) Melatonine 300mcg 5-6 hours befor desired sleep time
2) 10k lux light for 30m when waking up
3) Nobeltin (nootropic) it enhances clock amplitude, so I do get less sleepy during teh day and more sleepy at night ..
things taht kind of helped but find hard to keep: Keto
(I feel less sleepy on Keto, and easier to fall a sleep but it's been a while since ive been on keto)
+1 to melatonin. It took me a very long time to dial in the right dose though. It’s not like it’s some miracle cure but it has helped a bunch with being able to fall asleep at a reasonable time, sleep through the night, and thus wake up at a reasonable time. Which of course helps a bit with everything else
> so conditioned to being groggy in the mornings that I still find it hard to get up even if I feel fairly refreshed.
I am very much in the same boat. Mornings have never been my friend. Even the few restful nights and refreshed mornings I get are spoiled by learned grogginess and overstaying in bed.
That's part of the issue I had in terms of dialing in the right dosage. I was trying to use it off and on for about 20 years and could never get the right amount where it'd actually work at night but not leave me groggy in the AM. Part of the issue was for a long time it was hard finding the stuff in low enough dosages to even allow for this easily.
Turns out the answer is 500-600mcg for myself, but everyone's going to be different.
yes, melatonin is unfortunately misused commonly, especially in the US, where it's not regulated for whatever reason. If you take 5 to 20 mg, it can act as an immediate sleep aid, by overwhelming your body with unnatural amounts, with a higher chance of side effects like nightmares. For reference, the body naturally produces about 30 mcg to signal itself to fall asleep [1].
If you actually want to shift your circadian rhythm, the optimal dose is about 300 to 500 mcg (the actual absorption rate varies wildly between manufacturers and delivery methods), taken 4 to 6 hours before your sleep onset (note: when you usually go to sleep, not when you want to go to sleep). [2]
For a time I had to wake up at 6AM for work and it was a period where I struggled the most with my ADHD symptoms.
I hope there is more awareness in the future about the importance of sleep for neurodivergent people. This could help with the social jet lag most of us feel with having to follow a schedule that simply does not work for us.
I was formally diagnosed as a kid but didn’t do the drug route due to my father not liking these new drugs. I’m in my 40’s now and only started enforcing a sleep routine 10ish years ago. Eg. Bedtime at 11 and get up when alarm goes off at 7:30. And the effect on me was astounding. Everything just levelled out. I still like/need a coffee in the morning.
I wish it was as easy as that. I naturally fall asleep later than the average person and forcing myself to sleep early does not permanently solve the underlying problem.
One thing I have never understood about ADHD is that it seems the diagnostic criteria for it are widely different depending on the country. It tends to be significantly over diagnosed in some countries and perhaps under diagnosed others. I always found this rather strange. It suggests there is quite a lot that we don’t know about these kinds of issues.
There was a recent report from Finnish news agency YLE showing that the diagnosis rates show significantly variations between different regions of the country. So it seems even within a single country the criteria can be inconsistent.
The criteria are going to be roughly the same. Instead it’s the biases around ADHD (primarily ADHD denialism) that cause the variance in diagnosis rates.
Isn't this true for so many things though? Our understanding of the world is just different around the world, for better or worse, this is made clear in almost every way our societies are setup and act.
Things like "What is rape?" differs a lot between countries. In some countries, rape isn't (legally) possible between spouses for example, which is just a completely upside down way of seeing it compared to how it's typically viewed in Western countries, as an extreme example.
It doesn't surprise me things like ADHD diagnoses also are different between countries.
I am lucky I don't have disruptive sleep issues, but my brain still feels slightly foggy and my battery feels 75% charged in the morning. I imagine if I had disruptive sleep issues I might as well be toast. Or maybe I'm just not aware of disruptions in my sleep...
I was like you. A year ago, I was tired as hell despite sleeping (well, not enough, but I've never slept 'enough'). A few people said sleep apnea but i was not overweight and didn't snore. I tried the test anyway, and it turns out I wasn't breathing. I used an oral appliance and a year later, it's gone and I feel better.
Also, without doing anything my triglycerides, LDL cholesterol and blood sugar which had gone way out of whack, went back to normal.
I started using my oral appliance on a Monday. That Friday I was so energetic I ran 12 miles in one go. I hardly ever run or even practice that much, but I was just so wired that I couldn't help it. It was an amazing feeling. I highly suggest sleep apnea treatment even if you don't think it sounds like you.
I am increasingly concerned about some kind of latent sleep apnea. In particular, profound daytime drowsiness; plus waking up stressed, anxious, or even terrified, for apparently no good reason. Being unable to breathe would, in fact, supply a reason for all that.
Waking up suddenly in anxiety is a classic symptom. My main symptom was daytime drowsiness, esp while driving despite feeling fine. That plus just not performing my best.
Speaking of the running.. I would get winded after hardly a mile before treatment . But I just called it up to being out of shape. In reality it was latent mental stress that I had gotten used to.
If you haven't had a sleep study to check for sleep apnoea you should get one. It's very common, anyone can have it and the only way to check properly is a sleep study. You can have sleep apnoea without being a snorer and you can sleep next to someone without them being aware of it. It's extremely bad for your health and very treatable.
I still have problems, but my life categorically improved once I got diagnosed and treated for obstructive sleep apnea. I focus on things much better, I'm better at juggling tasks, and I'm just nicer to people, or at least my fuse is considerably longer than it used to be. Also I'm sure my wife is grateful that I'm not snoring or gasping for breath every night.
I would highly encourage anyone who can get a sleep study done to do it. Most insurance companies will at least cover the sleep study and sleep sleep apnea can lead to a lot of considerably-more-expensive issues later down the line. It's not very invasive anymore, all they had to do was have me sleep with a pulse oximeter for a few nights and apparently that was enough.
I can't help but notice that there's a lot in the direction of ADHD is linked to sleep pattern differences, and there's evidence that you can alter those sleep pattern differences through a number of environmental/behavioural interventions but the idea that this actually helps ADHD symptoms as such seems to be left up to the imagination of the reader.
Treating my sleep problems as delayed melatonin, by boosting melatonin with tiny supplements combined with a few other lifestyle changes (that I started well before the supplements), has led to me feeling sleepy and a calmer mind at night and simultaneously clear-headed and not groggy in the morning. And the clearer-headedness persists all day. That was never my pattern in the previous 30 years, no matter all the things I tried.
This is hilariously out of wack with my own experience, and my son's. We both have ADHD, and we are both extreme early risers. So much so that I am literally trying to train us both to fall asleep and wake up later.
well, theres no objective test, and its very similar to speaking to a god or whatever.... with enough positive encouragement, or a personal desire for it from yourself, you can be convinced you have adhd. some of the symptoms are very barnum-esque, unfalsifiable things like do you feel like you struggle compared to other people. its no wonder theres such massive variation in the adhd population.
So does eating properly and consistently. A likely expensive but also likely useful study could therefore measure multiple known sleep hygiene approaches in isolation, then in combination, and then look at the degree of correlation in comparison to controls.
Some of the observed differences might be cleanly attributed to previously not properly controlled for effects such as irregular meal schedules.
I've been using a smart switch to fade in a light (one of the "sun-like" full-spectrum ones) over my head in the morning and it's been really effective for regulating my circadian rhythm. Even with little sleep, I will naturally wake up in the morning at a much more regular time.
If the light turns on too quickly for me it’s super jarring and I hide under the covers. Did you find one that goes bright over the course of 30m or something? Or can you handle the quick increase in brightness?
I have a sunrise alarm clock, I think from Phillips. If I set the alarm for 8am, the light will start turning on at 7:30am then slowly increase in brightness over the next 30 minutes until 8am when it's at full brightness and the alarm goes off (which are nature sounds).
When it first starts, it's more of a warm glow than a light. The max brightness can also be set.
You can make your artificial sunrise take as long as you want, and connect them to a sleep tracker so they're timed to wake you up during a comfortable phase.
I've been doing this for 12 years, and I don't think I have ever been upset to hear my alarm since, as long as I'm home and the lights have prepared me. Lately I've even been waking up before my alarm about half the time, even though I work on a schedule one time zone east of where I am.
It's shocking to me that it's not more popular for everybody. I guess the benefit is hard to explain.
I have been using one of those sunrise alarm clocks for around 8 years now. If I go to bed at a reasonable time, the light will wake me up naturally before the alarm actually goes off. However, if I stay up too late the effect of the light fades. I'll sleep right through the light and need the alarm. On one occasion when I must have been really sleep deprived, I slept through the light, an hour of the alarm going off, and another 2-3 hours after that.
Yeah I tried most of this. I exercise regularly, have tried going out to walk in nature after work or in the morning, bright light in the morning, melatonin … it all helps a bit. Maybe it helps some people enough, but in my case you can live almost perfect epitome of health and balanced life… and then you relapse and your brain is mush for a day or two. It is pretty easy to self-medicate, eat complete junk, not sleep/sleep all the time, quit relationships or do other really dumb decisions that might have serious consequences down the line when the crash comes.
So yeah, no. ADHD is pretty serious, let’s take it seriously. Morning jog won’t fix you. ADHD-specific therapy is the most important in the beginning, then you need to find drugs that work. Check out Buprion.
Melatonin 1mg 2 hours before bed worked for me in combination with wrap-around orange glasses (that filtered all blue light from screens and lighting) for the last 2 hours before bed. Also take magnesium and chamomile tea regularly, that layer on top.
Individually nothing works, but the combination crossed a tipping point for me with radical change.
I have both ADHD and Orthostatic Dysregulation (OD), a 20-40% comorbidity where ADHD-induced sleep issues disrupt the autonomic nervous system, making standard OD treatments less effective.
Orthostatic Dysregulation sounds exactly like what I asked my Dr about recently! And of course I've had sleep issues my whole life, not much helps since it's based on racing thoughts and anxiety, other classic comorbidities.
I squatted, stood up, and the blood pressure monitor saw a drop and my pulse doubled 5 seconds later. It was trying to make up for lost time like my body had no idea I stood up.
Do you have any pointers to get more details? Since he didn't seem to know what it was exactly, we discussed POTS but that's a bit broad rather than a specific thing to treat it seems.
How do the authors disentangle cause and effect here? It doesn't follow that sleep issues are an underlying cause, and not just one of the MANY symptoms of ADHD.
I suffer from a profound circadian rhythm disorder. It is ancillary to my other mental issues, and it began to develop when I was a teenager. I recall late nights of sneaking into a dry bathtub to read, and also a cupful of cold water in the face, from my frustrated father, trying to get me to high school on time.
