In this episode, hosts Ash and Dusty tackle the complex relationship between sleep and ADHD. They discuss how sleep issues are prevalent among individuals with ADHD, with statistics suggesting that up to 90% struggle with some form of sleep disorder. The conversation highlights the challenges clients face in recognizing the connection between their mood, cognitive functioning, and sleep quality. Ash emphasizes the importance of clients experiencing well-rested nights to understand the benefits of sleep, while Dusty shares strategies for creating effective bedtime rituals and managing sleep procrastination.
The hosts explore various approaches tailored to individual needs, from establishing calming bedtime routines to the potential use of melatonin as a supplement. They acknowledge that not every solution works for everyone and that deeper sleep disorders may require professional intervention. Throughout the episode, they encourage listeners to take small, manageable steps toward improving sleep quality and to remain patient with themselves in the process. This discussion provides valuable insights into how ADHD impacts sleep and offers practical tips for those seeking better rest.
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Episode Transcript:
[00:00:00] Ash: Hi, I am Ash, [00:00:02] Dusty: I’m Dusty. [00:00:03] Ash: and this is Translating ADHD. [00:00:08] Dusty: I have a new coaching group coming up soon, so if y’all have been wanting to do some coaching with me, now is your opportunity. The group starts in May. It runs on Thursdays from May to August. We’re looking for about six people. And you can find out more by going to https://www.adhdstudio.ca/ or www.vancouveradadhdcoaching.com, or you can just hit me up on Blue Sky, Twitter threads, Instagram, Facebook or TikTok. [00:00:42] Ash: You’re everywhere. Unlike me, I’m nowhere. And you’re everywhere. [00:00:46] Dusty: As per our discussion on social media. [00:00:48] Ash: So Dusty, you wanna tell our listeners what we’re talking about today? [00:00:52] Dusty: Today we’re talking about sleep. [00:00:55] Ash: Dun Dun! [00:00:57] Dusty: The terror of all people with ADHD. [00:00:59] Ash: For sure. This is a tough topic and one that I think I have coached, if not every client I’ve ever worked with, certainly the vast majority of clients. This is something that we need to look at and address at some point. [00:01:15] Dusty: Well, I think that sleep is something that, again, last week we were talking about how phone usage is a really common topic for my coaching clients, so is sleep. Always a present issue. I have heard it said that up to 90% of people with ADHD struggle with some sleep issue or another, whether that is sleep apnea, insomnia, delayed sleep phase disorder.And I think the statistic, I could be wrong, is about 75% of people with delayed sleep phase disorder also have ADHD. It’s one of those things that gets in our way in so many ways. It could be interfering with work, it could be interfering with mood, it definitely impacts energy and executive functioning, right?
But it also can impact your long-term health issues. Like if you’re chronically under sleeping, there could be a lot of implications for your long-term health. And we see that ADHD untreated is associated with poor health outcomes.
So all of these things are mixed up together and I find it goes either one of two ways with clients. Either they’ve not tried anything and working on sleep is gonna be really easy because there’s so many things we can do or they’ve tried everything and they’re feeling really hopeless and it’s a touchy subject because when you’ve already been trying and your physiology is working against you, it can be so disempowering and frustrating to hear the same basic suggestions being thrown at you.
[00:02:43] Ash: Dusty, I also think one of the biggest challenges that we have when it comes to sleep as people with ADHD is we are not good at noticing. We are not good at connecting my grumpy mood today to my lack of sleep last night. And particularly for my clients who are chronically underslept, that’s just been a lifelong experience.Those clients don’t even know what being well-rested feels like. So for them, this feels like a baseline and it can be kind of hard when you’re already overwhelmed, when you feel like there’s not enough hours in the day. And certainly when you feel like sleep is the only time that you get time to yourself.
So many, even my clients who don’t have children, so many of my adult clients, you work all day, you come home, you make dinner, you deal with life, and then it’s time for you, right? It’s “me time”. And that can be really enamoring and lead to sleep procrastination behavior. So for my clients who have no idea what it even feels like to be well rested, it can be challenging to find that positive motivation. What is the reason that this is important to me? Why am I doing this?
I have a client right now for whom that’s true, and what we’re working on right now is not fixing sleep as a whole or even in a part. He’s got a toddler and so there are some confounding factors that he can’t control that sometimes disrupt his ability to get a good night of sleep, but we are working toward two well rested nights in a row because that client wants to have that experience. What is the difference because I genuinely can’t access any sort of information about what would be different if I was getting more sleep because it’s been so long, if ever, that this client has had that experience.
