Why people with ADHD can’t sleep (and what actually helps) | Hyperfocus

Hinzugefügt: 2026-06-05

[00:00:00]I think the research shows that it's about 80% of people with ADHD will struggle with their sleep, which is a huge percentage. But then, you know, 80% I still don't know where this 20% is that's sleeping great.

[00:00:12]>> I'd love to meet them. [laughter] >> Me, too.

[00:00:14]>> You must be so well rested.

[00:00:16]>> Hello. Do you have ADHD? And if you do, are you really tired right now? Me, too.

[00:00:22]This is because I, like apparently you, and like many of us with ADHD, I'm what one would call [music] really bad at sleeping. I've always struggled to sleep on any schedule that would be considered even remotely [music] normal. And as I creep into my 40s and per menopause sneaks in, things have gotten worse. And it just seems like, I don't know, unfair. Like, can I just please sleep?

[00:00:42]Can I sleep, please? Research shows us that people with ADHD are way more likely to have a whole host of sleep issues. And in that kind of horrible Oraoro snake eating its tail kind of way, disrupted sleep also makes ADHD symptoms worse. I feel like I have tried everything that I can to fix my sleep.

[00:00:59]And yet here I am tired again. So today I'm bringing in Marley Bole. She is the co-founder of Sleepworks, a clinic that helps people like me get better sleep.

[00:01:10]Marley has a special focus on ADHD and today she's here to help us all get some rest.

[00:01:23]I have a [music] very hard time staying asleep. I get in bed, I can fall asleep, but I can't stay there. And I was kind of hoping we could do like a little bit of like a pretend I'm your patient thing.

[00:01:33]>> Sure, I'd love that.

[00:01:34]>> Is that okay? So, I'm curious like how would someone like you help someone like me?

[00:01:40]>> Great question, Ray. I love this. So, first I would ask you, you know, have you always been waking up throughout the night?

[00:01:45]>> Oh, yeah. Always forever.

[00:01:47]>> Always. Do you remember being a night owl as a little kid?

[00:01:50]>> Very well.

[00:01:51]>> Yeah.

[00:01:52]>> Yes.

[00:01:52]>> A lot of us have the story of like our parents having a really hard time getting us to go to bed and then trying to like basically dress us for school because we have one aisle.

[00:02:00]>> Yes. My mother has ADHD. I think my grandmother also did. And I would get up in the middle of the night and she liked watching Spanish soap operas. So, I have these vivid happy memories of sitting up at like midnight watching Coruson Salvah with my grandmother. [laughter] I think that's his brother's father's sisters. Maybe they're dead. I don't know, you know. [laughter] [gasps] >> Oh, well, at least it's a positive memory. Um, you know, that's that's wonderful. So, what I would suggest for you, Rey, is because you are naturally a night owl, what time would you say that you're waking up in the morning for?

[00:02:33]Generally, >> I have an 8-year-old, so I'm on a school schedule, so like 6:30.

[00:02:39]>> Okay. So, that's really early for a night owl. Your biology wants you to be asleep later and sleep later. So, we do get a bit of a a synergistic improvement in our sleep um quality when we line up our circadian rhythm with our sleep time.

[00:02:58]>> Okay, let's pause here for like a little sciency explanation. Your circadian rhythm is basically like your internal clock. It runs on a 24-hour cycle and it's regulated by light. Bluish daylight tells your brain, "Hey, it's time to be awake." And the orangey glow of sunset tells us to start releasing hormones like melatonin which prepare us for sleep. As neurode divergent people, we are also usually sensitive to light. I always say like part of the ADHD assessment should be like, "Do you ever turn on overhead lights?" And if you don't, it should be part of the [laughter] all of us hate it.

[00:03:30]>> So true.

[00:03:32]I'm a lamp girl for sure.

[00:03:34]>> We are lamp people 100%.

[00:03:36]>> And we lamp people also tend to have issues with our circadian rhythms.

[00:03:40]>> For about 75% of people with ADHD, they actually have a delay in their circadian rhythms by roughly 90 minutes compared to a neurotypical person. Yeah. So that means an hour and a half later to be able to fall asleep and an hour and a half later to be able to wake up. And not that a delayed circadian rhythm means you have difficulty with sleep, but it makes us night owls. And typically, we're living in a society that operates for morning larks.

[00:04:08]>> I feel like this is one of these many things where it's just that the ADHD brain does not work within the confines of what is expected in society. Like you have to have a 9 toive job because you have to make money and survive. But your brain is not built for that. So you are just tired all the time.