One thing that made a night-and-day difference, if you will, was diet. I often blamed my bipolar or my pills on my unruly sleep schedule. But when I stopped eating bad food from restaurants, and I was mostly making stuff in my own kitchen, with fresh ingredients and fruits and vegetables, I could spontaneously wake up with the sunrise, no alarm, every day. It was not fun, because I was also losing weight and my stomach always demanded immediate attention, no matter how many dirty dishes in the kitchen sink. But as far as circadian rhythm, that puppy fell right into line for as long as I stuck carefully to such a diet.
That discipline ultimately falls apart every time, sadly. I am relatively powerless to deal with my lousy diet. But coming around to the diabetes diagnosis, I will also issue warning bells to the younger ADHD and night owls. Watch your blood sugar.
My blood glucose and insulin levels appear closely related to my drowsy/waking moods, and also to my troublesome bouts of anger and rage. Two types of [synthetic modern] insulin proved to be an amazing miracle in terms of calming down, having good sleep, and banishing nightmares and terrors.
My erstwhile psychiatrist was a forensic one, and she would fret about "blue light at night" but I doubled down on that danger to propose that having Internet disputes and arguments turning into rage and screaming? Perhaps that was detrimental to my sleeping and dreaming?
Therefore, I propose this to anyone who struggles with circadian rhythm: rather than letting physicians tweek you (or your young children) out of your minds, consider your diet, blood glucose, and all the other "sleep hygiene" factors. Really do an inventory of the fundamentals before you resort to drugs. It could save your life.
I believe it. I even sought out medical advice on how to best deal with it all. I was given the usual recommendation of low-dose melatonin and light therapy.
However, my issue at the time was that I could never find a light with high enough lux values that I felt like I could trust. Plus, another issue with light therapy is that one can basically never stop for any moderate amount of time, and well, my ADHD makes that near impossible.
I honestly think I would have better success with sleep issues if I could just control my own schedule or have a flexible schedule, but that is not really a luxury most jobs can provide.
There seems to be some kind of hidden connection between autism and ADHD. At first sight the definitions are contradictory but in reality, many people have both. Sleep disturbance seem to be common among autistic people too.
Dude I saw sleep specialists at Stanford here in Palo Alto and we still don’t know a lot about it, regardless of what you might read
The whole sleep hygiene things been sort of discredited and doctors just follow a script with like 5 things they will prescribe you for sleep problems and after those 5 things it’s like oh well we tried
I once showed them a study I found online in a reputable journal (at least the study was conducted by someone from a well regarded university in a journal that wasn’t obviously bad)
The doctor didn’t even look at the study, he just saw where it came from and said “yeah we don’t use that journal”
I would have much more appreciated an answer if I don’t have time to read your bullshit vs what he gave me
Yeah but the population taking it report falling asleep immediately after a large coffee. It just doesn’t work exactly like you would expect for those with ADHD
They may fall asleep after a large coffee, but they will wake up again.
My son has severe ADHD. The sleep deprivation is why he can only use medication for special events like tests. He can't sustain it for any long-term period.
ADHD treats with Lisdexamfetamine. Amfetamines, I repeat. People use this to study, to get high at parties, to be functional at work, so I really doubt there aren't patients out there abusing these drugs with valid prescriptions.
No, but if you're trying to argue that sleep therapy would be more effective for this group than non-stimulant form of medication, you need to prove this.
Sleepy therapy (CBT-I) may be the best supported treatment for insomnia, but it's still quite shit. ~50% of people will see little to no improvement after going through therapy.
Any psychiatrist worth a damn already considers these things.
"ADHD" symptoms can manifest for a variety of reasons, and that's why good ADHD testing involves multiple exams alongside the traditional ADHD ones to help figure out what actual issues are present.
Also, comorbidities make this all the more complicated. Your assertion that people need "more sun" and "regular sleep" could very well be true, yet someone can still have ADHD.
> Any psychiatrist worth a damn already considers these things.
Protocols however are always changing depending on new findings. Not saying this is the case, but not considering something unknown at the time doesn't make a doctor not worth a damn.
> Your assertion that people need "more sun" and "regular sleep" could very well be true, yet someone can still have ADHD.
if that was the case the treatment wouldn't be unecessary, like I specifically wrote in the comment you are replying to.
ADHD is highly treatable with medication, and any other intervention is at best mild mitigation. So how many? Amongst people with ADHD, basically nobody.
Sun and proper sleep is certainly helpful for people with ADHD but the likelihood of them getting that is vastly increased if they’re medicated correctly.
Stimulants make everyone’s ADHD symptoms (attention, focus; hard to distinguish from environment or personality traits) better (for some time), but they don’t reliably increase output.
Plenty of people with ADHD manage just fine (or better: sleep) without stimulants. Now if the ADHD is of the ‘late diagnosed’ kind, no one knows what reliably works or if the construct has been bent beyond its breaking point.
Just an FYI, in circles similar to HN, people will respond very negatively to anyone suggesting anything that might hint at tightening amphetamine prescriptions.
I'm counting on it, I find it deliciously ironic how much there's little interest here in the actual wellbeing of people. The logical hoops people go through here is hilarious.
tbh as a non-user, I think stimulants are likely life improving for many (potentially most) people. what i dislike/chafe at is the insinuation that stimulants only work for people with diagnosed ADHD or only have non-recreational effects for people with ADHD. the latter especially seems to rapidly have become a folk wisdom.
Sure, there's always the middle ground, but there's always the extreme, people abusing amfetamines because a regular human being isn't made to work 12 hours a day 7 days a week, or because after the third pill it's not kicking anymore.
And people should drop the cynicism that just because there are doctors around everyone is well cared for. Just look at the opioid crisis in the US, fuelled by respectable doctors chasing financial incentives.
Having been in medical school I would never trust physicians on the topic of amphetamines. More than half of them would regularly (ab)use ADHD meds during education, some would sell prescription meds to other students which in theory could get them suspended (it's not just the brightest people who end up physicians ...).
What would the "recreational" affects of stimulants be? I sometimes take it on weekends, does that make it "recreational"? If it makes me happier through better conversations, less distractions, and less hating myself for not doing the one plate that's been sitting unrinsed for a week, is that "recreational"?
This is the kind of absurd thing that people say when they know drugs from 2000s teen comedies, I fear. Just cause you've vaguely heard about people doing adderal at parties doesn't mean it's anything like meth, which is the common layperson misunderstanding. It's not a difference in degree, but a difference in kind.
People absolutely take amphetamines recreationally, they are mood & confidence boosting and help you stay up to party. I’m not sure what in my comment you are disagreeing with to be honest, you seem to be imputing a bunch of views to me and then arguing against them. I never said anything about similarity to meth, although they do hit the same targets. I have not vaguely heard of people doing adderal at parties, I have explicitly been to parties where people were doing adderal.
I've never understood recreational use of amphetamines. When I take them (prescribed, of course), I feel like garbage but I'm able to get my work done (which is the only reason I take the damn stuff). If I could choose to shed my executive dysfunction but never be able to take stimulants again, I wouldn't even have to think about it - obviously I'd take that deal.
Sorry, my comment was probably unclear if you're not familiar with the current psychiatric debates around ADHD. Long story short, it's where depression was 20 years ago, and where Chronic Fatigue Syndrome will probably be 10 years from now: there's a shift in treatment paradigms and an expansion in what "distress" counts as "pathological", which is how disorders are defined in the first place.
That seems pedantic but it's really important, here: ADHD (& MDD & ASD & all of em) are not singular physical diseases with a shared cause, but rather a bucket of symptoms that is used as a heuristic for picking treatments (which almost always means some sort of physical intervention, though therapy alone obviously helps in some cases). This isn't cause psychiatry is bad, but rather because we live in a pre-Gallilean era of cognitive science, and lack the theoretical tools to even begin describing these sorts of systematic, structural disorders in strictly neurological terms.
This is why psychiatrists prescribe off-label so often, and don't treat "diagnosis" like the big ceremony we expect as laypeople; you never truly "have" ADHD on an ontological level, you just have a psychiatrist who thinks that assignment is the best rough bucket to put you in to pick treatments. If you go to a different psychiatrist for more than a makeup/temp arrangement you'll have to get rediagnosed, technically speaking.
Some relevant tidbits to try to avoid a wall of text:
- Many, many providers still hold ~DSM4 ideas about ADHD being extremely rare in adults, and only valid as a diagnosis if you have solid proof of hyperactivity as a child. (ADHD has three "presentations": hyperactivity, impulsivity, and inattention, where the final one is dominant in adults by far). This is especially frustrating in light of the aforementioned methodological facts.
- As that hints at, ADHD treatment is marred by the absurdly harmful sentiment that there's some huge class of lazy jerks who just want to cheat out there, and that we have to carefully separate those lazy people from the people who have executive dysfunction through no fault of your own. Hopefully it's obvious that that's absurd, even if you're not as Sapolosky-pilled as I; if that's a coherent worry in the first place, it's like shutting down SNAP in reaction to a 1% fraud rate.
- ADHD diagnoses have been skyrocketing, which makes some clinicians assume it's overdiagnosed. See also: v***s + tylenol => ASD. Again, hopefully that doesn't need refutation here.
- In practice, getting an accurate sense of whether ADHD drugs help you is a huge rigamarole that is far harder than basically any other disorder (with the possible exception of BPD?); if you don't get educated upfront and choose providers carefully (which feels scummy and plays into the shame that prevents people from seeking treatment already), you can easily just spend hundreds of dollars and get a clinician who will never seriously consider ADHD treatment. They'll shower you in serious drugs of all kinds with aplomb for disorders that arguably fit some of the symptoms (usually MDD, GAD, and/or BD), but they've decided far before they ever met you that adult ADHD is a myth/conspiracy/mass hysteria.
- Finally, 'get more and better sleep' is just a goofy alternative to treatments that we know work, especially when it's heavily relying on the little 'melatonin only as your doctor recommends' disclaimer, which is hiding the fact that melatonin is not meant to be taken long term. It's like "use a planner" or "have you tried writing stuff down?" -- that stuff surely helps, but people go to psychiatrists because they've been trying their hardest for years and still feel like they're drowning.
Is it our (let's be real lol) fault that we are incapable of doing what we want to do to the extent that it causes persistent, serious distress? IDK. But I can personally report that I stumbled into an ADHD diagnosis and actual treatment (dextroamphetamine + bupropion) changed my life; without it I would be a constantly-stressed coaster terrified of getting fired and spending much of my workday staring at my hands, rather than feeling like the most capable engineer I've ever been by far.
And I only got there because I went to a psychiatrist for suspected GAD and she recommended it. Only later (through loved ones and close friends) did I learn how uniquely awful it is to try to find out if it helps you in the first place, which goes against the underlying ethos of our entire psychiatric system.
TL;DR: As a debugging principle for programs, yes, but for psychiatry in general and ADHD in particular, no.
