Sleep and ADHD

Living with undiagnosed ADHD meant struggling with insomnia for decades. Starting in the fifth grade it affected my daily life, and as a young mother I couldn’t afford to let it continue to leave me as a zombie.

Since building my own unconventional sleep routine, I've learned that ADHD brains often need different approaches to rest. Here's what I discovered, and why some "wrong" ways to sleep might be exactly right for you.

In this article you will learn what I took nearly a year to sort out for myself. I will tell you what I discovered worked for me and my spicy brain and list what else I’ve tried. I will try to explain why what works for typical brains does not work for all of us.

My Sleep and ADHD

This year I learned that I have ADHD. It makes a lot of sense that the normal “sleep hygiene” techniques spouted by self-help articles and television doctors don’t work for me.

Keeping my phone out of my bedroom did not work because I couldn’t quiet the voice that told me I might need it. That voice had some idea that I needed to complete something on my phone.

My brain had so many loops, as David Allen talks about, that I could never believe I didn’t have one to worry about. Having my phone next to my bed lowered the anxiety that I would miss something important — even if I never had something important pop up.

I don’t think this is an addiction issue. I’m able to leave my phone at home and I can put it down, I just use it for things I once used paper and pen for and for entertaining my brain to help it relax. I’m not alone. The ADHD sub of reddit is full of people complaining that this tip doesn’t work for them.

Experts who don’t have ADHD don’t often take into account our differences. With racing thoughts, time blindness, and sensory issues that far exceed those experienced by others, we often need to find different answers. Trying the exact opposite of what is suggested, if the original tip wasn’t for you, can help you learn what works best.

Give yourself permission to find your own answers, rather than taking those given by everyone else.

My Journey

It took me months to figure most of this out, trying everything I read that was meant to help and its opposite. For this reason I learned that many of the things that we’re told not to do often don’t work for me. It’s only in the last year I’ve gotten my routine down—more than 17 years after I decided to stop listening to the experts.

Some of my strange bed behaviors are at least tangentially backed by science. But none of what worked for me is guaranteed to work for you, but it might help to know that you can do some weird stuff and sleep better.

ROUTINE ELEMENTS

Routines help those of us with ADHD counteract our decision paralysis and time-blindness. Alarms (often two within 5 minutes of each other), keep us on task and make sure we have the opportunity to get the sleep we need. Rituals ready our mind to slow down and stop racing.

A Wind-Down Ritual

My wind-down ritual is the most recently adopted part of my nightly routine.

This three-step process gradually steps down the attention needed. I’ve learned about “soft engagement” and my ritual slowly gets “softer” in this way with each of the three steps.

• Actively learning with Duolingo or ukulele lessons. I especially like using my body a bit with the ukulele before moving on.
• A routine physical activity and listening (brushing my teeth and listening to the Bible — please don’t think I’m one of those Christians)
• A gentle, quiet game and listening to an audiobook

Soft Engagement

While this may seem counterintuitive to traditional sleep advice, it works because of a concept called soft engagement. Soft engagement is a strategy that works well for many with ADHD, specifically for me it’s a good way to switch activities throughout the day.

Allowing yourself to engage with low-pressure, flexible tasks can work with how the ADHD brain naturally functions. Without realizing it, I used parallel activities, a soft-engagement approach, to fold my laundry (while watching TV), get my dishes done (while listening to an audiobook), and remain focused at meetings (while doodling and making up stories in my notes).

Body doubling is another version of soft engagement most of us are familiar with. By having someone performing similar tasks (or as I will sometimes do, having a podcast or video on where someone is doing similar tasks) we can find motivation from the sense of companionship and reduce feelings of isolation — something which has often haunted me when I needed to get things done.

The popularity of LofiGirl among those of many us with ADHD is a testament to how well body doubling can work, even if the other person is an animated character sitting at a desk while we get writing or homework done.

I think of my nightly ritual as a form of task initiation, a version of soft engagement that helps gain the needed momentum to get prepared for the switch from day activities to sleep.

The three steps that progressively move from active engagement (learning) to less active and light involvement (resource management game while essentially being read to) helps my attention drift and slowly quiet my always-on brain.

Having my phone in bed—actively using it—is exactly the opposite of what all the books and experts say, and I’m sure keeping the blue lights and addictive device out of bed is best for most people. For me, it is the only way to settle.

Nightly Ritual Specifics

I generally play Outlander 2. It’s a muted-color resource management game that has a sweet nature’s sound background and allows me to listen to my book (or finish listening to the section of the Bible I have for my daily study) while winding down.