On the flip side, I will say that when I have the most success with clients around sleep, it is when we start to get to that point where we’re not just getting more sleep, but the client is noticing and appreciating the differences. The differences in mood, the differences in cognition, the differences on being able to access motivation, the differences in being able to match intention with action without getting distracted. Because that’s the other thing, when we’re under-sleeping, there’s this pattern – I’ve had more than one client say this exact language to me – there’s this pattern of I am underslept, I need something. Right? So then we go to caffeine or we go to junk food, or we go to things to kind of help push us through the moment or the day. And now we’re kind of stacking problems up together, right? Because the caffeine’s gonna have an impact later in the day, we’re gonna have a crash from the junk food, etc.
[00:05:37] Dusty: It’s interesting that you say that because for me, I think it was after I started noticing whether I have good sleep and or stop sleeping. I don’t notice it so much when I get more sleep. It’s like when I go back to having poor sleep. And one of the most interesting things that I notice is a huge uptick in my clumsiness. My lack of spatial awareness, my disc coordination or dyspraxia really goes up a lot. [00:06:06] Ash: That goes up for me as well. So Dusty, I think the very first thing our listeners can take away from this episode is if you’ve not had that experience that you can recall of being well slept, if that’s not something you can access in terms of knowing what that feels like, perhaps that’s a first goal for you, is to get that one or two nights of really solid sleep and to make sure that you’re reflecting on what is different when you’re well slept versus how you typically operate.Because what we’re describing, the coaching process, we’re just framing it in sleep. But for sleep in particular, there is no substitute for the evidence of how much better it feels once you know, like for me, now that I know how much better it feels, and I was chronically under-slept through my 20s.
My entire life, I was always, always undersleeping. That is the mode that I operated in and I felt like it worked okay enough for me, but now that I know what wellslept feels like, and now that I know how much I’m losing when I start to veer into not just under sleeping one night, but getting into that more chronic territory of being underslept, it’s an easy thing for me to prioritize because I know that being well rested is going to set me up to be more successful, right? All of my other ADHD challenges are easier to face if I am reasonably well slept. So yeah, if you haven’t had that experience, that’s a great first thing to aim for – just what does it feel like. Let’s not worry about the schedule of it. Let’s just get the hours in and see what that experience feels like for you and what the differences are.
[00:08:02] Dusty: Yeah, like I said, I feel like it goes one of two ways. I’m glad you mentioned things like revenge bedtime procrastination ’cause that’s what I mean, right? Like either it’s gonna be really easy or it’s gonna be really hard because I think if you don’t know that much about your own ADHD and you don’t know sort of the role of like fun and like slow time…I see a lot of people come to coaching and they are just in this constant cycle of being behind from procrastinating. And so their errand time or the work time of their day (be that work work or just life work) bleeds into what’s supposed to be their relaxation or their downtime.
And so because they can’t get anything done, they don’t give themselves permission to have fun, then they don’t wanna go to bed ’cause they didn’t have any fun. Right? It feels like the day’s not over. And so they get into this place where they’re never giving themselves time to have fun. And it’s having that downtime that makes you feel like the day is complete where you can go to bed.
Because really, this is what I tell clients all the time, your ADHD part of your brain hates sleep, it represents a state of lower stimulation. It’s very boring to go to sleep. Your brain never wants to be bored. It never wants to be unoccupied. So of course when you’re like, I’m gonna go to bed, your brain suddenly thinks of creative projects and things that you forgot to do, or it starts ruminating on embarrassing moments.
Maybe you’re laying in bed and then all of a sudden you get really emotionally dysregulated. This used to happen to me all the time. I’d be laying there trying to go to sleep and all of a sudden I’d remember something upsetting that happened and next thing I know, I’m up and on my phone. Not ’cause I wanted to use my phone, but because I’m full of feelings. And then when I realized this is my ADHD trying to fight off sleep, like it’s going, “don’t go, don’t put me to sleep. I’m bored”, right? So if we can get our need for entertainment and stimulation met, that’s gonna help a lot.
And also I see people not transitioning, right? I see people being go, go, go. They’re in work mode. They’re in active mode. They’ve got the lights on in the whole house, they’re wearing their clothes and then they’re like, okay, teeth, maybe PJ’s and then bed. Then they’re laying there going, well, why am I not sleepy?
Well, your body is in go mode, right? I think neurotypical people are a little better at understanding that transitions have to happen. I sometimes think we just, it’s not even that we don’t transition, it’s that we forget that transitions are a thing we have to do.