Chronobiologist here. And also have ADHD.
The associations with ADHD really are there, but that may just also be because a huge number of brain processes have a circadian regulation, and those get disrupted by whatever is causing ADHD.
The causality is also bidirectional, because whatever ADHD does could cause light exposure behavioral changes, which could leave a circadian phenotype.
In general, a huge number of diseases have circadian phenotypes. To be a circadian disorder, you’d have to have clock mutations, and ADHD really doesn’t have those. So calling it a circadian disorder feels off.
But from personal experience, the linkage is strong enough to warrant deeper research, and beyond that, there’s some steps we can take ourselves. Regular walks in nature, going out to get sun… all generally useful things to do that do seem to help ADHD as well.
> The causality is also bidirectional, because whatever ADHD does could cause light exposure behavioral changes, which could leave a circadian phenotype.
This seems the most likely given my own experience with ADHD and sleep issues. Good sleep alleviates some of the worse aspects of ADHD. Conversely bad sleep exacerbates ADHD symptoms which can also worsen sleep, etc.
My 23andme profile says I have genes associated with delayed sleep. ADHD (and autism) really seem like they're driven by a cluster of multiple genes with many overlapping between people with the condition(s), but not all.
One rationale for that is how surprisingly prevalent ADHD is across many societies, which only makes sense to me if there's multiple genes which combine and which together confer various advantages to societies as a whole (if not to the individuals). One of the gene sets seem to be sleep issues. It makes sense in a pop-psychology level evolutionary biology where the "creative" types also tend to stay up later which might give them more focus time, or perhaps for story tellers / poets recounting tribal history, etc.
I hope this area gets more research. These things are highly inheritable among families.
Creative types often have sensory differences and staying up at night helps alleviate the overload that intense sunlight and people cause.
I know because I am on the spectrum and suffer from overload. At night is my "flow time" when the creativity happens.
The night is my best time too, but I’d hesitate to say that for most folks this has to do with the night being quieter.
The clock just has that spread. And I’d argue it makes evolutionary sense. You want people who are alert later, in a group. But this holds for most animals too.
In my case I interpret it as my "safe time". At night, the world sleeps, and no one is waiting on me, or going to randomly interrupt me. When other people sleep, obligations sleep too.
No? I guess I can't speak for most, but one of the things I most notice being different, other than the light of course, is the noise.
Autism correlates with specific neanderthal genes. There is a hypothesis that neanderthals were nocturnal based on the larger eyes and visual cortex.
There’s no clear set of genes that causes delayed sleep. You definitely have those rare mutations of core clock genes which causes their circadian cycle to have distinct properties, one of the outputs of which is a natural sleep preference that’s out of phase with typical societal rhythms, but is still a normal amount of sleep, and its consolidated and restful etc.
But the clock itself has a population wide variation in its actual period. It varies between 23.8 hours and 24.6 hours, and everyone far from the 24 hour ideal pays a tax. The clock either has to phase advance or phase delay to synchronize, and over time that has all kinds of impacts, including on sleep, but also memory and learning, stress, attention…
The whole system is clocked. Every cell in our body runs a 24 hour cycle, driven by the transcription, translation, inhibition and breakdown of the core clock proteins. They’re in a negative feedback loop, with a time delay, and all kinds of mutations can shift the overall period of the clock. If it’s of a core clock protein, the effect will be strong, but other genes cycle or have their functions in a cycle due to the clock, and feed back into the clock, so small mutations can accumulate to cause circadian period variation.
It’s also why you see circadian phenotypes in all kinds of diseases. Definitely needs more research, but the research is also hard. You need to observe the body in high resolution over many time points to start making sense of all this, and that’s expensive and exhausting. We’ll get there, though.
> It varies between 23.8 hours and 24.6 hours, and everyone far from the 24 hour ideal pays a tax.
As a person with ADHD and who noticed that whenever I have a few weeks off (so no schedule restrictions, so to speak) my sleep schedule seems to advance by almost an hour a day, this sounds like it might explain a few things.
Yeah if I allow it my sleep schedule shifts about 45 minutes a day. Eventually it'll "flip" my day after a month or so instead of going to bed late now I'm getting up early. However it also feels like not all the biological rhythms follow it.
I have had the opposite effect. The days where I get 8 hours of good quality sleep per Oura and Garmin have been some of my least productive days, which is always contrary to my expectations. My most productive and focused days are usually when I get 5 hours after a few nights of solid sleep. It might relate to the hangover effect, but I've never really been hung over before so I don't know if that would affect me.
Ha! Same. But it’s not sustainable. I need the long reset for the short one to work
> after a few nights of solid sleep
Can't speak for you but at least myself I find there's a delay of 24 to 48 hours before either sufficient or lack of sleep really catches up with me. It takes 2 to 3 nights of good sleep (unfortunately somewhat difficult to pull off) before I feel fully functional.
I did not see environmental factors in your consideration.
I got ADHD and Autism diagnosed as teen, the diagnostic was rather solid. Got methylphenidate for some months. I ran away from home with 17, i moved together with my girlfriend (at 26) into an emotionally stable environment and... the symptoms disappeared. No jactation, no special interests, no masking. Everything just disappeared. A bit of stimming remains. And a horribly fucked up sleep cycles.
Had undiagnosed RAD and CPTSD for longer than i'm self-aware. Severe emotional neglect for my first 17 years. Parental rejection plays a big part in here.
I'd be like, maybe i'm just a special case, and nothing of this applies to other people. But i see other ADHD-havers being too similar to me, and that includes hypervigilance and silent walking, which are apt adaptions to certain kind of childhood environments.
Maybe too much gets diagnosed as ADHD that is not genetic at all...
CPTSD literally rewires your brain and "appears" in diagnostic tests as ADHD: lower arousal in prefrontal cortex, overactive amygdala causing fast emotional response, impacted hippocampus, dopamine disregulation, etc.
Stress changes the layout of your brain along with your body's chemical responses. With ADHD, genetics seem to play a larger role where you can lack the stressors and still end up with the same end result. I wouldn't be surprised that treatments would work across both CPTSD and ADHD.
> CPTSD literally rewires your brain and "appears" in diagnostic tests as ADHD
This seems unexpectedly one-sided to me. It could equally be that ADHD is CPTSD from something that current knowledge does not consider traumatic (yet).
The highly heritable aspect of ADHD makes that proposal a bit weird
CPTSD is inheritable by child rearing. Thats what makes trauma intergenerational. Runs through families like cluster B disorders.
Edit: I think in practice this looks like normalisation of neglect and violence within a family.
I am not sure the distinction goes in this direction. Rather than "shouldn't be diagnosed as ADHD" I would sooner say "ADHD should be treated in multiple ways"
It's very typical for there to be overlap between inevitability and environmental circumstances
The distinction might be useful for determining whether to prescribe stimulants. People with CPTSD should not get those.
Exactly I’m glad to hear it from chronologist. I have schizoaffective, bipolar type, very affected by light changes.
I also have polymorphism in my melatonin, receptor genetics that are linked to this disorder. But I have several other genetics that make this a definite polygenic disease. So I highly doubt chronology efforts are going to work in a holistic way.
My heritage is from the Sami people of Finland. And my disorder is most likely related to that heritage and my sensitivity to light changes. But also changes in my diet. Specifically higher omega-3 fatty acids, and I mean really high.
Yes. Our rhythms tend to pattern the environment. And generations with the kinds of seasonal light changes you have close to the poles likely had a broad impact on many genes.
> Specifically higher omega-3 fatty acids, and I mean really high.
How much & for what? I remember seeing a paper many years ago which claimed better depression at about 2g+ EPA/day.
> But also changes in my diet.
You should seriously try "metabolic psychiatry" for at least 6months with daily blood tests on GKI 1-2 (what children with epilepsy do). Most popular is for bipolar.
> How much & for what?
Well I do not really count, but I only eat seafood or venison, which bothy have higher long chain omega 3 and omega 6. I really have an issue with short chain PUFAs like from vegetables. I started this mainly because of my lipid profile. Very low HDL, high LDL, and a family history of herat attacks in our early 50's.
I found it helped my mood disorder stabilize and also my IBS-D.
I would say I get well over 2 grams a day though but to my the length and balance or omega 3/6 is important for me genetically.
> You should seriously try "metabolic psychiatry"
I would say I am doing it, only better, because I know my genetics and what some people miss is the type of fats they need due to polymorphism in FADS1 and FADS2.
Is there a good resource you would recommend for learning about chronobiology for someone who is intellectually curious?
What about for someone who wants to better understand how sleep and their biological & cognitive functions are related?
Hmm… surprisingly sparse. Some chronobiology labs have good outlines. YouTube has a few good videos, including some from the Royal Society Lectures that walk you through the basics of the clock, this one especially:
https://youtu.be/KZJAmcpc9SE?is=5XZvvDQwLMC_rIdv
A book recommendation:
Internal Time — Till Roenneberg
Papers: 1. https://physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1113/expp...
Somewhat old, but still a good systems level review. We know some of this stuff to higher resolution now.
2. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7202392/
This one is a very approachable one on sleep and rhythms, and especially talks about why mental health disorders and sleep disruption tend to co-occur.
> the Royal Society
Royal Institution
Ty for the links and your other posts
Classic night-owl creative type here.
A few years I was playing around with analyzing my own genome and found a needle in the haystack: an unstudied clock gene mutation (in CRY2), which, after correspondence and tests from scientists in the field, is effectively confirmed to delay the clock. Sort of unbelievable story, will write it all up some day.
As far as ADHD is concerned, I’ve never been officially diagnosed but certainly have some traits (and notably missing others); it makes me suspect that ADHD is probably a cluster of different etiologies, some caused by circadian issues, some not.
I’ve often wondered if having this variant would be useful at all for chronobiologists in the field to study / observe. Feel free to shoot me an email (in bio).
I'm interested in how you went about analyzing your own genome? Did you use a service?
This was before AI got good, so I would do it differently today.
Back then, I got my genome sequenced via nebula genomics (no longer around). I found a lab that screens ~150 genes that potentially contribute to circadian disturbances. I punched all of those genes into this software called gene.iobio that came with the nebula report, which reports any potentially interesting variants and links out to Clinvar. There were a ton of results, everyone carries loads of these harmless variants, but the one that jumped out was in a gene I knew played a critical role in clock timing, and amazingly, that was it.
Oh wow! I congratulate you on your efforts and curiousity.
Cry2, or Cryptochrome2, is from a fascinating family of genes. I’m a chronobiologist by training and pursuing independent research in it, so I’m always fascinated to hear more about how it feels like from the inside.
Thanks! I still can’t believe how lucky I got finding this thing, to be honest.