Resource management games are my favorite method of task switching throughout the day. It’s easy to put a game down at the spur of the moment, they don’t normally have small goals that lead to larger goals, which is always dangerous for my attention, and they seem to avoid the overly bright and loud graphics and sounds like games like Candy Crush.

I listen to the same books on repeat, with timers for 15 minutes (with soft “sleep-phones”). If I don’t fall asleep a few minutes after the timer has gone off I restart it. On the third time I set it for 45 minutes. It takes me a year or longer to get through the books (Pride and Prejudice which I also read once a year during the day, and The Wheel of Time Series by Robert Jordan). I know them nearly by heart and it doesn’t matter if I miss some of them.

Defined Endings

The other benefit of these short silly activities is that there is a defined ending to each of them. I do 3 lessons on Duolingo or 1 from my ukulele book before I go upstairs. I have a Bible study program I’m following, so that activity is finished when I’ve reached the end. The Bible app I use automatically stops at the end of the daily session. If it extends past my toothbrushing and foot lotion/massaging I play Outlander until it’s over. It doesn’t usually.

I let myself play Outlander until I have built a specific building or completed/failed the campaign. Then I set the 15 minute timer for whichever book I’m reading.

With each activity having a set conclusion it feels like I am closing three important loops before I snuggle into my blankets. This feeling is important for me, since open loops can irritate my brain in the background.

Clear endpoints for each activity helps prevent that “just one more” trap, losing my grasp of time as I try to find one more excellent post or beat one more Candy Crush level.

Schedule

Working backwards from wake-up and keeping a schedule every night—whether weekday or weeknight makes sleeping less of a decision every night. Late at night, with my brain still running but exhausted, was a recipe for decision paralysis for me. Of course everything is more exciting than going to bed. So I don’t give myself the choice.

This completely ruined my social life, but if we’re completely honest, my unhappy, tired face wasn’t making me any friends. I’ve found ways to hang out with people while still going to bed within 20 minutes of my preferred bedtime most nights.

Journaling helps me see what activities and friends have been worth deviating from my plan.

The week I experimented with not following this plan was hilarious. I stayed up until I “felt” tired and like I should go to bed. I remember that near the end of it I was up at 4 am reading blogs and fell asleep the next day as soon as my husband was home from work.

Going to bed at the same time each night took some discipline, but it also meant going to bed at the same time as my husband. I think the body doubling aspect of him reading in bed while I finished brushing my teeth and flipping through a magazine was comforting.

Now I head to bed even if he’s up working on a deployment. My body is ready to rest and my brain doesn’t fight it.

Mental Strategies

Individual needs vary, but many of our racing minds can be quieted by answering the questions they ask. My own brain asked “What if I need to remember something important?”, “What if I don’t get 8 hours of sleep?”, “How awful of a person am I that I can’t just do this?” Finding ways to answer these questions (and forgive my self-flagellation.

Acceptance of Limitations

The first step to me finding sleep regularly is another soft engagement approach: reduced resistance.

The best lesson I remember from my old psychiatrist was to stop telling myself I “should” do something. Replacing all my “should”s with “might” or “could,” allowed me to open up space to make changes.

Instead of telling myself “I should get 8 hours of sleep each night,” I said I might do that, if I could just find ways to do it.

This has helped me in so many ways, not just sleep.

Resting≈Sleeping

Accepting that “resting” was the next best thing to “sleeping,” and not—as everyone else said—getting up to keep the bed only for sleeping.

I started reading self-help books on sleeping in college. One of the first things every one of them mentioned was getting up after you hadn’t been able to sleep for some set amount of time—usually around 20 minutes.

For over a decade I would get up and do something when I couldn’t sleep. I would read in a chair, sweep, watch TV.

None of it helped me create a “sleeping” place in my bed. Instead it just made me hate my bed.

At some point someone (and I wish I remember who) told me that resting my brain and body was a good compromise. I could let part of my mind race and do a body scan https://www.mindful.org/beginners-body-scan-meditation/ while I tightened each muscle and relaxed them. I would think of every red thing I’d seen that day, and then every orange thing, and so on.

Called “quiet wakefulness," resting this way isn’t as good as sleeping, but it’s the next best thing to it, for me. I find that if I relax into it and stop worrying about why I can’t sleep, I will often drift to sleep eventually.

This step was one of the first that helped me to stop hating the process of going to bed. Not being able to sleep often feels like a curse—one that you force yourself to live out every night. Teaching myself that lying in bed without sleeping wasn’t something to be avoided lowered my anxiety about doing just that.

So many of my discussions with my therapist about my ADHD involve me learning to accept and forgive the differences I’ve hated my entire life. I look at this step as one of the first times I successfully did that.