Like if you wanna go to bed, if you’re gonna choose to go to bed, you have to be sleepy. In order to be sleepy, you have to kind of wind down. In order to wind down, you might need to lower the lights, put away the to-do list, and do some things that put your brain and body in the mood to go to bed. Right?
Sometimes I liken this to foreplay with clients. I’m like, you know, if you’re having a stressful work day or you’re in a traffic jam, you’re also maybe not in the mood to do the lay down, move around, right? What we think of foreplay is a thing that we do on purpose to put ourselves and our bodies in a mood for a certain type of activity.
We kind of need to do the same thing with sleep. Like if I’m not tired, I’m not gonna choose bed. And so when it’s easy like that, it’s easy. And then sometimes people have done all those things and it’s like a different thing.
[00:10:53] Ash: So Dusty, that thing you just said about needing a transition time for my clients for whom that’s the primary struggle is we need to introduce transition. [00:11:15] There needs to be a ritual. There are steps that need to happen between here and there. One thing that has actually been pretty universally successful for that set of clients is moving up the boring steps. So there’s a transition into the boring steps of brushing teeth and washing face and putting on PJs.But then there is this carrot on the other side for some amount of time, maybe an hour, maybe a couple hours depending on the client, where they can engage with something that they enjoy and maybe something a little lower key, something that starts to push you in that sleepy mood, as you said, you know, knitting or crafting or for me, honestly, oftentimes it is watching TV.
I do find, I am a person that can fall asleep with the TV on. So for me, watching an episode or two of a TV show in bed and here I’m breaking tons and tons of good sleep rules, but for me, I’m in my pajamas, I’m in bed, I’m cozy, I watch my episode or two and now I’m getting sleepy enough that I’m gonna fall asleep mid episode if I watch another one, so I turn the TV off.
So. Yeah, there is something about maybe moving that transition time up and then having downtime after you’ve done all the things. You’ve brushed your teeth, you’ve got your jammies on now you can have the same experience of, at bedtime all you have to do is fall into bed, but you’ve also done some things to signal readiness to your body.
But I do wanna note that that’s not the challenge for every client. I have a client whose problem wasn’t getting to sleep. He told me pretty much, this is pretty much verbatim out of his mouth, that once I’m in bed and close my eyes, I go to sleep. That part has never been a problem for me. The problem is delayed gratification, getting to sleep. Plus if he didn’t work in an office and work a pretty traditional like nine to five ish type of job his sleep schedule would naturally skew later. This is the type of person who will be doing actual useful, productive things at midnight, 1:00am, 2:00am, and somebody who really enjoys nighttime in particular.
So his challenge is around, “I enjoy this time, this is productive time for me, but my life doesn’t allow for me to keep this schedule”. And a couple of weeks ago we did coach about sleep. I don’t remember how we got into it. It was a topic I suggested based on some things he was saying, and it sounded like sleep was probably having the biggest impact with his struggles at this moment in time. He was a little reluctant to dive into the topic, but we did. And he decided that the positive outcome, because again, why, why am I doing this? The positive outcome that I’m looking for is to get to work an hour earlier so then I can get off earlier. And so the next week he came back and because he doesn’t struggle to get to sleep once he’s in bed, he was like, well, it worked, but I hate that it worked. And I was like, ooh, what do you mean by that? And he was like, I don’t know. It didn’t really change my mood during the day. I still feel frustrated at work all day. Like I am noticing some things that feel better, yes, more sleep is better, but it didn’t have as much of an impact as I would’ve liked it to have. And so it doesn’t feel good to be sacrificing that time.
So we talked a little more and we discovered that the reason it wasn’t feeling good is because in the morning he was still having to rush in order to “buy bedtime”, which was midnight. In order to be out the door and ready to go to work by 8am, he found that he was getting stuck in this rush state and it was kind of setting the tone for the whole day, and the very next thing out of his mouth was – but I cannot move my bedtime up another hour. I know. I know that I will never do that. It feels too restrictive. That’s not gonna work. I won’t do it.
So we talked a little more and we came up with the solution of why not go to work at the same time you were going to work before. So now he gets to keep his midnight bedtime, which feels late enough, right? For that need of “I like evenings. I like that time”. And he’s got time in the morning to go slower, to do a little yoga, to do some other things before he starts transitioning into work and to very slowly get ready for work rather than rushing out the door. I haven’t actually talked to this client since we set up that second bit of practice. So I don’t know yet what the outcome is, but the reason I share this story is because so often when we think of sleep, we think of, oh, I need to be in bed by this time and it needs to be this whole ritual and I should be doing what everyone else is doing. And we moralize things like staying up late.
