ADHD and Sleep: Getting Through the Time Change
This Sunday, November 1, clocks fell back an hour. Most people will get through it with a slightly off Monday and forget about it by midweek. In a household with ADHD, a shift in the sleep schedule can throw off the whole week.
This is the last post in our ADHD Awareness Month series. We saved sleep for the end because it affects nearly everything we’ve written about this past month, from focus in the classroom to adults who spent years running on too little rest.
Why ADHD and sleep are so closely tied
Sleep problems are common with ADHD at every age. Kids may fight bedtime for an hour and then wake up exhausted after what should have been a restful night. Adults often describe a second wind that arrives around 10 p.m., right when they should be winding down. Part of the reason this happens seems to involve the body’s internal clock. A research group in the Netherlands estimated that about 70 percent of adults with ADHD have trouble falling asleep in a way that fits a delayed sleep pattern. In other words, their bodies are ready for sleep later than the clock says they should be. School and work still start at the same time, so the result is a steady sleep debt.
Sleep and ADHD also feed into each other. Poor sleep makes it harder for anyone to focus and keep frustration in check, and those are the same areas where ADHD already makes life harder. After a short night, ADHD symptoms can look a lot worse than they do on a well-rested day.
What the time change does
Falling back asleep sounds easy, since everyone gets an extra hour. In practice, it shifts the timing of light, meals, and bedtime, and the body needs a few days to catch up. Kids tend to wake at their usual time on the old clock, which now means 5:30 instead of 6:30. Evenings also get dark much sooner, so the late afternoon can drag and bedtime starts to feel arbitrary. If someone’s internal clock already struggles to stay on schedule, that adjustment can take longer than a few days.
Tips for ADHD and sleep during the time change
Morning light is one of the strongest signals the internal clock gets. Open the blinds as soon as everyone is up, or step outside for a few minutes before school or work. In the evening, dim the lights and put screens away an hour before bed when you can, since bright light late in the day pushes sleep later. Another good practice is to keep the bedtime routine the same even though the clock is different. Kids with ADHD usually do better with a predictable sequence, like a bath and then a book.
If sleep problems keep going well past the time change, talk with your physician. Loud snoring or daytime sleepiness that doesn’t improve deserves a medical look. Some ADHD medications can affect sleep too, so let your prescriber know if bedtime has become a struggle, and please don’t change a medication on your own.
Where self-regulation fits in
Falling asleep depends a lot on how easily the body can shift out of a busy, alert state into a calm one. That shift is hard for many people with ADHD, who describe lying in bed with a mind that won’t slow down no matter how tired they are.
At Austin Biofeedback & Neurofeedback Center, our licensed therapists use several kinds of training that work on self-regulation. Heart rate variability (HRV) training and biofeedback use real-time feedback on breathing, heart rhythm, and muscle tension, and they give people practical tools to use at bedtime as well as during the day.
Neurofeedback training works toward greater flexibility in brainwave activity, so moving between alert and settled gets easier over time. All of these fit alongside good sleep habits and medical care, and every person responds differently.
Wrapping up ADHD Awareness Month
This year’s ADHD Awareness Month theme was “A Community of Support,” and we tried to write each post for the people doing that supporting, whether that’s a parent reading a report card or an adult finally putting a name to something they’ve lived with for years. If anything in this series sounded familiar, we’d be glad to talk with you. Call us at 512-794-9355 or schedule a consultation through the contact link on this website.