Bedside Notebook

Much like keeping my phone on my bedside table, keeping a notebook and pen nearby allows me to tell my always-on voice that if anything important comes up I can write it down.

In the years since I started doing this, I’ve only had to write down a few things while I’m falling asleep, but I have found it really useful those times, in addition I often find I remember things to do during the day when I first wake up.

Also, if I have a notebook with me I can avoid picking up my phone.

ENVIRONMENT

While managing our thoughts is crucial, our physical environment plays an equally important role—ADHD can come with increased sensory sensitivity.

It doesn’t take much to disturb my attention, whether I’m focused on writing or trying to fall asleep. Blocking sounds and finding ways to keep the light from disrupting my sleep patterns has been vital in getting sleep each night.

In addition, controlling body temperature from warm to cool has been proven to aid in the process of falling asleep. I’ve found the sensation of cooling down makes my eyelids feel heavy and it’s a lot easier to fall asleep.

Temperature Control

Keeping our bedroom between 66º and 72º helps a lot, with our thermostat lowering the temperature an hour before bedtime.

In addition I keep a reusable menopause pillow in my freezer. Originally bought when I twisted my ankle, it’s perfect for icing bruises and overused muscles. One night I brought it to bed because I just felt hot and I didn’t want to remove my weighted blanket.

Stretching it out in my bed while I get ready so it cools the sheets and then laying it against my spine cools my body and is an indication that it’s time to sleep. We already keep our home pretty cold at night, but this little extra step can be really helpful when I feel buzzy and excited.

I also got rid of my top sheet and keep my weighted comforter untucked from the end of the bed, allowing myself to take my legs out as I need.

One of my stims has always been tucking my toes into the space between by footboard and mattress and rocking my entire body up and down as I move my feet. With that area free it doesn’t feel like I’m squishing my feet into the space.

Red Light

We keep our bedside lamps at 85 percent in a red light. If either of us stays up late the light doesn’t seem to affect us. I have blue-blocking glasses, but I don’t now how much those really help when I’m staring at my phone. I do know that the red lights often seem like they’re not on at all.

The bulbs we have are no longer produced, but they’ve lasted us for more than 15 years. We set them up with our phones and can tell our phones to turn them off. Much like I say “See you later ducklings” a the end of my sessions on Threads, telling the phone to turn off my bedroom lamp feels like a completion of the end of the day.

PHYSICAL COMFORT

Tiny discomforts can change a difficult night into an impossible one. Setting myself up for a good night means preparing for things I know set me off.

Socks!

Socks are partially great for temperature control, but they also preemptively prevent sensory issues, like a ragged toenail (ugh!). I put on some peppermint foot cream and then pull my sleep socks on.

Peppermint foot cream helps me to be aware of the rest of my body while I lay in the dark. When I’m up in the small hours of the morning I often feel like I’m only my thoughts. The cool burning of the lotion creates a better awareness.

The cream also helps keep my heel skin smooth so it won’t catch on socks or otherwise bug me throughout the day.

Heated eye mask

I use a heated eye mask on my jaw before falling asleep. My TMJ, an issue many ADHDers suffer from due to anxiety or just the need to move, can wake me up at night, heat helps ease the pain.

Additional Tools, Apps, and the Rest of the Day

Children’s Melatonin

I don’t take this regularly anymore, but whenever I start having problems sleeping I pull it out.

I started by taking the adult dosages, but they didn’t work. Reading more about it, I learned that the 3-5 mg that most of these pills contain is too much for everyone and can actually ruin your sleep.

Children’s melatonin tends to be .5 mg, which is the amount that works for me, taken with dinner. It’s important to take it a few hours before bed because it is meant to mimic hormones, not as a sleep medication. Not that I’m a doctor. It can also interact with medications you take!

When I started on Effexor I had a hard time staying asleep, I went back to taking melatonin and I think it helped, mostly because I immediately went from waking up 3 times a night to sleeping through.

When I Wake-Up: Nothing Much Happens

Nothing Much Happens is a fantastic podcast. Each episode the amazing writer, Kathryn Nicolai, reads a calming, not very exciting (I really can’t call them boring!) story and then reads it again. She explains at the beginning of each episode that listening and thinking about the story can train your brain to sleep. I have listened to it and fallen asleep during the first story, during the second, and—once or twice—while trying to remember everything that happened in the story.

I don’t know why I choose not to listen to it every night. I love everything about it. I think I worry about being dependent on something that has the possibility of ending at some point. I also like knowing that I have something in my back pocket in case my normal things don’t work.

MyNoise

When I was first getting a hang of this a decade and a half ago and would still wake up 3 or 4 times a night, or wake up and not be able to fall asleep I included the app MyNoise in my routine.