And here’s a client kind of flying in the face of that saying. I value late evenings, and I am not willing to move my bedtime up to 11pm because I know that that’s such a negative thing for me that I can’t/won’t stick to it. Like that’s a thing that I would have to stick to out of brute force, not out of positive motivation, and I can’t do it.
And so, rather than trying to challenge that, we found a different solution for this client to try. It still achieves the goal of being well rested, but doesn’t move the bedtime up any earlier.
[00:16:56] Dusty: Yeah, I think everything that you’re saying is really salient. Like it’s if you’re not in the camp of people who have tried everything and by the way, if that’s you, if you’re like, I’ve done all these things, nothing works, blah, blah, blah. I understand, I understand. Don’t worry, we’re getting to you.But for the people who are kind of just realizing that sleep is an issue, kind of realizing that sleep could be underlying some of their ADHD struggles, ’cause we struggle with forgetfulness and emotional dysregulation anyway.
When you’re underslept you have more of that, right? We struggle with impulse control. When you’re underslept, you have more of that. Studies have shown that people who sleep an average of six hours a night or less have ADHD like symptoms. So if you already have ADHD, you’re giving yourself double ADHD.
If you’re just realizing that and you’re sort of realizing that ADHD is getting in the way of you prioritizing bedtime, there’s a lot of things you can try and something I’ve come to realize in my time coaching is that a lot of people with ADHD have co-occurring conditions, and sometimes that includes like anxiety and trauma.
Common mindfulness advice can be really helpful, but for a certain subset of people with ADHD, it’s harmful. It’s not good for them to be in their bodies. It’s not good for them to focus on breathing. It’s not good for their mind to be unoccupied. And so, like what you said, Ash, sometimes doing the thing that flies in the face of standard sleep advice is helpful.
Like for me, one of the most helpful things to get to bed is low level stimulation because if I lay in bed in the dark, in silence, my brain will just kick into high gear to amuse me and it will go to dark places, no pun intended. So I’m listening to a show that I’ve seen before, or watching a show that I’ve seen before or listening to a podcast, like having some lower level of stimulation that’s in this golden zone where it’s not so interesting that I’m going to try not to fall asleep, to stay engaged with it, but it’s not so boring that my brain is taking over.
[00:18:52] Ash: That is often the thing that can help with unwinding, right? letting my body unwind and get sleepy without my brain kind of winding it back up again. So you’re totally on the money with that. Have you ever had the experience of somebody who has a more severe sleep condition co-occurring with their ADHD or who is struggling with feeling like they’ve already put in a lot of effort to try?It’s a good question, Dusty. I have certainly had the latter, that sleep is just a thing that I struggle with, and I don’t think that that is something that is correctable.
[00:19:33] Ash: And when you think about the number of ways that we can be messed with when it comes to sleep. It’s understandable that you get there, right? We were just talking earlier about transitions, right? The doing the steps that you need to do before bed and doing them early enough that your body has some time to kind of acclimate, relax, calm down. There’s the act of falling asleep itself, which for those of us that are prone to rumination, can be really challenging. Turning your brain off and actually feeling sleepy, actually being able to stay in that calm state in your body to access sleep. In the morning there’s the waking up on time and the ritual of the morning itself too.My client that really likes evenings and that sleep procrastination thing we were talking about, that’s not my first client who is naturally a night owl, but my life doesn’t allow me to be as much of a night owl as I would like to be. There are just any number of individual factors.
So when I am coaching with a client who is frustrated by sleep, who has kind of accepted that this is just the way it is, which by the way, the client I was talking about earlier, does fall into that category. I like to say, let’s just slice off one piece. Right? If it’s just the transition piece of putting on pajamas, brushing your teeth and washing your face, let’s just do that part and not yet worry about when you’re gonna get to bed.
Just try that part and let’s see if that alone has any impact on your ability, desire or motivation to go to bed or not. Or for some clients, and this may seem a little counterintuitive if you’re already under-slept, but maybe start with the morning and have the morning you want to have, and then getting that kind of in place a little bit creates positive motivation to be more well slept. To have that morning that has gone from being something I dread to something enjoyable.