[00:04:26]>> We're just tired all the time. We're perpetually sleepd deprived and working at, you know, inoptimal times for our performance and our functioning.

[00:04:35]>> The world works on a timetable that is anathema to how ADHD brains operate. And unsurprisingly, that has realworld consequences. We were tired so we slept in and now we're late and we're rushing and when we're rushing, we forgot that really important thing and we don't have our homework and we don't have that work thing and we didn't pack our kids lunch and we are screwed. And there's shame in it, too. like a feeling like you're not able to function like you should be, sort of embarrassment and even self-lame. Add to this that a sleep deficit has a big impact on cognitive function, emotional regulation, and even physical health, and you are looking at a recipe for disaster. This is why I need to figure out how to sleep through the night, which Marley explained is also a circadian rhythm issue. The first part of your sleep when you fall asleep, your body might think that you're having a nap. And then the period of time that you're awake throughout the night, your body might think it's daytime. And then you're falling back to sleep probably right before your alarm clock goes off in the morning before you have to wake up at 6:30 to get your kid ready for school. Luckily, there are things we can do to entrain our circadian rhythm, which is like a fancy way to say line up your circadian rhythm with your actual schedule so you don't wake up at 2 a.m.

[00:05:41]every day. So, a very practical way to for people with ADHD to entrain their circadian rhythm is, and this is my favorite sleep tool is to get a pair of amber lensed glasses. Just cheap amber orange lens glasses. They change everything to kind of like an orangey glow. There's nothing special about them >> and they look cool.

[00:06:01]>> And they look cool. I think we're going to start like a new like fashion trend.

[00:06:04]Just for our audio listeners, I'm going to describe Marley has put on a pair of like kind of hip wfairer style glasses that have orange lenses and now I feel like we're at the beach.

[00:06:14]>> They're very cool. A lot of times when people with ADHD put these on for the first time, they're like, "Oh my gosh, it just feels like my eyeballs just took a break or they just took a drink of water. Like it it feels so good." And it's because a lot of our artificial light that we have in our homes is energy efficient, >> short wavelengths of light. It's harsh lighting and it's like irritating our brains a little bit. Um, so when we put on these amber glasses, it's very soothing, but if we put them on two to three hours before our goal bedtime, they're going to help our brain advance our circadian rhythms. So, we're falling asleep earlier. So, your brain starts to go, we just watched the sun go down.

[00:06:53]Start the down regulation process. And then when we're ready to go to sleep, we need our bedrooms to be completely dark.

[00:07:00]And there's a really simple test you can do at home to see if your bedroom is dark enough for sleep. You just hold your hand out at arms length. If you can see your hand at that distance with your lights off in your room, there's too much light for your brain to continuously secrete melatonin while you're sleeping. And so, a very inexpensive, easy tool is just an eye mask. And I really like these. I'm holding up a contoured eye mask. They're a couple of bucks. Inexpensive, contoured, so they don't rub our eyelashes. A lot of people don't like sleeping masks or eye masks because it's irritating. Um especially if you have any >> Yeah. like any like sensory issues, which I do as well.

[00:07:39]>> The contoured ones are minimal contact because they just sit on the outside of your orbital. So it doesn't really feel like you're you have something over your eyes.

[00:07:48]>> Got it. So can I ask you there are these kind of external tools like the eye mask, like the glasses. I have to admit, maybe it's vanity and maybe it's just practicality. It is unlikely that I'm gonna wear sunglasses for three hours before bed [laughter] every night in my apartment and like when I'm like out dinner with friends, you know, but is there anything I can be doing sort of more internally that can help me kind of learn to regulate my sleep a little bit better? Yeah, absolutely. So, cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia is considered the gold standard preferred firstline treatment for chronic insomnia.

[00:08:26]And it works really well for people with ADHD as well. And so one of the pieces that you can do that's kind of internal or behavioral work is undoing some of those maladaptive beliefs we have about our sleep.

[00:08:39]>> So the idea that you're a bad sleeper perpetuates the actuality of you being a bad sleeper.

[00:08:45]>> You got it. I know. I've had clients who are like, I can't even walk by my bedroom door in the evening because I look at my room as the torture chamber as soon as the sun goes down cuz they're anticipating such a struggle every night. And so, the first step to address some of these things is addressing those thoughts. They're not helpful and they're not even that accurate. There's no guarantee that if we have a bad night's sleep, we're going to have a terrible next day. Most of us with sleep problems have had poor night's sleep and our next day was perfectly fine. You know, we got through those days just fine. So, even just being more realistic about those things, like I might I might have a great day. There's a possibility I could have a good day. And that's cognitive restructuring.

