> 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)
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.
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.
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.
Live on East Coast, take a west coast remote job. 9am Meeting is noon.
I did this for several years. It works great
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
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)
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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/
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).
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.
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.
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