You know, for some clients it’s been, let’s not worry about anything else, but getting to bed on time without attachment to whether you go to sleep or not. Right? We can worry about how to get sleepy and how to go to sleep later. Let’s just start with the practice of being in your bed physically by midnight. And if you can’t sleep, fine, do whatever you would normally do if you can’t sleep. But let’s start building that ritual and then we can worry about what we need to add to it to induce some amount of sleepiness.
So listeners who have struggled mightily, and who have tried everything, and this is certainly true for my clients in that situation, oftentimes we do the ADHD thing where we’re like, let’s build the transition ritual and then the thing I’m gonna do next, and then I’m gonna be at bed at this time, and then my morning is gonna go from looking like the chaos it looks like now to looking like this very regimented structured thing.
And that can be not only introducing too much change and kind of setting you up for an all or nothing. It can also make it actually kind of hard to know what elements of this are working for me and what elements aren’t. And so that’s more than anything why I like to take it one piece at a time.
Let’s pick a piece and slice it off and see what happens. And once we find something that works, now let’s worry about one of the other smaller, discreet dilemmas that are wrapped up in this big thing that we’re calling sleep as a topic.
[00:23:07] Dusty: Yeah. One thing that’s so interesting that’s worked for some of my clients, and it sounds so bizarre, but having a really nice set of sheets and pillows. Right. Like, I don’t know about you, but many times through my adult life have I rocked the no sheet on the bed, bare mattress, like piles of crap in the bed. Nobody wants to go to bed in that, right? Like sometimes it’s simple, but also seemingly disconnected. It seems like fluff, but having a really nice bed that you want to get into, or like you’re saying, having a nice morning routine.I had this one client that was brilliant. He started putting aside time every morning to do just something that he wanted to do and calling it luxury time, because “morning routine” sounds brutal. Who wants to get up and grind their morning routine? But what if your morning routine was to play some video games and do your favorite thing, you know what I mean? Have your favorite breakfast – that’s motivating.
And I’ve had some other clients use some really interesting hacks to overcome parts of that. So in our last episode, we were talking about the phone being advantageous and disadvantageous. Well, there’s this app called Alarmy, and a lot of people use it to get out of bed. It’s an app where it doesn’t stop going off until you get up out of your bed and you match a photo. And so a lot of people use a barcode from the shampoo bottle in their bathroom. And so in the morning they have to get outta bed, go in their bathroom and take a photo of the barcode, and so now they’re up and outta bed.
But this client actually used it to get in bed. It was so brilliant, Ash. What he did was he taped a photo on his ceiling right above his bed and he used that as the image. So the alarm would start going off at night when he wanted to go to bed and he had to go lay down in his bed horizontally, point the phone at the ceiling and match the photo. And then lo and behold, he’s already in bed.
And like you said, it’s not everything at once. Sometimes it’s just that one thing. Another thing I find interesting is how many steps back, sometimes it has to go right? Like someone coming into coaching, they wanna work on work productivity, or they wanna work on emotional regulation or how they show up socially. And if we track that back to sleep, okay, well now we’re working on the basics of sleep.
But sometimes that tracks back to something like your exercise routine, getting enough body movement in the day or cleaning, like maybe it’s easier for you to choose to go to bed when your surroundings are peaceful. And if your surroundings are chaotic and you can’t sleep in a messy house and you feel you keep getting distracted by things…now we’re starting to find some homes for things in your house and it doesn’t seem connected, but it’s all connected, right? Sometimes it does have to start a few steps back when we figure out what it is getting in the way of sleep.
But I just wanna say for that other camp of people, I sometimes get those clients who feel like they’ve tried everything and so they’re coming from a place of hopelessness and it’s really hard. And there’s two things here – one is that sometimes it’s not one thing you have to do differently. Some people have the kind of nervous system where they might have to do all the sleep hygiene things every night, like it might be a lot of work for you to prioritize sleep. It might be about the temperature of the bedroom, comfortable sheets, lowering the lights, not having food after a certain amount of time.
You might be the kind of person who has to do a lot of things to achieve sleep and if that’s the situation for you, that sucks. Right? And that’s a bummer. You get to choose, is the sleep outcome worth it enough for you to make some lifestyle shifts to do all these things?
I think it’s kind of similar to a person who has some level of digestive issues. If there are certain foods that upset your digestion, for some people it’s a no brainer, they’ll eliminate those foods, they’ll change their diets. Other people will just live. My dad has had the worst heartburn for my whole life. But, he’ll eat like a pint of ice cream and then be like, oh, my heartburn. Like he won’t change his lifestyle, he just lives with a heartburn. So you can just live with the crappy sleep. You don’t have to do all the things if it doesn’t feel worth it. But you get to make the choice of whether sleep is important enough that you’re willing to make these lifestyle shifts.