Happy to share more if you ever want to connect. Tl;dr: feel from the inside is bad, would not recommend!
so what do you actually do for a living btw?
Looking forward to the write up, and would you provide some info before that happens, like how does one even start analyzing your own genome, where do you even sequence it? Isn't it supposed to be huge?
You find a (preferably local, clinical grade so HIPAA/GDPR applies) lab to do a sequence of your DNA. There's some parameters (e.g. coverage rate of your sample) to consider so you might want to look around as prices and services offered will vary.
They'll return a BAM file to you which contains your genome, consider this the raw data. You can take this data to screening services that specialize in analyzing your genome for specific purposes. E.g. here's a service that specifically analysis for the sake of genealogy: https://www.yfull.com/
I've only dipped my toes into the topic but that's my base understanding so far, it's pretty intimidating at times but quite interesting.
being a night owl isn't the same as suffering from circadian rhythm disorder. it just means that you are a night person. the suffering happens if you are a larch but live like a night owl because your circadian rhythm is messed up. and adhd messes that rhythm up.
There are larks, owls and then there are people like me: constantly tired pidgeon. I tried early and late night lifestyle and nothing works for me.
I'm not sure if it's a circadian thing, but I have ADHD and have a strange issue related to sleep.
If I sleep for 8 hours or more I get hypnic headaches, and massive all-day migraine-like headaches.
I have to sleep a max of 7 hours a night. Always feel slightly tired, but the alternative is headaches.
Wow that's insane. For me, if I sleep too late, regardless of how much I sleep, I still feel tired. But I'm definitely not a morning person because I just hate going to bed early. It might be a work thing too, idk.
You might try intentionally getting excess sleep and going for a reasonably high intensity run as soon as you get up. If you do decide to test that be sure to give it at least a few days to adjust before coming to any conclusions.
Cycling helps reduce my migraines. Starting a ride as they come on is still effective, but ideally I’d go before I feel anything.
got this same issue. as a teen I'd just sleep 13 hours and then be groggy and in pain for the rest of the day. now I'm just incapable of sleeping more than 7 hours, I have to wake up, do something else for an hour, then go back to sleep for 1-2 hours to be finally rested.
Similar here, but it’s not a headache, it’s a feeling of tiredness and unease with too much sleep (8+ hours).
I average about 6 and it gets as low as 3.5-4.5 during the week, with a catch up 8 every so often. I get wicked and debilitating migraines which relate to missing the catch up 8 hours or missing my daily bike rides (30-40km).
I’d love a migraine cure.
Potentially sleep apnea? Doctors will tell you it doesn't cause headaches, but getting low oxygen sleep definitely caused headaches for my wife. She didn't have any of the classic risk signs (young, normal weight, did not complain of tiredness) but had nearly constant headaches. The CPAP was life changing, turns out she was tired and the headaches basically went away forever.
> Doctors will tell you it doesn't cause headaches, but getting low oxygen sleep definitely caused headaches for my wife.
idiot doctors what do they know
Well doctors told me it causes headaches
What about something hormonal ? I feel like colloquially we think of just the obvious ones but don't vitamin D and Melatonin potentially have links here ?
It seems like you might know - is there any correlation or information to read around light sensitivity and ADHD?
I don't know if it's because I'm in my 40s, have ADHD, or got on the meds. But it's becoming more noticeable the last couple of years.
I'm very sensitive to light in the morning and can't get back to sleep when the sun peeks in. And at night if my wife left her phone face up, I know when she gets a notification. I see the screen light up through my shut eyelids.
I've long since had to wear an eye mask to bed, which I hated until I found one I liked. The ones that do it for me are the weighted ones, in case you've never tried.
I tend to sleep with my arm over my face like a cat in the sun, which has messed up my shoulder a bit. So thanks, weighted makes a lot of sense, I didn't know they make them.
40s but no diagnosis of ADHD. I have a mask for summer time as I'm the same when the light peeks in. I bought a pair of cheap ones off amazon. I usually wake at dawn and put them on, then sleep hog-like.
Hello chronobiologist. First time I read that noun, and had to look it up on wikipedia. Very interesting domain of sciences. What are you working on? What methods are you using?
For a long time I had a really annoying issue where I would not be able to sleep because of a post-nasal drip cough that only appeared at night. During the day, I had no nasal congestion, runny nose, etc. Turns out I'm allergic to lavender and there is a lavender bush that blooms at night outside my bedroom window.
> To be a circadian disorder, you’d have to have clock mutations, and ADHD really doesn’t have those.
Can you expand upon this? Because to my layperson eyes, this statement directly contradicts the content of the study. E.g.
> Brain and Muscle ARNT-like 1 (BMAL1) and Period circadian protein homolog 2 (PER2) are core components of the circadian clock in humans, which form a feedback loop to control gene expression in a cyclical manner. Downstream, attenuated BMAL1/PER2 rhythms in oral mucosa indicate weaker or desynchronized peripheral clocks, and symptom severity tracks with reduced PER2 rhythmicity, tying molecular clock strength to the clinical phenotype. Together, these data support a model in which individuals with ADHD consistently experience shifted endocrine signals (melatonin/cortisol) coupled with molecular disruptions via the loss of the rhythmic expression of clock genes.
Other studies have found links with more CLOCK genes: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10824139/
Beware that Frontiers In is a very low quality outlet and most scientists stay far far away from it (unless they really need a publication the next three weeks since they have that tenure track review coming up).
Eg see https://retractionwatch.com/2025/07/29/frontiers-retract-122...
> Frontiers has an artificial intelligence review system for submitted manuscripts, which now includes verification of the reviewers’ and handling editors’ conflict of interest statements, the company said.
problem solved I guess
Wonder how useful that is when literally you put:
> The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Then what, the AI queries latest real-time status of their bank account to validate this? What a waste of GPU float computations.
yeah, this is what I came here to say
I don't know about Frontiers in Psych specifically, but, see also: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAcademia/comments/1oi5dhy/whats_...
> walk in
> see this title
> oh man that would explain a lot
Ok after reading a chunk of this the correlation is pretty wild. Having the data it’s quite striking. Sleep intervention as a form of ADHD treatment has always seemed reasonable to me but this gives a lot more clarity to the approach and mechanisms.
For me, the seasonal aspect of it aligns with their blue light findings (both driving symptoms and aligning with improvement under the intervention of having a grow-LED garden setup on my desk), and in a second maybe related matter we’ve found using blue light blocking glasses an hour before bed to be the most impactful single intervention around sleep quality and onset (the ones that are like orange laser safety glasses, not the mildly reflective desk-work glasses)
> walk in
> see this title
> think authors are reversing causation hard
-- signed, a deep Night Owl
Indeed.
The following (informally described) symptoms are well-known consequences of ADHD:
- Delayed Sleep Phase [1]
- Staying Up Late [2]
- Revenge Bedtime Procrastination [3]
Newsflash, getting a full night's sleep helps alleviate ADHD symptoms, while being perpetually sleep-deprived wrecks us.
But there are reasons why we stay up late. Simply forcing us to sleep doesn't address those reasons.
Which is why I wrote about it so much, and keep spamming these links even though it feels so darn obvious. Not to the authors of the study, it appears.
[1] https://romankogan.net/adhd/#Delayed%20Sleep%20Phase
[2] https://romankogan.net/adhd/#Staying%20Up%20Late
[3] https://romankogan.net/adhd/#Revenge%20Bedtime
going to bed early feels like i'm a child being punished.
staying up late rocks. its the funnest. why would i give that up? just to pay attention better at work? no thanks.
> staying up late rocks. its the funnest. why would i give that up? just to pay attention better at work? no thanks.
You may eventually find yourself in a situation where the tradeoff is worth it.
E.g., you have a family to feed, and your ability hold a well-paying job hinges on your performance.
There's only one little problem with that reasoning, my friend...
sigh
ADHD PEOPLE ARE NOT MOTIVATED BY REWARD[1]
We literally can't do the things we want and need to do [2].
We know full well the trade-off is worth it. It's just that we can't have it.
Sincerely,
--an AuDHDer
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3010326/
[2] https://add.org/demand-avoidance/
> ADHD PEOPLE ARE NOT MOTIVATED BY REWARD
I'm not sure that's an entirely fair way to frame that. ADHD people can be highly motivated by reward, but being motivated isn't enough to consistently navigate the path from wanting something to getting something. Reward can make you want something more, and even try harder for it, but ADHD means that sometimes no matter how much you want something and how hard you try it just doesn't happen.
I'd frame it differently: ADHD people are highly motivated by reward, but like, actual reward, not an uncertain promise of unclear reward at indeterminate point in the future, whose causal connection with motivated behavior is tenuous at best - which is, somehow, how most people apparently motivate themselves.
N=1 here, but for me, anything that's more than an hour or two in the future rapidly loses any motivating power; any reward that happens after more than a day may as well happen at infinity.
It's more literal than that. The prospect of reward is very literally not motivating. It does not provide motive force. It does not make us move.
We consciously want the thing, but that isn't enough for executive function to kick in, so "I need to get off the sofa so I can make tasty dinner" results in not having moved two hours later.
Ah, hello me.
> E.g., you have a family to feed, and your ability hold a well-paying job hinges on your performance.
I can do all of these things anyway. Of course, this does present the potential reality that were I able to sleep like people, I could be even more successful, but after a near death experience, then disability, I've learned to be happy with where I am.
> E.g., you have a family to feed, and your ability hold a well-paying job hinges on your performance.
I am in this situation, forcing me to adapt and get up early like most normies.
My job performance did not improve. And going to sleep early only makes me more miserable, because now I have exactly zero personal, interrupt-risk-free time.
Or just: you have a family, including children who need you to be a responsible adult first thing in the morning (every morning) whether you like it or not
It's hard to interface with society this way. I'm the same as you and have waxed and waned many times. There are periods where I'm all about being social and living a normal life. There are other times where I'm just down to only sleep when I'm dead tired (as opposed to using drugs to keep me in normal rhythm). There are tradeoffs
Consistent inconsistency is the part of the ADHD package.
It's not that there aren't tradeoffs, it's that we don't get to choose these tradeoffs (as in: the cost of choosing is huge and nonzero).
A delayed sleep/wake cycle is only relevant in the context of a society where people are forced on an unnatural sleep schedule. You could get a full 9 hours of high quality sleep every single night and still be considered to have a delayed sleep/wake cycle disorder.
Some people are just night owls. A large percentage of night owls have ADHD. I think they can linked without it meaning that people with ADHD have to learn to get up at 5AM.
Keep staying up late if that's what feels natural for you, but it's probably worth making sure that you're still getting enough sleep and that you don't have other issues (like sleep apnea) keeping you from getting the quality of sleep you need. There's a lot of other health issues associated with sleep disorders and sleep problems will tank people's ability to focus even when they have non-ADHD brains.