For some reason my brain seeks the edges/repetitions in most white noise, and the white noise machines that the psychology field likes so much disturbed my tensor timpani muscle. I think I was constantly trying to make sense of what was happening. I also didn’t like how difficult it was to hear things outside of our bedroom.

MyNoise doesn’t have those issues. You can build soundscapes with multiple inputs and I don’t know if it’s because of layering or something else, but I can’t find the repetition. Unlike coffee shop noises I used to use, I don’t hear someone saying the same thing every 7.5 minutes.

My favorite mixes (which I still use, just not usually in bed) involve Tibetan bells, wind, and cats purring. Cats purring seems to settle my nerves very well.

The app allows you to mix the volume of various pieces within each track and to vary how loud each is on a randomizer.

You can also listen to it in the background while you listen to other things. It is 100% the greatest app for people who like to have noise in the background and I don’t think I could have lived through the last few years of being undiagnosed without it.

Unfortunately, it isn’t available at the App Store anymore. It’s still on the web at mynoise.net. I am so sad it’s gone.

Getting into the sun in the morning

Getting outdoors with my dog in the morning and waking my body up helps me keep an internal clock. I’m sure you can read more about this somewhere (everywhere) but it’s difficult to understand how important it truly is until you’ve done it yourself.

Tips That Didn’t Work for Me

Not everything was meant for you. It’s okay that not everything was meant for me. It’s important to recognize what doesn’t work, even as we celebrate those that do. These were the things I expected to work that didn’t. Reflecting on why these didn’t work helped me find what would

Gratitude Journaling

Gratitude journaling has always been detrimental to my depression. Repeating each day that I’m grateful for my family, or that the weather was nice, or some ridiculous thing actually makes me focus too much on the fact that not everyone has those wonderful things and that I take them for granted most of the time. It also makes me feel bad that I’m depressed and that these happy things do not make me happy. Guilt is not great for falling asleep.

Instead: I have found that 1Second Every Day is great for me actually noticing what is great about my life in the moment. I love going through the videos at random times too, which brings up these good times and keeps them top of mind.

Regular Journaling

Much like gratitude journaling, journaling at night often left me thinking about what I should have done instead of what I did well.

Instead: I journal in the morning. The additional space between the day things happened and the morning after seems to give me enough of a buffer to look at events with a clearer eye. It also has me looking forward to the current day and days to come, instead of only looking back at the last 16 or so hours.

Showering

I don’t know what it is about showering and ADHD, but my daughter and I both love and hate to shower. My current theory is that it is a planned set of activity switching that’s difficult to get excited for, and the sensory inputs might get to be too much. Once in it’s hard to get us out.

Showering before bed was great for temperature control, but it left me with too many tasks I wish I’d completed or not raced through: pumicing my feet, putting on moisturizer, etc. I also sometimes woke in the morning with the feeling that I wanted to shower but feeling guilty for showering twice (especially since I’ll shower after exercising too).

Instead: I use the menopause pillow I keep in my freezer. I also occasionally use a small migraine heating pad on my jaw. I’ve found the slow movement from hot to cold makes my body settle into a place I can sleep.

Reading (visually)

I read all the time in high school, except when I was going to sleep. My husband reads in bed. I try every so often to grab a book and read as I’m falling to sleep, but either I’m too bored with the book to stay engaged or I’m too interested and keep turning pages long after he’s fallen asleep.

TL;DR: Quick Tips for ADHD Sleep

Everyone's brain is different, but these strategies might help you find what works for you:

🌙 CORE STRATEGIES

• Embrace "soft engagement" instead of fighting it—try gentle games or audiobooks while winding down
• Use "children's" melatonin (0.5mg) instead of adult doses if you need it
• Create a predictable wind-down sequence with clear endpoints for each activity
• Accept that resting is valuable even when you can't sleep

🛏️ ENVIRONMENT HACKS

• Keep your bedroom cool (66-72°F)
• Use red lights instead of white/blue
• Consider a cooling pillow for temperature regulation
• Wear socks (new socks!) to prevent sensory distractions

🧠 MENTAL TRICKS

• Keep a bedside notebook for racing thoughts
• Replace "should sleep" with "could sleep" thinking
• Use familiar audiobooks/podcasts that won't overstimulate
• Don't force yourself out of bed when restless

☀️ DAILY HABITS

• Get morning sunlight
• Stick to your bedtime (even on weekends)
• Use body-doubling when possible
• Track what works (and what doesn't) for you

Remember: Breaking traditional sleep rules isn't failing - it's finding what works for your unique brain.