[00:09:27]>> This is one of the reasons Marley is not a fan of smartwatches or like other wearables for sleep.

[00:09:33]>> We'll have people book appointments and they'll be like, "My Apple Watch says I'm getting 0% RAM."

[00:09:39]>> [laughter] >> And we're like, but you're you you're getting REM cuz you're here.

[00:09:43]So, the wearables across the board as of like today, there are not any wearables that have any accuracy or any reliable accuracy for sleep stages. There actually during the pandemic when everyone started tracking their sleep, they there was a term coined in that time. It's called orthosomnia and essentially it is the effect of people looking at their sleep data and it dictating how they've slept when it hasn't doesn't correlate with their sleep at all. So people will look at their sleep data in the morning. It says they slept poorly. Then they go in through their whole day being like I slept so poorly last night.

[00:10:20]>> It's almost like the opposite of the CBTI practice.

[00:10:23]>> It's the opposite. It's the cognitive restructuring the other way. It's almost validating I'm a bad sleeper.

[00:10:28]>> I have a question about that then. If I wake up in the middle of the night, I'm always in this position where I'm like, should I just get up and give up and like wait to get tired again, which traditionally has not worked that well for me, or should I kind of like white knuckle it and like, you know, turn in circles for 20 minutes until I eventually fall back to sleep somehow.

[00:10:47]>> Great question. I feel like this is something that a lot of people struggle with. And I'd actually recommend to get out of bed when you can't sleep, but with some guidelines around that, especially for people with ADHD, I call it the 2020 rule. If you're in bed for longer than 20 minutes awake, you got to get out of bed for at least 20 minutes to reset.

[00:11:08]>> Yeah, I admit I I'm not sure how I know how long I've been there. It always feels like an eternity.

[00:11:13]>> It feels like a long time. Well, our perception of time is influenced too by how miserable it is lying there. So, if you feel like h it's been a long time, it's already time to get up.

[00:11:22]>> Okay. [laughter] Don't wait it out, which is what I thought you should do.

[00:11:26]>> Yeah. You don't want to wait it out. You want to get out of bed. Go to a dark like a dimly lit room. You don't want to turn on any lights that you don't need to. If you have a pair of amber glasses, you can put those on to help navigate with some low lighting. And you want to have a plan to do something that's boring, not over stimulating, that is engaging enough that you're not going to doze off, but not so engaging that you're going to have a, you know, trouble task switching back to bed.

[00:11:52]>> So, for example, some things I like to do, I hate laundry. I think there's way too many steps to laundry. I don't understand why this hasn't been a streamlined process. [laughter] It's too many steps. So what I would do is my plan would be if I have to get up in the middle of the night, I would have a basket of unfolded laundry and I would just stand there and fold laundry for 20 minutes and then I would do some cognitive restructuring in that moment telling myself even if I can't get back to sleep, at least this annoying task is done tomorrow. And that was super helpful because it took the pressure off of falling back to sleep. But it also um you know it was boring enough and I think my body also was like enough with this waking up throughout the night. You do not want to be doing laundry. You hate it.

[00:12:39]>> Personally, I find folding laundry very zen. That said, it never occurred to me to get out of bed instead of like flipping like an angry pancake for an hour. And the idea that Marley had new advice to offer was a huge relief because like I said, I've never been good at sleeping, but these days things are on a whole new level. This is likely because I'm in my 40s and there's a lot of evidence that pmenopause can have a big effect on sleep, especially for women with ADHD. It sucks. So, I asked Marley, my dreamy Canadian sleep oracle, why this happens to so many of us and whether there's anything specific I can do about it.

[00:13:15]>> So, pmenopause affects our sleep because of the changes in our hormone levels, particularly our estrogen and progesterone.

[00:13:23]>> Is that also why I can't sleep before my period?

[00:13:25]>> Yes. So in the ludial phase, yes, like the week before your period, >> oh my god, >> it's the worst.