This is my feeling too, going to sleep early feels like I’m missing out on so much. My entire family other than my late father has been this way since forever, we almost never go to bed till 2-3 am.
when left to my own devices without external time constraints (e.g., gradschool), i settle into sleeping from 4am-11am.
but there's a strong cultural bias to judge people that wake up at 11am as lazy. and people that stay up to 4am are reckless.
but somebody that slept the same seven hours from 11pm-6am is pragmatic and responsible.
Lots of the things on this site are normal things that everyone experiences to some degree ...right?
>Lots of the things on this site are normal things that everyone experiences to some degree ...right?
Everyone may experience some of those things some of the time, particularly if they are overwhelmed, overworked, overstressed, etc.
ADHD is experiencing most of these most of the time - as in all the time - for your entire life.
As an analogy: everyone may experience toe pain sometimes if and when they stub their toe on kitchen table leg.
But if it hurts like that all the time, for your entire life - you'd get it checked out, right? There are solid chances something is different about your body.
Now multiply that by 100.
To reword this: say, each relatable entry on that page is a 2% likelihood of ADHD.
If you relate to 100 of them, the chances you're not ADHD drop to 13%.
I've got enough people through an official diagnosis this way that this page, in itself, is a decent enough diagnostic tool.
How much do you think ADHD is a specific mental condition that one either has or doesn't have, versus a set of common symptoms that can have many causes? I wonder which direction a causal relationship between sleep and ADHD might be.
Pretty much anything we don't have a detailed mechanistic understanding of falls into the latter category - an arbitrary bag of sometimes unrelated symptoms, ie a fundamentally statistical categorization - regardless of what anyone might try to claim. This applies to everything across the natural sciences and medicine. If we can't model it in minute detail then we do not truly understand it and anyone attempting to claim otherwise is full of shit regardless of whatever credentials they might have somehow managed to stumble into holding.
Exactly this. Particularly in mental health, where verifying a mechanistic explanation is hard (at least doing so ethically is), many of the well-known problems are defined as clusters of highly correlated symptoms, because that's the best we can do at this point - but this is useful.
Not all highly correlated symptoms will turn out to have a common mechanistically-explainable cause, but all symptoms of a mechanistically-explainable cause obviously are highly correlated.
> Newsflash, getting a full night's sleep helps alleviate ADHD symptoms, while being perpetually sleep-deprived wrecks us.
being perpetually sleep-deprived wrecks everyone. If you've got ADHD getting the sleep you need won't cure it, but it will make it easier to manage. If you don't have ADHD, but a lot of the symptoms fit for you, getting sleep might those all go away.
Your links helped me immensely when I first saw them a few years back. So many "quirks" finally clicked. Keep sharing and Thank you!
Thanks for the link to this wiki. There are so many traits I feel related to, I can now procrastinate the whole day there.
"Revenge" is such a dystopian way to describe "making time for oneself"
Almost my exact response.
And the cruel tragedy is that it becomes this self-reinforcing cycle.
Sleep bad > "Bad" ADHD day > Harder to fall asleep. Rinse. Repeat.
Then add in the use of powerful stimulants (e.g. Adderall) to power through a workday, only to have that cause insomnia that night, and a wrecked sleep schedule for the following 3 days.
Caffeine too, and forgetting to take medications on time and taking them later in the day.
If you really have ADHD and aren't abusing Adderall, it should help you sleep better:
https://stephaniesarkis.com/blog/study-finds-that-stimulant-...
Yup I absolutely fall off a cliff if I'm consistently consuming a stimulant. That includes caffeine. It's actually a problem where I have to be careful that I'm not having it too early (as opposed to late) in the day otherwise it will wreak havoc on my life.
in my case I need to take it at a perfect time where it stops working just after I go to bed. Take it too early and it will stop working before I go to bed and I won't fall asleep because my mind will distract me from it. Take it too late and I technically will sleep, but I won't actually feel rested in the morning.
Nah, I'm taking a very minimal dose (adjusted) and I know that my sleep is less deep and shorter. Without medication I sleep around 8 hours, with 6:30-7 hours.
The best that helps sleep in my experience is doing sports. Lots of it.
When are you taking it? There are a lot of studies that indicate that stimulants HELP sleep.
You should re-evaluate what is happening to you as it is not an ideal situation: it may be possible you have something else instead of ADHD (or together with ADHD) or you maybe taking it too late in the day.
https://aasm.org/journal-sleep-methylphenidate-can-have-slee...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41397339/
I had great success reflecting 80,000 lumens of work lights off my living rooms ceiling during winter for a couple years.
At a new home, I remodeled four rooms to have three bands wide of LED lighting surrounding the ceilings, hidden from below by cove molding. It is an actual sunny day, with an “an actual” sunny sky inside. Winter, midnight, eclipse? Not a concern.
Having all that intense light reflecting off entire ceilings creates soft diffuse lighting, no shadows, even though it is extremely bright.
Helped a lot with waking up and avoiding depression, all year round.
On the sleep treatment, anything that can help sleep is good, my body has always operated well on a 30 hour day, which means terribly almost all the time, by default. But I do a lot of things that help, so my sleep is pretty good most of the time.
I would see sleep aids as a pretty narrow interventions relative to my ADHD.
Correlation would be nowhere near equivalence.
This sounds amazing- do you have part list or pics/write up?
I had a contractor and an electrician! There is some significant power draw.
It’s been five years, so I expect the best components are different, more efficient and cheaper.
In winter, the lights can be considered part of my heating system. In summer, windows get opened. If I did it again, I would have some little fans up there expelling air from the cove directly outside.
But that is fine tuning. I am really happy. (When the lights are on. /h)
The 30 hour day feeling resonates. If I have no external schedule or I'm just living as I see fit, I end up gravitating to 3am bed, ~12pm wake sorta schedule. The only real problem is that it's functionally incompatible with jobs and many other services, even fully remote
Same. For me it's more like 4-6 am bed.
I also work best in long bursts of up to 12 hours, with days of full rest in between bursts. I don't do well with a five days a week 9-5 work schedule.
And timeline urgency / time pressure tends to do well at putting me into deep flow state, whereas it can be hard for me to get into flow state for work otherwise.
I'd love to find myself a situation in which I can work like you describe and have it now be side-eyed by normies. That's exactly how I want to live/work, and I've never really found a place that will let me do it, so I just keep rolling through these completely incompatible arrangements that eventually kick me out.
> And timeline urgency / time pressure tends to do well at putting me into deep flow state, whereas it can be hard for me to get into flow state for work otherwise.
As long as there's a tangible reason the deadline is urgent, then I feel the same way. If it's just an arbitrary demand then I don't respond like they'd hope. My brain knows when something is truly urgent and when it's not.
Live on East Coast, take a west coast remote job. 9am Meeting is noon.
I did this for several years. It works great
Lol, brilliant. I tried the exact opposite of this and got fired for essentially not being awake at 9am EST while I live in PST
I noticed that my bedtime drifts because after 11PM it's finally quiet enough to do anything productive. Before that it's just impossible to work. After I started living alone, I finally could go to sleep at a sane time since I didn't have to wait hours for everyone else to calm down enough to let me think.
I can confirm this effect. One winter I left 2x300w living room lights on perm, and it had a dramatic effect. The only issue is that its nice to turn lights off at night, and if you do that, now you're in habit-dependent territory.
one thing i've been paying the adhd tax on is automating / making habits lower activation energy. smart bulbs / blinds are a great thing for me especially when i am already in bed and have too much executive dysfunction to walk 3 feet to the light switch / shade
Ah on the 30 hour day: I had some success living a 28 hour day for a few months, which has the nice property of meaning your awake hours are identical week to week making it at least somewhat possible to interface with polite circadian society.
6x 28 hour days pack cleanly into a 7-day week, so all Mondays you wake at the same time, then all Tuesdays you wake 4 hours later and so on. It was one of the most productive times of my life but ultimately left my partner feeling unhappy and lonely.
Fuck it we do our best with 24 hour days…
Your comment prompted the epiphany that I am a natural 4-cycle per 5-day person.
That's enough synchronization that I am going to give some thought to what the crossovers times with "normals" will be, and may try it.
Synchronizing across M-F, then adjusting between Friday evening and Monday morning, to repeat.
> ultimately left my partner feeling unhappy and lonely.. do our best with 24 hour days
Impossible to express just how deeply frustrating it is to have the “sleep when I want you to, not when you want to” kind of fight. Over and over. For decades after being a grown ass adult.
It’s weird that it has to be explained to 24h normies but pressuring someone to alter a part of their biology like this is wrong. Gosh honey, plastic surgery might be uncomfortable in an ongoing way for you, but I’m willing to take that risk. Gee babe, I see you need a vegan/carnivore lifestyle but please change this just doesn’t work for me.
People can always make these things their red line and force the issue I guess, find out where the other person’s red line is. The weird part is that the sleep thing is generally accepted as reasonable and polite society kinda regards the other behaviors as very unacceptable
This is all well and good until you have children to look after. Expecting one parent to pick up the slack because you want to go to bed at 4am is not fair.
I didn't read the person's story that way. I took it that the other partner felt unhappy and alone, which is a reasonable way to feel. It doesn't sound like it was a fight to me, but a discussion.
I would LOVE to learn more about your LED setup. Do you have a write up or pictures? I'm super interested in doing something similar
So they all faced inward, toward the ceiling center?
>open the door
>get on the floor
>walk the dinosaur
Suffered from ADHD my entire life (undiagnosed). Fixed my chronic insomnia pre-diagnosis. Sure it helped a bit but not even close to medication.
Has anyone considered that one reason for being/staying awake late at night that's very salient for ADHD people is that night tends to be much quieter, so it's a period when it's much easier to think/read/work without constant interruptions. Noise pollution isn't taken seriously enough.
Oddly, I gravitate towards noise like a busy coffee shops or taking walks along highways. The background noise keeps unwanted thoughts from barging in
That's a good point, although at the same time, even the most quiet environment can only help so much to stave off distraction and once hyperfocus starts there's very little that can pull you away.
It's not just a lack of interruptions or even the lack of potential interruptions, but that I can let my guard down knowing that I'm not inadvertently ignoring someone.
That's why I'm reading this at 1:55AM local time! It definitely gets quieter, though, I'm in the suburbs so not that noisy to begin with. But now, no cars, animals outside mostly asleep (hear an owl sometimes), cell phone stops trying to scam me via voice and text messages, not even aircraft flying overhead (they start between 4-5 am, which is also when the first cars can be heard). Can hear my heartbeat in my ears. But my tinnitus is a lot louder. No job, so no need to get up early though I typically manage before noon.
