for my entire adult life, my greatest nemesis and my biggest dream has been a good night’s sleep.
first of all, ADHD and sleep are toxic exes.
you can try to make things work, but it is all in vain. every night, i naively get ready for bed around 11 and then play the waiting game until 1. i have ADHD (yes, fully functional adults do suffer this “bees in my fucking head” disorder) so if i am doing nothing, my thoughts are racing like they’re being chased by Lewis Hamilton in the last lap, and if i am on my phone, it is suddenly 2 am and i have no idea how that happened.
i spoke to my therapist who gave me a range of solutions — including changing my bedsheets every night (therapists of the world, please validate me when i say that is a sure way to lose your snooze). as someone with executive dysfunction, knowing that i would have to do 1–2–3–4 things before i could sleep only made things worse. i would instead be locked in a scroll paralysis, procrastinating.
my fellow ADHD family, what is the miracle cure and please can i have it by tonight?
secondly, does our hearing have an extra alert night setting?
i get that us ADHD folk are too sensitive to external stimuli but it is honestly barbaric that this happens even when we’re “unconscious”. can a girl get a small break, maybe a few hours?
when i do fall asleep — hallelujah — my catlike reflexes kick in. i wake up multiple times a night, and often it is because of something ridiculous like my neighbour laughing on this phone 3 houses from mine. this same brain is able to be entirely oblivious to quite a number of things during the day, but she seems to make up for it at night.
i have an addictive personality, so i have steered away from sleep medicines so far. after having tried many non-medicated options like meditation and an embarrassing amount of sleep ASMR & guided meditations to the best of my ability (which isn’t much, if i am being honest), i have decided that the pressure of having a good night’s sleep was just not worth it.
frustrated, defeated and having marinated in the pandemic nihilism for a while, i am now forced to ask: is sleep really that important?
it’s okay to have bad sleep.
yay, we’ve reached the “normalise XYZ” section of this post. basically, i have learnt that this vicious cycle of me chasing sleep unsuccessfully for years and me just trying harder the next night be the problem. everyone, especially in the mental health space, places such importance on figuring out your sleep hygiene that making someone fix their sleep is a no-brainer. however, if you are someone like me, whether ADHDer or not, this pressure of not having sorted out your sleep can make it worse for us to relax, calm down our anxieties and actually fall asleep.
“Sleep is like a cat: It only comes to you if you ignore it.” — — Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl
here are a few things i do and tell myself to make it easier instead:
- 5 hours are actually pretty okay. lot of people run on this.
- i feel tired today, but that doesn’t mean i will not have a good day.
- my night does not govern my next day, no matter what everyone else says. i can actually focus, i can actually go for that walk, i can actually be productive.
- if i do wake up in the middle of the night, i sit up. the counterintuitive act of resisting sleep makes it easier for me to fall asleep.
if you do have sleep troubles and would like to share your rambling thoughts with me, i would be glad.