[00:13:32]>> A lot of people wor >> struggle so much and it certainly does impact us hormonally and that that does make an impact to our sleep. But the reason it affects people with ADHD so profoundly is because sleep deprivation in general exacer exacerbates symptoms of ADHD. So it becomes debilitating for a lot of women. So that's really interesting to me because I think I was understanding this backwards. I was thinking that pmenopause is sort of worse for people with ADHD in some way that I had yet to understand. Not what you're saying, which is permenopause has such a profound effect on sleep that it really exacerbates things for people with ADHD. That makes a lot of sense.

[00:14:18]>> Yeah.

[00:14:19]Marley says those CBTI techniques for reframing how we think about sleep can be really helpful for pmenopause and menopause as well. A lot of the symptoms that keep us up at night like hot flashes and night sweats, those don't tend to happen during deep sleep or RAM sleep. So, how we think about them is really important. So, one of the things that can kind of lighten that worry for people as they're going through these disruptions of their sleep throughout the night um in pmenopause is remembering, okay, I wasn't in my deep sleep. I was already awake and not to worry because when we get ourselves into, you know, start to worry like, oh no, tomorrow's going to be awful. I'm awake again. What if I can't get back to sleep? Those things will actually keep us awake. So, being able to be like, okay, I probably was already awake before this happened. Give myself a few minutes. I'll get back to sleep. That's way less disruptive and it just puts you on a better trajectory to not develop chronic insomnia.

[00:15:09]>> So, a lot of this is really about managing how you think about your sleep.

[00:15:14]A lot of it is >> and managing the anxiety piece, not so much the actual sleep of it all as the things that get in the way of the sleep.

[00:15:23]Like >> you got it.

[00:15:24]>> I do wonder because all of this is very rational. I also know as a person with ADHD who's gotten a lot of really rational, great advice in my life, but I don't always follow it that well. And when that happens, I do have a habit of turning to things that I think are maybe uh in my mind like a quick fix. Maybe I could just take this pill and I'll be better. So, Marley, why is melatonin not the wonder drug that I want it to be?

[00:15:49][gasps] >> I know. Wouldn't that be great if it was if we could just get this over- thecounter natural?

[00:15:54]>> Eat this candy and now I'm a great sleeper. Like, why?

[00:15:56]>> Oh, it'd be so wonderful, but it's not.

[00:15:58]And and the thing about melatonin, which I always, you know, like to tell people is melatonin in the sleep medicine world is almost never used as a sleeping aid.

[00:16:10]Really, >> almost never. It is used it's a chronobiotic. What?

[00:16:14]>> So melatonin's profile has a very limited amount of um efficacy to make us sleepy. So very minimal sedation. What melatonin actually is is it resets our circadian rhythm. It changes our clock.

[00:16:31]>> But if people with ADHD have a delayed circadian rhythm and melatonin can change your circadian rhythm, is it not then helpful to take it? Yeah, it can be helpful taken to take melatonin for a short period of time to help advance your circadian rhythm. So, that's where it can be very helpful for people with ADHD. Now, the thing is we want to take it about 10 to 12 hours before we want to be awake >> to set our clock. So, if you want to be awake at 7:00 a.m., you're taking it roughly 700 p.m. But you're not going to bed at 700 p.m. So, a lot of people are taking melatonin at bedtime.

[00:17:08]>> Yeah. and then it's actually causing more of that. It's solidifying their delay in the circadian rhythms. So, I don't generally recommend supplementary melatonin because I can't guarantee the quality of it. Um, I think that if you can get pharmaceutical grade melatonin in small dosage, um, it can be really helpful. However, I do believe that we can produce the, you know, a perfect amount of melatonin ourselves if we're just give ourselves more exposure to complete darkness as well.

[00:17:37]>> Okay. Now I want to turn maybe to some of the things that are a little less safe. When I would be having sleep disturbance, I would turn to uh benadryil or unisome or um dyenhydramine like a thing that I knew would knock me out and it did. It was great except I started noticing that I would wake up in a really bad mood. So taking anything like that whether it's the unisome or benadryil or graval or any of those sedating like antihistamines [clears throat] long term is not advised but taking any so any of the sleeping aids that are even prescribed are not intended for longterm use got it >> that is the problem for shortterm use.

[00:18:23]So if it's just the ludial phase, if it's a situation, maybe you're going through a stressful period of your life and it's going to be a shortterm 7 to 10 day period, that is how sleeping aids are actually being like intended to use.

[00:18:36]>> Yeah.

[00:18:37]>> And they can be how people take them, right?