And like Ash is saying, you can make them over time. You don’t have to make them all at once. But, I think there’s some group of people here for whom a higher level of intervention is just going to be necessary, and that’s okay. The easiest level of higher intervention is melatonin and I’ve learned a lot about melatonin ’cause my daughter has sleep issues. One of the most interesting things I learned about melatonin is that a lot of people take it wrong. They take it when they want to sleep, and it’s not a sleeping pill. Melatonin is the hormone that builds up in your brain. You know, a long time ago in ancient times, melatonin would start building in our brain as it got dark outside, right? When we were people who lived with natural lighting. So as the sky slowly darkens starting in the late afternoon, melatonin is slowly building.
Well, now we have artificial lighting and some people’s systems are really sensitive to that artificial lighting. And so if you’re not gonna start making your environment darker after 6:00 PM, what you can do is take whatever your dose of melatonin is that your doctor tells you or that you’ve decided. But instead of taking it all at 10:00 PM and you wanna go to bed at 11:00 PM, break it up into four. Take a baby dose at like 6:00 PM, take a baby dose at 8:00 PM, take a little bit of a bigger dose at 10:00 PM and slowly mimic what your brain is supposed to do. I’ve heard some people have really good outcomes with that. And so that’s interesting ’cause I didn’t know that before I started researching sleep more because so many of my clients struggle with it.
But there are a couple of clients I’ve had who’ve actually had to see sleep specialists and in one or two really extreme cases get this kind of medication that blind people take because blind people don’t see any light, so they have off circadian rhythm issues.
There’s a whole gamut of higher level interventions as well. I just wanna give a shout out to a Canadian company called Sleepworks and they do neurodivergent informed CBT for insomnia. I’ve heard really good things about them and I’ve had a couple clients have good experiences with them. I love that they take a neurodivergent informed sleep to the psychological aspects of insomnia because sometimes it’s not physiological.
But I think the thing for me is I always go in stages, right? Start with the stuff we’re talking about. If that doesn’t work proceed to building it up. Maybe you’re doing several of the things at the same time because maybe you need to, but add them in one at a time. And if that’s still not working, it’s really important to not blame yourself and not to get into that kind of shame that we were talking about with social media or with food.
A lot of people in our society don’t have a problem sleeping. They can’t understand how it might be hard to sleep. And so there’s almost kind of this feeling of like a moral failure. It should be easy, but it’s not and that’s a really tough grief and feeling to hold. And so, if you are one of those people struggling with some kind of higher level of insomnia and sleep issues, just know that you’re not alone. It’s more common among neurodivergent people. You may need a higher level of intervention and that’s okay. You know, we gotta do what we gotta do.
[00:30:15] Ash: Well said Dusty. Sleep disorders are an invisible disability, just like ADHD is an invisible disability, and those who don’t have that experience really don’t get it.Seep is one of the things that is most moralized in our productivity obsessed society, right? If you are not able to get enough sleep and be on time to work you are judged very, very harshly for that in most circumstances.
So, I’m glad we kind of wrapped up there. This may not be enough for those of you that have a deeper level sleep disorder of some sort that coexists with your ADHD, but for those of you who have either tried nothing, or maybe you’ve tried everything but you’ve tried it all at once, pick off a slice.
Any slice, it doesn’t matter whether it’s evening, morning, the transition, just getting into bed (as your client did using Alarmy) at a certain time and building from there. Try something and then step back and evaluate what worked or didn’t work about it, and kind of use that information to inform what you might try next.
If it’s working, what can you add onto it? If it’s not working, what is it that you were trying to accomplish? What was the outcome you were looking for, and what is a different way that you could achieve that same outcome? My client that I talked about earlier, the outcome he was really trying to achieve was feeling better in the mornings, not coming home completely wiped out and grumpy by the end of the day because his day starts grumpy and we got there by making some compromises in a couple of ways. Like he thought that getting home earlier from work would be majorly impactful. But it turns out that while the sleep part is important, the “when I get home from work” doesn’t matter if I have to rush out the door in the morning. And while I still don’t know the outcome of that, the outcome here is not the point. The point is we’re building on information in real time based on what the client is noticing, having implemented a new practice.
So I think that’s a good place for us to wrap, Dusty. So until next week, I’m Ash.
[00:32:25] Dusty: And I’m Dusty. [00:32:25] Ash: And this was the Translating ADHD podcast. Thanks for listening.
