Has anyone thought about evening exercise to get to sleep earlier? I don’t exercise enough, but I adopted a dog recently and whenever I take him for a decent evening walk, I tend to get a bit better sleep. I also have my cell phone set to go off at 10:30pm every night before a work day. (Sun, Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu) it isn’t as much to get me to stop what I am doing and immediately go to bed, but instead to take a couple melatonin so that I will start to feel tired earlier. I also, fortunately, have a job that I could set my own schedule, so I work around 10am- 7pm or so. Being Salaried helped me so much, because I could decide to leave at 5:30 or leave at 8:00 if I was on a roll. I do my most creative work after the majority of people have gone home (no external distractions) I still fight with internal distractions but they are recognizable and I can choose to ignore them. I write work instructions for a department of my company, they are pretty complex, but they are seriously needed, and ever-changing. I can have two or three different ones in progress at once and can jump between them as necessary. But, after the boss wanted my coworker and I to push out as many of these documents as we could in a month, and that month-long sustained full-tilt editing and attempting to finalize (approval from another Manager necessary to finalize) and having so many kicked back for both of us, my brain hit a wall and has decided to go into neutral.
As far as my sleep patern goes, I never can fall asleep before midnight unless I am already over tired and have taken melatonin. If I have the computer on, and I don’t have to be at work the next day, I can easily stay awake from Friday morning until Saturday night (midnight) and due to spinal arthritis, Ii can’t be asleep in bed for more than 7 hours without pain the next day. So, as far back as I can remember, I do best on 7 hours of sleep, and usually get about 6 hours of sleep.
I do need to use 5 different alarms on my cell phone to keep me from getting distracted before work so that I get on the road and in to the office on time. 1: Get out of bed 2: Get dressed now. 3: Gather stuff to leave 4: leave for work. 5: If you haven’t left already you’re going to be late! The beauty of these cell phone alarms is that they each have a different notification alarm or song, and hubby helps me quite a lot with most of them.
My biggest problem is actually going to bed and then going to sleep. I have a couple cell phone games that I play in bed at night as I am trying to fall asleep that I can start and stop halfway when I finally do fall asleep, which do NOT affect the alarms in the morning. I had one game on my phone that I fell asleep in the middle of which prevented my cell phone alarms from going off, that game was uninstalled as I was walking from my car to the office, two hours late! Thank goodness I have an understanding boss. I showed him my alarms on the cell phone and that none of them went off because another app prevented it, but that I had uninstalled the other app so it wouldn’t happen again.
I have been upfront about my ADHD to my employer since my first interview when I was hired, but it was only after I was there for a couple years that I realized Time Management was my BIGGEST deficit. I do not notice the passage of time. What seems like only a couple years ago was actually 5 or 7 years, what seems like a couple weeks ago was actually a month or two ago, and what seems like a few minutes ago was over an hour ago. I have pop up reminders at work to tell me to go to lunch and to go home. They work most of the time, but I have been so wrapped up in a task that I have forgotten to go eat lunch. The cafeteria closes before I am hungry, so one of my filing cabinets is a pantry. There is a microwave only 5 paces from my desk. I only need to put the soup in a bowl, microwave and eat, yet I forget. I don’t have time…. If only the world revolved on a 30 hour day instead of 24, I might have a chance…
Has aanyone taken time to see what their body would naturally do if they didn’t conform to outside guidelines of when to sleep, when to wake, etc?? Like a week-long stay-cation. A week off from work, no outside commitments, nothing really keeping you from sleeping when you were tired and waking when you naturally would wake? I have done that myself, and it resulted in finding I run on a 30-32 hour wake/sleep cycle. I averaged 7 hours of sleep after about 23 – 24 hours of being awake. I had just about reached the point where I was getting up naturally at the time I needed to be getting up for work after the brain-vacaation. It helped me realign my sleep cycle just enough that it didn’t seem so bad to get up that early. 
But, since I was back on a 24-hr schedule, it started to degrade after about a month or two.
Hopefully, each person here, especially sugarglider and no_dopamine can find out what works best for their brain.
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