[00:18:38]>> That's not how people are using them 100%. So the problem and and even why you would have experienced with like Unisome or Graal why you'd wake up in a bad mood and this is true across the board with any of these medications or over-the-counter drugs is it's sedation not sleep which are different processes.

[00:18:58]>> Got it.

[00:18:59]>> Yeah. And so sedation does provide that um subjective experience that we are asleep. So, it eliminates that terrible symptom of us lying in our beds tossing and turning and being mad that we're awake, which is excruciating, and that can be really helpful to eliminate that for a night or two, but it doesn't provide natural sleep where the our brains go through certain stages. And the biggest stage that would affect our mood and executive functions is our REM sleep, our rapid eye movement sleep, the stage of sleep that we do the bulk of our dreaming.

[00:19:33]>> Okay? Most sleeping aids disrupt that stage of sleep and make us spend more time in the lighter stages.

[00:19:39]>> And is that why you wake up grouchy?

[00:19:41]>> You wake up grouchy or you know the hung over feeling of feeling sedated and it's because you didn't sleep. You were sedated.

[00:19:49]>> So Marley is what you're telling me there is no shortcut? Is that really is that what we're saying here? Is that >> isn't that so disappointing? Right. both [laughter] you are validating the fact that people with ADHD do have a harder time sleeping and that changes in hormones like before your period or perry menopause or menopause also make that harder. But there is no like cheat code and we simply have to be like thorough and thoughtful and use sensible sounds like cheap and not highly technological tools to help us manage this in a way that is sustainable.

[00:20:27]>> Absolutely. And I know that's so disappointing.

[00:20:30]>> I know that's so disappointing.

[00:20:32][laughter] >> Give me the magic pill.

[00:20:34]>> Yeah.

[00:20:35]>> But I will give you some good news about all of this with the circadian rhythms.

[00:20:40]Specifically, if we most people, it doesn't take long to regulate your circadian rhythms. Some people notice an improvement the very first time that they they do a 24-hour of, you know, amber glasses on at night, then the the blackout eye mask. Even if you can't put these on three hours before bed, 20 minutes is better than zero minutes. And then in the morning, using something like a bright light therapy lamp. So, one of these little guys um often used for seasonal effective disorder to get artificial sunlight with sleep. Even little bits make it and make big changes. So, um you know, I always tell people too like if we can get 15 minutes more of sleep every night, that's over 91 hours of extra sleep in a year.

[00:21:22]That's a lot of extra recovery time for our executive functions. [laughter] >> So, we don't I mean this finally some good news. Thank you. We don't have to be perfect. These don't have to be perfectly followed. You can fluctuate and still get back on track even if you've gotten off track. That is music to my ADHD ears. I'll be the first to say that advice from doctors, especially when it comes to ADHD, is easier said than done. But it's good to know that when it comes to sleep, small changes can actually make a really big difference. And Marley isn't just an expert. She's got firsthand experience.

[00:21:56]One of us. One of us. She has ADHD. And she went through most of her life as a bad sleeper.

[00:22:04]>> It was suggested that I go for an assessment for ADHD and went for an assessment and of course was diagnosed with ADHD. And it was it was a surprise to me, but it was a surprise to no one else in my life. Like even I've recently ran into my middle school teacher and she was like, "I thought you had an ADHD diagnosis."

[00:22:22]She's like, "I've known since you were in grade seven." Like, "What are you talking about?" But what I loved was working with, you know, in sleep deprivation and and and working with people that are sleepd deprived. There was such a huge overlap that existed between how people are functioning cuz even neurotypical people, if they're sleepd deprived, their executive functions tank. And then all of a sudden it's like very hard to make a plan and execute a plan >> which makes it harder to get back on track. Yeah. And then started working with people with ADHD and just recognizing, oh my gosh, this is a huge problem for a lot of us and just realizing that a lot of the behavioral sleep medicine strategies are not adapted to for people that are neurode divergent. So taking out a lot of the steps makes things more digestible and sets us up for better success because behavioral change is hard for everybody, but then it's so much harder when we have ADHD and sleep deprivation. That's kind of how I got started and it's just been >> the best experience and I think I I found my my people [laughter] and it's it's truly the most rewarding, you know, career I could possibly ask for. helping people sleep is not no pun intended, but it is a dream. [laughter] Thank you so much to Marley Bole, who is herself a dream, [music] and to all our sleepy ADHD listeners. We really hope this helped. We'll link to Marley's sleep clinic in the show notes. [music] See you in 2 weeks.

[00:24:05]with them.