I wouldn't say I "have ADHD" but I do have a what I call an "attention prioritization and low energy disorder" that nothing i've ever tried has helped. I hear stimulants might help, but never tried em, can't get em.
I agree that that worsens the problems, but I grew up in a quiet, boring village before internet distractions or mobile phones, where this could not have been a factor, and I still had/have insomnia issues (and ADHD).
I'm in my late 40s, which meant that childhood didn't have internet and folks didn't start getting it in their homes more commonly til my late teens.
That doesn't mean distractions weren't there, and those distractions are still around if I live with other people. Growing up, a lot of distractions were parents and siblings. Exciting things on television with lots of noise that I'd notice. Libraries were brutal - quiet places where I would notice people shuffling papers, turning pages, and going about their activities in "silence". I was always better off when folks would just leave me alone to do stuff with lots of background noise so I wouldn't notice stuff - or just being alone. Staying up late gave me that.
It doesn't take modern life or a boring place to be free from distractions.
Ok, that is your situation, and you have my sympathies, but that doesn't change the fact that I didn't have those issues, and grew up in an very calm environment without noisy distractions. And that's not just memory, if visit my family it's still a very quiet and calm space, including during the daytime, and it still doesn't fix my insomnia.
I'm not saying that these can't be factors, but the original question was asked in a way that suggests it might be a general explanation, and it clearly cannot explain everything.
The title of the article is irresponsibly chosen.
- My time in the field of psychology has made me think that the use of imprecise language for describing psychology has a large and problematic societal impact
ADHD is correlated with but is NOT a "circadian rhythm disorder". This is definitionally true.
There are many causes of ADHD. One of them is likely sleep issues.
I absolutely have ADHD that impacts my life, but I sleep like an absolute stone, and unlike my partner, can fall asleep within minutes of my head hitting the pillow most of the time. I get 6-8 hours of sleep per night, and it does not seem to have cured me.
I found that more than 8 hours made a massive difference to me. That being said the only way I could maintain this was having a toddler who wakes up every night.
There seems to be almost nothing new here. I see that the main studies the they cite are actually from the 2010s:
https://www.bmj.com/content/350/bmj.h68.abstract
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13899...
I'd be curious to see if there's been any larger scale follow up on this since.
well it's a review article
I'm used to reviews of recent work, not of work from a decade ago
This one is from 2024
Associations between sleep problems in children with ADHD and parental insomnia and ADHD symptoms
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11108211/
Intuitively this intersects seamlessly with the rise of device usage. Blue light, but perhaps even more impactful is the regular night-time creation and release of up-regulating biochemistry. That lingers well into sleep hours. I can imagine smart phones being introduced to communities has a linear correlation with the rise of ADHD there.
Walk outside so that the morning sun can directly hit your eyeballs. Don't stare directly into the sun. Try to look at something a little bit off axis. Your eyes should feel somewhat uncomfortable if you are doing this correctly. Do this every day for 3-5 minutes. You can accomplish this incidentally by just doing normal stuff like taking care of your own lawn and going for a run.
Light coming in from a window is generally filtered. Light being bright can be very deceptive. Even if the temperature is correct. Your eyes crave that deep infrared energy that LEDs and energy efficient windows actively reject.
Dr. Sandra Kooij is a good person to look up if you are interested in adult ADHD and sleep. She has a book about it. From what I remember, there are a few things that are known:
1. a large majority of ADHD sufferers are phase-delayed and struggle with insomnia
2. you can induce ADHD-like symptoms in normal people by restricting sleep
3. Some of the interventions that improve sleep timing and quality affect ADHD (but it isn't a total cure)
> 1. a large majority of ADHD sufferers are phase-delayed and struggle with insomnia
I would think this wouldn't be such a problem if society would acknowledge night owls exist and allow work to adjust accordingly. Forcing a night owl to live the life of a morning lark is likely not the best way to get their best work. The person suffers who has to try and live in a world not designed for when they sleep, and the employer suffers by getting less out of those people.
I have ADHD and left to my own devices I would go to sleep somewhere between 2-4am. At work, I don't function so well before about 2pm some days... and by that point that day is almost over.
Completely agree, and tend towards the same schedule. I don't even mind working in-person with people, but this idea that everyone should just be uniformly aligned to operate on the same hours is alienating and humiliating at times.
being a night owl is not good for your health for a lot of reasons (I am one).
This would depend on the individual, or so my sleep team, including my sleep doctor suggest.
It is better for me to align with a pattern where I get some level of restful sleep, as opposed to one where I do not ultimately.
In an ideal world, you are obviously correct, but in the world between a severely disturbed sleep where I get a handful of hours of actually restorative sleep, vs once where I actually sleep for 7 hours? One wins over the other.
And yes, given I have an entire medical team (for other reasons, I have a SCI) I have done about everything you can to resolve sleep. Between ADHD however, symptoms related to the SCI etc, we really do just have to go with whatever we can reasonably get.
As long as you're getting enough sleep and some sunlight what's the problem? I'm guessing that a lot of people who are night owls aren't getting that, and that a lot of people who have other health issues (especially sleep disorders) end up living the night owl lifestyle, but I don't see why it should matter what specific times you go to bed.
> I have ADHD and left to my own devices I would go to sleep somewhere between 2-4am. At work, I don't function so well before about 2pm some days... and by that point that day is almost over.
Indeed. I've struggled with it since childhood, not only me. The same "symptoms" for lack of a better word are seen with my mother, my aunt and my grandmother. All are night owls, all sleep poorly etc.
For whatever reason, regardless of how much sleep i've had, my brain begins to kick into high gear with a clarity of thought and capacity to dedicate myself to things starting at about 9PM. This remains true REGARDLESS of sleep, how well rested I am, general health, etc. I could have had NO sleep for 24 hours, still be away at 9PM the next night, and it's like a switch.
The ONLY time this ever differs, for reasons still unknown, and where I fit into "normal society" is for whatever reason, when I visit Russia (which I have not done for some time for obvious reasons.)
When I am in Russia, with no effort at all, I sleep normal hours without issue, and wake up during the day time actually well rested. This ceases once I return to my timezone. This same pattern is not seen when say, I visit the US instead.
If only I could harness this magic...
Are you originally from Russia?
Nyet. My partner is originally from Russia. I live in a land down under.
its a catch all for people whos brains didnt develop correctly, people who are a genius, and boys
Nope wrong.
A very uninformed opinion.
I go to bed at 9pm and wake up 3-4am. As a person with ADHD, this schedule helped me the most. Hardest part is not easily being able to go to sleep if I'm awake in the middle of my sleep.
Before this I used to sleep very late, even when I was a kid, and morning schedules were too hard. This way, there's no oversleep risk.
Three things that helped me with my circadian phase (to certin extend)
1) Melatonine 300mcg 5-6 hours befor desired sleep time 2) 10k lux light for 30m when waking up 3) Nobeltin (nootropic) it enhances clock amplitude, so I do get less sleepy during teh day and more sleepy at night ..
things taht kind of helped but find hard to keep: Keto (I feel less sleepy on Keto, and easier to fall a sleep but it's been a while since ive been on keto)
+1 to melatonin. It took me a very long time to dial in the right dose though. It’s not like it’s some miracle cure but it has helped a bunch with being able to fall asleep at a reasonable time, sleep through the night, and thus wake up at a reasonable time. Which of course helps a bit with everything else
Melatonin lately (about 500 mcg) has helped me get better sleep and hopefully to help with the sleep drift.
However, it's almost like I'm so conditioned to being groggy in the mornings that I still find it hard to get up even if I feel fairly refreshed.
> so conditioned to being groggy in the mornings that I still find it hard to get up even if I feel fairly refreshed.
I am very much in the same boat. Mornings have never been my friend. Even the few restful nights and refreshed mornings I get are spoiled by learned grogginess and overstaying in bed.
That's part of the issue I had in terms of dialing in the right dosage. I was trying to use it off and on for about 20 years and could never get the right amount where it'd actually work at night but not leave me groggy in the AM. Part of the issue was for a long time it was hard finding the stuff in low enough dosages to even allow for this easily.
Turns out the answer is 500-600mcg for myself, but everyone's going to be different.
Do you really mean 300mcg ? the lowest dosage I see available is 1mg.
There are many 300mcg options available on Amazon.
yes, melatonin is unfortunately misused commonly, especially in the US, where it's not regulated for whatever reason. If you take 5 to 20 mg, it can act as an immediate sleep aid, by overwhelming your body with unnatural amounts, with a higher chance of side effects like nightmares. For reference, the body naturally produces about 30 mcg to signal itself to fall asleep [1].
If you actually want to shift your circadian rhythm, the optimal dose is about 300 to 500 mcg (the actual absorption rate varies wildly between manufacturers and delivery methods), taken 4 to 6 hours before your sleep onset (note: when you usually go to sleep, not when you want to go to sleep). [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melatonin
[2] https://www.circadiansleepdisorders.org/info/PRC.php
For a time I had to wake up at 6AM for work and it was a period where I struggled the most with my ADHD symptoms.
I hope there is more awareness in the future about the importance of sleep for neurodivergent people. This could help with the social jet lag most of us feel with having to follow a schedule that simply does not work for us.
I was formally diagnosed as a kid but didn’t do the drug route due to my father not liking these new drugs. I’m in my 40’s now and only started enforcing a sleep routine 10ish years ago. Eg. Bedtime at 11 and get up when alarm goes off at 7:30. And the effect on me was astounding. Everything just levelled out. I still like/need a coffee in the morning.
> For a time I had to wake up at 6AM for work and it was a period where I struggled the most with my ADHD symptoms.
go bed earlier then ffs
I wish it was as easy as that. I naturally fall asleep later than the average person and forcing myself to sleep early does not permanently solve the underlying problem.
be more active in the day, get exhausted now and then, it works
Until I became a father last year, I believed the 'late owl' ADHD trait-- not anymore. It's a habit, not encoded, nor due to ADHD.
One thing I have never understood about ADHD is that it seems the diagnostic criteria for it are widely different depending on the country. It tends to be significantly over diagnosed in some countries and perhaps under diagnosed others. I always found this rather strange. It suggests there is quite a lot that we don’t know about these kinds of issues.
There was a recent report from Finnish news agency YLE showing that the diagnosis rates show significantly variations between different regions of the country. So it seems even within a single country the criteria can be inconsistent.
The criteria are going to be roughly the same. Instead it’s the biases around ADHD (primarily ADHD denialism) that cause the variance in diagnosis rates.
Isn't this true for so many things though? Our understanding of the world is just different around the world, for better or worse, this is made clear in almost every way our societies are setup and act.
