Can’t Sleep?
Every adult with ADHD seems to have a unique combination of ‘symptoms’ or ‘challenges’. But there is one that almost every adult seems to struggle with: Sleeplessness.
We have trouble falling asleep. We have trouble staying asleep. And when it’s time to wake up and greet the new day? Forget it!
What’s going on, and why? Dr. David Pomeroy, who has treated over 2,500 folks with ADHD, explains what we are doing, and you may be doing right now, that is making it harder for you to do what your ADHD mind is already struggling to do, namely shut itself down and fall asleep.
Why Can’t I Sleep?
I tell people sleep is foundational and I ask people when they first come in how’s your sleep? Is it restless do you snore? In my mind do you need a sleep study? and every time they come back they rate their sleep, one to ten. What time do you expect to get to bed? What time do you actually get to bed? How late do you use electronics?
Helping people understand how to get enough sleep, because teenagers want to stay up later and they want to sleep later, but they can’t because school’s in there. But adults will say, I’ll say, do you have trouble getting to sleep or do you have trouble getting to bed? and 75% of the time it’s trouble getting to bed, because it’s quiet and they can do their projects and get into things and then they look something up on the internet, and that’s gone.
Most computer monitors and television sets emit blue wavelength light blue light is a signal in your brain to wake up there are blue light
receptors that have nothing to do with vision, they’re just, wake up, and that’s why there are these little blue light things you can buy to help you in the winter and you have them around in the first half hour after you get up and they’ll help you be more awake. Well if
you’re sitting in front of a laptop monitor and you’re soaking in this blue light it says a wake up, wake up, wake up, okay now go to bed and go sleep. It doesn’t work.
Televisions it’s not so much problem as far as a blue light because you’re far enough away and it falls off on a logarithmic-ally, but still
a television then is the stimulating. There’s ads and there’s all kinds of stuff and it’s always moving so that jazzes the ADD brain. Medications not onboard anymore, and there we go
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