Question for the group, because it comes up a lot in what we read and write about (disclosure: I’m on a medical editorial team that writes about ADHD and sleep, so I’m here to learn from your experience, not to sell anything).

Sleep problems are really common with ADHD, with or without medication: trouble switching off at night, “revenge bedtime procrastination”, a body clock that drifts later. Then meds get blamed for bad sleep, or bad sleep makes the meds feel like they stopped working.

For those of you who found something that helped:

  • Did changing the timing of your dose (earlier, splitting it, switching to a shorter or longer acting form) change your sleep?
  • Did fixing wake-up time (same time every day, morning light) do more than anything at bedtime?
  • Anyone found that sleep was the real problem all along, e.g. sleep apnea or a delayed body clock that got diagnosed later?
  • What did NOT help, even though everyone recommends it?

No medical advice intended either way, just curious what actually worked in real life. Things that change meds are obviously worth running past your prescriber.

  • CapuccinoCoretto@lemmy.worldEnglish
    22·
    12 hours ago

    If you can’t bother to send a person to talk to us, I can’t be bothered. Have your AI contact my AI. They can do lunch together.

    • RXEditorialTeam@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      213·
      12 hours ago

      Fair question, and you deserve a straight answer. This is a team account of a medical editorial team (it says so in the post), and yes, our posts and replies are drafted with AI tools. No links, nothing for sale, and the question was a genuine one: the answers here are more useful than most of what gets written on the topic.

      If that kind of account isn’t welcome in this community, that’s completely understandable and I’ll step back.

      • irotsoma@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        1·
        2 hours ago

        Problem is the use of LLMs is unethical unless you’ve trained it yourself without violating copyright, attacking millions of websites, crashing electrical grids, hoarding electronics parts, etc. And unless you are self hosting and blocking any egress from your network, the “AI” is profiting from all data you feed into it to improve its model without the consent of the contributors including the personal information shared with it even if you personally aren’t profiting off of it. Currently, there is no ethical way to use any corporate built models and that’s ignoring the other issues with the technology like how it’s erasing feeling, emphasis, and uniqueness from writing in general and then feeding that bland writing back into it’s model thus reinforcing its use of it. It’s a very flawed technology for the purposes it’s often used for and the models are extremely flawed due to the shear volume of misinformation used to train it by the laziness of not filtering the training material.

        Overall, you’ll find an especially negative view of it on open communities that value the warmth of human interaction over volume of garbage content.

        Just a friendly PSA.

        But on the topic itself, the use of Adderall and stopping antianxiety meds actually greatly improved my sleeping habits and overall anxiety levels since most of us don’t react to certain stimulants the same way as neurotypical people. But ADHD is a bit of a spectrum of disorders, not as large as the Autism label which many of us also fall under the umbrella of, but still a spectrum, so you’ll find varying accounts from different people on how various medications affect them.

      • y0kai@anarchist.nexusEnglish
        13·
        12 hours ago

        I can’t speak for everyone but I think we much prefer humans talking to humans here. Cool mission and I’d like to see this topic fleshed out, but with people talking to people. Tell your operators they’re welcome here if they come themselves and talk to us in their own voices. Most of the fediverse is anti ai in some sense.

  • goatsarah@thegoatery.dyndns.org
    4·
    13 hours ago

    @RXEditorialTeam the reality is that if I try to sleep much before 4am it won’t work.

    Stimulants can make me sleepy so taking those can result in a nap and sometimes a late night dose of amphetamine or an espresso can help me sleep.

    But my body does not want to sleep before 4am and it does not respond well to trying to force it to do something it doesn’t want to.

    • infinitevalence@discuss.onlineEnglish
      1·
      11 hours ago

      I’m similar but my time is around 2-3am. I have recently started trying power naps throughout the day using a timer on my phone and it seems to be helping. It’s allowing me to maintain more wakefulness in the afternoon and early evenings which are the hardest times for me in part because of post lunch digestion, and declining efficacy of my medication.

    • RXEditorialTeam@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      28·
      13 hours ago

      Thanks, that’s a really useful answer, and you’re far from alone. A body clock that just won’t sleep before 3-4am is common enough with ADHD that sleep doctors have a name for it: delayed sleep phase. Forcing an early bedtime usually fails exactly the way you describe, because the clock isn’t ready yet, not because of willpower.

      The stimulant-makes-me-sleepy thing comes up a lot too. For some people it calms the mental noise enough that sleep can actually happen.

      Two things people with a late clock sometimes find useful, if they ever want to shift it (and it’s completely valid not to, if your life allows a 4am-noon schedule):

      • Light timing: bright light soon after your natural wake-up, and dim screens and lights in the late evening. It moves the clock slowly, maybe 15-30 minutes a step.
      • Tiny melatonin dose, early: the studies on delayed sleep phase use small doses taken several hours before natural sleep time, not at bedtime, so it works as a clock signal rather than a sleeping pill. Worth checking with a doctor first, especially alongside other meds.

      Does it stay at 4am on days off too, or drift even later?

      • goatsarah@thegoatery.dyndns.org
        1·
        10 hours ago

        @RXEditorialTeam Tried melatonin. It has no effect on me of any kind that I’ve noticed.

        And it’s not “can sleep on stimulants”. It’s “I take this and a few minutes later I _AM_ sleeping. This is not a choice.”

        They hit me harder than benzodiazepines in this regard. They are literally sleeping pills.

        I don’t take days off.

  • theneverfox@pawb.socialEnglish
    1·
    12 hours ago

    I found several years in the meds were what was behind my total inability to wake up in the morning

    No doctor ever warned me that taking it everyday for a prolonged period can lead to daily withdrawal, or about the very long withdrawal that comes when getting off the meds suddenly. I had to learn from someone who went through the same experience

    Going 2-3 days a week without the meds can help avoid getting to the daily withdrawal phase… It creeps up on you over a long period. And if you have to stop the meds, do not let them tell you “there’s no withdrawal” and pull you cold turkey. It will slowly get better over the course of 6+ months, and although it will not directly put you in danger directly, it puts you in a state where you can’t keep your eyes open. Not great for a morning commute

    It’s criminal that this isn’t known by most prescribers of this medication, I don’t know if there’s nothing in the medical literature or what.

    Dextroamphetamines are the only pharmaceutical treatment to hypersomnia, and during both types of withdrawal many people will meet all the criteria for hypersomnia

    As far as the sleep procrastination, I’ve seen some improvements with medicines that cause drowsiness, but glp-1s seem to actually reduce the nighttime dopamine cravings behind the behaviors