Things like "What is rape?" differs a lot between countries. In some countries, rape isn't (legally) possible between spouses for example, which is just a completely upside down way of seeing it compared to how it's typically viewed in Western countries, as an extreme example.
It doesn't surprise me things like ADHD diagnoses also are different between countries.
Disruptions to sleep aggravates underlying issues, mentally or physically.
I am lucky I don't have disruptive sleep issues, but my brain still feels slightly foggy and my battery feels 75% charged in the morning. I imagine if I had disruptive sleep issues I might as well be toast. Or maybe I'm just not aware of disruptions in my sleep...
What's wrong with being toast? :P
My sleep issues are at least manageable.
I was like you. A year ago, I was tired as hell despite sleeping (well, not enough, but I've never slept 'enough'). A few people said sleep apnea but i was not overweight and didn't snore. I tried the test anyway, and it turns out I wasn't breathing. I used an oral appliance and a year later, it's gone and I feel better.
Also, without doing anything my triglycerides, LDL cholesterol and blood sugar which had gone way out of whack, went back to normal.
I started using my oral appliance on a Monday. That Friday I was so energetic I ran 12 miles in one go. I hardly ever run or even practice that much, but I was just so wired that I couldn't help it. It was an amazing feeling. I highly suggest sleep apnea treatment even if you don't think it sounds like you.
Welp, I guess I should check that out, thank you.
I am increasingly concerned about some kind of latent sleep apnea. In particular, profound daytime drowsiness; plus waking up stressed, anxious, or even terrified, for apparently no good reason. Being unable to breathe would, in fact, supply a reason for all that.
Waking up suddenly in anxiety is a classic symptom. My main symptom was daytime drowsiness, esp while driving despite feeling fine. That plus just not performing my best.
Speaking of the running.. I would get winded after hardly a mile before treatment . But I just called it up to being out of shape. In reality it was latent mental stress that I had gotten used to.
If you haven't had a sleep study to check for sleep apnoea you should get one. It's very common, anyone can have it and the only way to check properly is a sleep study. You can have sleep apnoea without being a snorer and you can sleep next to someone without them being aware of it. It's extremely bad for your health and very treatable.
I still have problems, but my life categorically improved once I got diagnosed and treated for obstructive sleep apnea. I focus on things much better, I'm better at juggling tasks, and I'm just nicer to people, or at least my fuse is considerably longer than it used to be. Also I'm sure my wife is grateful that I'm not snoring or gasping for breath every night.
I would highly encourage anyone who can get a sleep study done to do it. Most insurance companies will at least cover the sleep study and sleep sleep apnea can lead to a lot of considerably-more-expensive issues later down the line. It's not very invasive anymore, all they had to do was have me sleep with a pulse oximeter for a few nights and apparently that was enough.
I can't help but notice that there's a lot in the direction of ADHD is linked to sleep pattern differences, and there's evidence that you can alter those sleep pattern differences through a number of environmental/behavioural interventions but the idea that this actually helps ADHD symptoms as such seems to be left up to the imagination of the reader.
"Adults: 0.5 mg nightly advanced DLMO by 88 minutes and reduced ADHD symptoms by 14%" https://brandonluumd.substack.com/p/circadian-rhythms-matter...
Treating my sleep problems as delayed melatonin, by boosting melatonin with tiny supplements combined with a few other lifestyle changes (that I started well before the supplements), has led to me feeling sleepy and a calmer mind at night and simultaneously clear-headed and not groggy in the morning. And the clearer-headedness persists all day. That was never my pattern in the previous 30 years, no matter all the things I tried.
This is hilariously out of wack with my own experience, and my son's. We both have ADHD, and we are both extreme early risers. So much so that I am literally trying to train us both to fall asleep and wake up later.
well, theres no objective test, and its very similar to speaking to a god or whatever.... with enough positive encouragement, or a personal desire for it from yourself, you can be convinced you have adhd. some of the symptoms are very barnum-esque, unfalsifiable things like do you feel like you struggle compared to other people. its no wonder theres such massive variation in the adhd population.
ADHD meds also impact circadian rhythm. So I don't really know how a study could look at this dynamic with any usefulness.
So does eating properly and consistently. A likely expensive but also likely useful study could therefore measure multiple known sleep hygiene approaches in isolation, then in combination, and then look at the degree of correlation in comparison to controls. Some of the observed differences might be cleanly attributed to previously not properly controlled for effects such as irregular meal schedules.
With most everyone medicated its impossible to find a control group. Same applies to any emf studies.
This is what openai needs to be spending their compute on. Screw the stolen math proofs. Help me sleep better
I've been using a smart switch to fade in a light (one of the "sun-like" full-spectrum ones) over my head in the morning and it's been really effective for regulating my circadian rhythm. Even with little sleep, I will naturally wake up in the morning at a much more regular time.
If the light turns on too quickly for me it’s super jarring and I hide under the covers. Did you find one that goes bright over the course of 30m or something? Or can you handle the quick increase in brightness?
I do the same with a lifx bulb, it can be set up to fade and colour shift over any duration you like.
Google for "wake-up light". Philips is the brand I'm familiar with but there are others.
It's a controllable dimmer switch that I fade in over the course of an hour or so using a Home Assistant script.
I have a sunrise alarm clock, I think from Phillips. If I set the alarm for 8am, the light will start turning on at 7:30am then slowly increase in brightness over the next 30 minutes until 8am when it's at full brightness and the alarm goes off (which are nature sounds).
When it first starts, it's more of a warm glow than a light. The max brightness can also be set.
Smart bulbs.
You can make your artificial sunrise take as long as you want, and connect them to a sleep tracker so they're timed to wake you up during a comfortable phase.
I've been doing this for 12 years, and I don't think I have ever been upset to hear my alarm since, as long as I'm home and the lights have prepared me. Lately I've even been waking up before my alarm about half the time, even though I work on a schedule one time zone east of where I am.
It's shocking to me that it's not more popular for everybody. I guess the benefit is hard to explain.
I have been using one of those sunrise alarm clocks for around 8 years now. If I go to bed at a reasonable time, the light will wake me up naturally before the alarm actually goes off. However, if I stay up too late the effect of the light fades. I'll sleep right through the light and need the alarm. On one occasion when I must have been really sleep deprived, I slept through the light, an hour of the alarm going off, and another 2-3 hours after that.
Yeah I tried most of this. I exercise regularly, have tried going out to walk in nature after work or in the morning, bright light in the morning, melatonin … it all helps a bit. Maybe it helps some people enough, but in my case you can live almost perfect epitome of health and balanced life… and then you relapse and your brain is mush for a day or two. It is pretty easy to self-medicate, eat complete junk, not sleep/sleep all the time, quit relationships or do other really dumb decisions that might have serious consequences down the line when the crash comes.
So yeah, no. ADHD is pretty serious, let’s take it seriously. Morning jog won’t fix you. ADHD-specific therapy is the most important in the beginning, then you need to find drugs that work. Check out Buprion.
It's effectively junk science, circadian associations are about as "jesus christ not this again" of HN as "in rats"
> Melatonin and bright light therapy has advanced DLMO in both children and adults with ADHD
Tried it with gusto over about 3, among a ton of other things. Didn't work for me at all.
> we propose a pragmatic, behavioral-first clinical pathway
Read: cheap
> we propose a pragmatic, behavioral-first clinical pathway
> Read: cheap
I mean, if it works great, if it doesn't there's a lot of other options.
Melatonin 1mg 2 hours before bed worked for me in combination with wrap-around orange glasses (that filtered all blue light from screens and lighting) for the last 2 hours before bed. Also take magnesium and chamomile tea regularly, that layer on top.
Individually nothing works, but the combination crossed a tipping point for me with radical change.
I have both ADHD and Orthostatic Dysregulation (OD), a 20-40% comorbidity where ADHD-induced sleep issues disrupt the autonomic nervous system, making standard OD treatments less effective.
Do you have any reading you'd recommend for this? I have ADHD. dysautonomia, and sleep issues so it seems adjacent to my line of research.
Orthostatic Dysregulation sounds exactly like what I asked my Dr about recently! And of course I've had sleep issues my whole life, not much helps since it's based on racing thoughts and anxiety, other classic comorbidities.
I squatted, stood up, and the blood pressure monitor saw a drop and my pulse doubled 5 seconds later. It was trying to make up for lost time like my body had no idea I stood up.
Do you have any pointers to get more details? Since he didn't seem to know what it was exactly, we discussed POTS but that's a bit broad rather than a specific thing to treat it seems.
Adderall is for both ADHD and narcolepsy. Makes sense that the thing are related.
How do the authors disentangle cause and effect here? It doesn't follow that sleep issues are an underlying cause, and not just one of the MANY symptoms of ADHD.
uBlock filter to fix selection:
I suffer from a profound circadian rhythm disorder. It is ancillary to my other mental issues, and it began to develop when I was a teenager. I recall late nights of sneaking into a dry bathtub to read, and also a cupful of cold water in the face, from my frustrated father, trying to get me to high school on time.
One thing that made a night-and-day difference, if you will, was diet. I often blamed my bipolar or my pills on my unruly sleep schedule. But when I stopped eating bad food from restaurants, and I was mostly making stuff in my own kitchen, with fresh ingredients and fruits and vegetables, I could spontaneously wake up with the sunrise, no alarm, every day. It was not fun, because I was also losing weight and my stomach always demanded immediate attention, no matter how many dirty dishes in the kitchen sink. But as far as circadian rhythm, that puppy fell right into line for as long as I stuck carefully to such a diet.
That discipline ultimately falls apart every time, sadly. I am relatively powerless to deal with my lousy diet. But coming around to the diabetes diagnosis, I will also issue warning bells to the younger ADHD and night owls. Watch your blood sugar.
My blood glucose and insulin levels appear closely related to my drowsy/waking moods, and also to my troublesome bouts of anger and rage. Two types of [synthetic modern] insulin proved to be an amazing miracle in terms of calming down, having good sleep, and banishing nightmares and terrors.
My erstwhile psychiatrist was a forensic one, and she would fret about "blue light at night" but I doubled down on that danger to propose that having Internet disputes and arguments turning into rage and screaming? Perhaps that was detrimental to my sleeping and dreaming?
Therefore, I propose this to anyone who struggles with circadian rhythm: rather than letting physicians tweek you (or your young children) out of your minds, consider your diet, blood glucose, and all the other "sleep hygiene" factors. Really do an inventory of the fundamentals before you resort to drugs. It could save your life.
> I suffer from a profound circadian rhythm disorder.
is there a test for this? how do you know?
i like the web new things to see about ADHD.
Embrace the nightly builds :P
Could explain one pathway on how Guanfacine, an ADHD-approved, blood pressure-lowering, sleep-inducing drug, works.
Sleep inducing? "Guanfacine may worsen sleep in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, including reduced total sleep time."¹
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guanfacine
Second para, line 1 in that Wikipedia link: “ Common side effects include sleepiness,”
I believe it. I even sought out medical advice on how to best deal with it all. I was given the usual recommendation of low-dose melatonin and light therapy.
However, my issue at the time was that I could never find a light with high enough lux values that I felt like I could trust. Plus, another issue with light therapy is that one can basically never stop for any moderate amount of time, and well, my ADHD makes that near impossible.
I honestly think I would have better success with sleep issues if I could just control my own schedule or have a flexible schedule, but that is not really a luxury most jobs can provide.
There seems to be some kind of hidden connection between autism and ADHD. At first sight the definitions are contradictory but in reality, many people have both. Sleep disturbance seem to be common among autistic people too.
Dude I saw sleep specialists at Stanford here in Palo Alto and we still don’t know a lot about it, regardless of what you might read
The whole sleep hygiene things been sort of discredited and doctors just follow a script with like 5 things they will prescribe you for sleep problems and after those 5 things it’s like oh well we tried
I once showed them a study I found online in a reputable journal (at least the study was conducted by someone from a well regarded university in a journal that wasn’t obviously bad)
The doctor didn’t even look at the study, he just saw where it came from and said “yeah we don’t use that journal”
I would have much more appreciated an answer if I don’t have time to read your bullshit vs what he gave me
Can someone give me the tl:dr, I lost track after the title /s
(Adhd joke hehe/no hehe)
Oh cool so now people will be told to go to sleep earlier and get more sun before you can prove that you deserve actual treatment. Fun...
Another way to look at this is how many people need more sun and regular sleep and instead are doing unnecessary treatments?
That is doubly important given that one of the effects of the medications, is to disrupt sleep.
Yeah but the population taking it report falling asleep immediately after a large coffee. It just doesn’t work exactly like you would expect for those with ADHD
They may fall asleep after a large coffee, but they will wake up again.
My son has severe ADHD. The sleep deprivation is why he can only use medication for special events like tests. He can't sustain it for any long-term period.
Roughly, zero. Stimulants are not a fun dependency, come with a bucket list of side effects and downsides, and only mitigate one aspect of ADHD.
ADHD treats with Lisdexamfetamine. Amfetamines, I repeat. People use this to study, to get high at parties, to be functional at work, so I really doubt there aren't patients out there abusing these drugs with valid prescriptions.
Yes, some people will abuse their prescriptions.
But the majority will not. Treating ADHD through stimulants usually has fantastic outcomes for patients.
So it isn't roughly zero, and this minority is what's being discussed here.
No, but if you're trying to argue that sleep therapy would be more effective for this group than non-stimulant form of medication, you need to prove this.
Sleepy therapy (CBT-I) may be the best supported treatment for insomnia, but it's still quite shit. ~50% of people will see little to no improvement after going through therapy.
I'm not arguing anything, I'm questioning
You brought up people "high at parties", no one else is discussing that.
and what about the rest of the discussion?
> Treating ADHD through stimulants usually has fantastic outcomes for patients.
does it though? this comment section should be testament to everyone on meds still struggling
Any psychiatrist worth a damn already considers these things.
"ADHD" symptoms can manifest for a variety of reasons, and that's why good ADHD testing involves multiple exams alongside the traditional ADHD ones to help figure out what actual issues are present.
Also, comorbidities make this all the more complicated. Your assertion that people need "more sun" and "regular sleep" could very well be true, yet someone can still have ADHD.
> Any psychiatrist worth a damn already considers these things.
Protocols however are always changing depending on new findings. Not saying this is the case, but not considering something unknown at the time doesn't make a doctor not worth a damn.
> Your assertion that people need "more sun" and "regular sleep" could very well be true, yet someone can still have ADHD.
if that was the case the treatment wouldn't be unecessary, like I specifically wrote in the comment you are replying to.
ADHD is highly treatable with medication, and any other intervention is at best mild mitigation. So how many? Amongst people with ADHD, basically nobody.
Sun and proper sleep is certainly helpful for people with ADHD but the likelihood of them getting that is vastly increased if they’re medicated correctly.
Stimulants make everyone’s ADHD symptoms (attention, focus; hard to distinguish from environment or personality traits) better (for some time), but they don’t reliably increase output.
Plenty of people with ADHD manage just fine (or better: sleep) without stimulants. Now if the ADHD is of the ‘late diagnosed’ kind, no one knows what reliably works or if the construct has been bent beyond its breaking point.
Just an FYI, in circles similar to HN, people will respond very negatively to anyone suggesting anything that might hint at tightening amphetamine prescriptions.
I'm counting on it, I find it deliciously ironic how much there's little interest here in the actual wellbeing of people. The logical hoops people go through here is hilarious.
tbh as a non-user, I think stimulants are likely life improving for many (potentially most) people. what i dislike/chafe at is the insinuation that stimulants only work for people with diagnosed ADHD or only have non-recreational effects for people with ADHD. the latter especially seems to rapidly have become a folk wisdom.
Sure, there's always the middle ground, but there's always the extreme, people abusing amfetamines because a regular human being isn't made to work 12 hours a day 7 days a week, or because after the third pill it's not kicking anymore.
And people should drop the cynicism that just because there are doctors around everyone is well cared for. Just look at the opioid crisis in the US, fuelled by respectable doctors chasing financial incentives.
Having been in medical school I would never trust physicians on the topic of amphetamines. More than half of them would regularly (ab)use ADHD meds during education, some would sell prescription meds to other students which in theory could get them suspended (it's not just the brightest people who end up physicians ...).
What would the "recreational" affects of stimulants be? I sometimes take it on weekends, does that make it "recreational"? If it makes me happier through better conversations, less distractions, and less hating myself for not doing the one plate that's been sitting unrinsed for a week, is that "recreational"?
This is the kind of absurd thing that people say when they know drugs from 2000s teen comedies, I fear. Just cause you've vaguely heard about people doing adderal at parties doesn't mean it's anything like meth, which is the common layperson misunderstanding. It's not a difference in degree, but a difference in kind.
People absolutely take amphetamines recreationally, they are mood & confidence boosting and help you stay up to party. I’m not sure what in my comment you are disagreeing with to be honest, you seem to be imputing a bunch of views to me and then arguing against them. I never said anything about similarity to meth, although they do hit the same targets. I have not vaguely heard of people doing adderal at parties, I have explicitly been to parties where people were doing adderal.
I've never understood recreational use of amphetamines. When I take them (prescribed, of course), I feel like garbage but I'm able to get my work done (which is the only reason I take the damn stuff). If I could choose to shed my executive dysfunction but never be able to take stimulants again, I wouldn't even have to think about it - obviously I'd take that deal.
>> tightening amphetamine prescriptions
oh man, just reading these three words spikes my blood pressure
Sorry, my comment was probably unclear if you're not familiar with the current psychiatric debates around ADHD. Long story short, it's where depression was 20 years ago, and where Chronic Fatigue Syndrome will probably be 10 years from now: there's a shift in treatment paradigms and an expansion in what "distress" counts as "pathological", which is how disorders are defined in the first place.
That seems pedantic but it's really important, here: ADHD (& MDD & ASD & all of em) are not singular physical diseases with a shared cause, but rather a bucket of symptoms that is used as a heuristic for picking treatments (which almost always means some sort of physical intervention, though therapy alone obviously helps in some cases). This isn't cause psychiatry is bad, but rather because we live in a pre-Gallilean era of cognitive science, and lack the theoretical tools to even begin describing these sorts of systematic, structural disorders in strictly neurological terms.
This is why psychiatrists prescribe off-label so often, and don't treat "diagnosis" like the big ceremony we expect as laypeople; you never truly "have" ADHD on an ontological level, you just have a psychiatrist who thinks that assignment is the best rough bucket to put you in to pick treatments. If you go to a different psychiatrist for more than a makeup/temp arrangement you'll have to get rediagnosed, technically speaking.
Some relevant tidbits to try to avoid a wall of text:
- Many, many providers still hold ~DSM4 ideas about ADHD being extremely rare in adults, and only valid as a diagnosis if you have solid proof of hyperactivity as a child. (ADHD has three "presentations": hyperactivity, impulsivity, and inattention, where the final one is dominant in adults by far). This is especially frustrating in light of the aforementioned methodological facts.
- As that hints at, ADHD treatment is marred by the absurdly harmful sentiment that there's some huge class of lazy jerks who just want to cheat out there, and that we have to carefully separate those lazy people from the people who have executive dysfunction through no fault of your own. Hopefully it's obvious that that's absurd, even if you're not as Sapolosky-pilled as I; if that's a coherent worry in the first place, it's like shutting down SNAP in reaction to a 1% fraud rate.
- ADHD diagnoses have been skyrocketing, which makes some clinicians assume it's overdiagnosed. See also: v***s + tylenol => ASD. Again, hopefully that doesn't need refutation here.
- In practice, getting an accurate sense of whether ADHD drugs help you is a huge rigamarole that is far harder than basically any other disorder (with the possible exception of BPD?); if you don't get educated upfront and choose providers carefully (which feels scummy and plays into the shame that prevents people from seeking treatment already), you can easily just spend hundreds of dollars and get a clinician who will never seriously consider ADHD treatment. They'll shower you in serious drugs of all kinds with aplomb for disorders that arguably fit some of the symptoms (usually MDD, GAD, and/or BD), but they've decided far before they ever met you that adult ADHD is a myth/conspiracy/mass hysteria.
- Finally, 'get more and better sleep' is just a goofy alternative to treatments that we know work, especially when it's heavily relying on the little 'melatonin only as your doctor recommends' disclaimer, which is hiding the fact that melatonin is not meant to be taken long term. It's like "use a planner" or "have you tried writing stuff down?" -- that stuff surely helps, but people go to psychiatrists because they've been trying their hardest for years and still feel like they're drowning.
Is it our (let's be real lol) fault that we are incapable of doing what we want to do to the extent that it causes persistent, serious distress? IDK. But I can personally report that I stumbled into an ADHD diagnosis and actual treatment (dextroamphetamine + bupropion) changed my life; without it I would be a constantly-stressed coaster terrified of getting fired and spending much of my workday staring at my hands, rather than feeling like the most capable engineer I've ever been by far.
And I only got there because I went to a psychiatrist for suspected GAD and she recommended it. Only later (through loved ones and close friends) did I learn how uniquely awful it is to try to find out if it helps you in the first place, which goes against the underlying ethos of our entire psychiatric system.
TL;DR: As a debugging principle for programs, yes, but for psychiatry in general and ADHD in particular, no.
it was unclear because of snark
Be me. Too AHDH to even open the article, let alone read the article before moving to the next HN post.