The Hunter’s Curse: ADHD and the Nighttime Battle for Sleep

Explore the evolutionary roots of ADHD sleeplessness and why modern society can’t keep up.

Image by Alexandra_Koch from Pixabay

My mom used to joke that I nearly flunked kindergarten because I couldn’t take naps.  She’d point out that I hadn’t taken a real nap since I was 2 years old, and to the best of my knowledge, outside of large time-zone changes or using sleeping drugs, I have no recollection of ever in my entire life having successfully taken a nap.

There have been both ups and downs to this dimension of my Hunter-in-a-Farmer’s world neurology. 

I’m bright and creative — the latter apparently having a large association with ADHD — and have accomplished an astonishing amount for a single lifetime.  Perpetual curiosity and never-ending energy have led me into fields of study and parts of the world that have deeply enriched my life, and saved the lives of thousands of others.

On the other hand, Mrs. Clark, my 2nd Grade teacher, saying “Tommy, an empty wagon always rattles,” and “Tommy, even a fish wouldn’t get caught if it kept its mouth shut,” didn’t do a whole lot for my young self-esteem. Neither did being kicked out of both high school and college (albeit in both cases because of my anti-Vietnam War agitation).  I know the downsides of ADHD, and how devastating it can be to run afoul of your own neurochemistry.

On the third hand, using my Hunter skills for entrepreneurialism has let me raise my family in a way that’s largely only available to the top 10% of Americans, from traveling the world repeatedly to being able to put 3 kids through college and backstop them through the occasional bumps and hiccups of life. Louise and I have been together for over 5 decades, and it’s been a great ride.

Through it all, though, sleep has been my continuous challenge. And, apparently, I’m not alone in that, particularly among people who share my ADHD neurological baselines. 

In the December, 2017 issue of Current Psychiatry Reports, Wynchank, et al, report:

“Three cross-sectional, clinical, and population studies report a prevalence of insomnia in ADHD adults ranging from 43 to 80%. … The mechanisms explaining the relationship between ADHD and sleep problems are incompletely understood, but both genetic and non-shared environmental influences may be involved.”

A 2010 report in Biological Psychiatry digs into possible measurable mechanisms underlying the association between insomnia and ADHD, saying:

“Previous studies suggest circadian rhythm disturbances in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and sleep-onset insomnia (SOI).”

For this second study, they evaluated 40 ADHD adults, taking daily measurements of salivary levels of the sleep hormone melatonin and noting exactly when they fell asleep every night, how well they slept, and whether or not they could easily fall asleep like normal people and how they differed from your garden variety insomniac without ADHD.

“Compared with control subjects,” they noted, “both groups of ADHD adults had a longer sleep-onset latency and lower sleep efficiency.” They added that adults diagnosed with both ADHD and insomnia had “a delayed start and end of their sleep period…compared with healthy control subjects,” and “also showed an attenuated 24-hour amplitude in their rest-activity pattern…”

“These findings,” they added, “demonstrate diurnal rhythm deviations during everyday life in the majority of adults with ADHD that have SOI (sleep onset insomnia)…”

Hunters and sleep

My original 1980 hypothesis about Hunters and Farmers posited that most of the behaviors that we associate with ADHD, including distractibility, impulsivity, and risk-taking — while maladaptive in a world of factories and classrooms — were actually assets in the world that our hunter-gatherer ancestors evolved in over the past million or so years. 

Noticing every single sound in the classroom is called “distractibility” today, but in the forests, jungles, and savannahs of old it was an essential survival skill.  Those who didn’t notice the predator sneaking up on them were quickly weeded out of the gene pool, and those who failed to attend to the sounds of small prey animals ended up starving.

While it would be suicide for a farmer to make an “impulsive” decision on what crops to plant — possibly ending up 9 months later during the harvest discovering that ragweed isn’t all that edible — for a hunter chasing a rabbit through the forest there’s no time to do a risk-benefit analysis if a deer wanders into range.

And while risk-taking in a factory or supermarket can be fatal or unwise, the early-day hunter who wakes up knowing — and relishing the idea — that there are things out there that want to eat him as much as he wants to eat them will be a much more likely to bring home food than the hunter who’s so reluctant to take risks that he never leaves the cave.

Not only has science largely proved my hypothesis, it’s even found that the I was right in the prediction I made in the late 1990s that genes regulating the neurotransmitter dopamine would probably be at the core of the biological/genetic basis of ADHD.

But how could sleep — or the lack of sleep — be adaptive for a primitive hunting society? And, like how an ADHD adult can find success in ADHD-friendly occupations like being a detective, author, or entrepreneur, is there any possibility that ADHD-related insomnia might even be useful in today’s world?

Interrupted sleep

Many people wake up at least once during a night, usually somewhere in the middle of their sleep.  The manufacturers of sleeping drugs know this, and have even begun to throw a few extra milligrams of their drugs into a time-release part of the pill, so when someone might be inclined to wake up at midnight, they don’t. 

But what if waking up at night is normal and healthy? What if it’s an important part of our genetic heritage, passed down from hunter-gatherer ancestors, that, for millions of years, helped our ancestors survive?

This is precisely the thinking behind the theory of diurnal sleep (di as in “two parts” and urnal as in “in the night”).

The possibility that we’re not programmed for a straight-through 8-hour sleep every night was first brought into the scientific mainstream by Dr. Thomas Wehr, a clinical psychiatrist who now has his practice in Bethesda, Maryland, and is associated with the clinical psychobiology branch of the National Institutes of Mental Health. Dr. Wehr and his colleagues were examining photoperiodicity in humans – how exposure to light (and the changing length of daylight during different seasons) affect our hormones, sleep, and general behavior.

“It’s a kind of archeology, or human paleobiology,” Dr. Wehr told The New York Times. He explained: “We're looking at what human hormonal, sleep and temperature patterns might have been like in a prehistorical period when there was very little artificial light around.”

What they found was astonishing.

They set a group of volunteers up to sleep in a room with no outside light whatsoever, and gave them 14 hours of darkness every night.  At first, the subjects slept an average of 11 hours a night for a few weeks, although the researchers concluded that this was just their way of catching up from our chronically-sleep-deprived work-driven American culture.

Then things got interesting.

Once people’s sleep patterns normalized, they settled into an average of eight hours of sleep a night, but with a huge caveat: they all woke up in the middle of the night, typically for around between one and two hours.  Some woke up earlier than others, with first sleep lasting typically anywhere from three to five hours, but all in such a way that there was solid sleep at the beginning and end of the evening. With the mid-night awake period, the entire night became an average of 9 to 10 hours time in bed, to produce a net eight hours of sleep.

Which took us from a group of psychiatrists and sleep researchers to Virginia Tech historian Roger Ekirch. He published a paper titled “Sleep We Have Lost: Pre-industrial Slumber in the British Isles” in the American Historical Review, showing that in the time before widespread use of artificial light (be it kerosene or electric) there was a widespread and robust body of literature — from fiction to nonfiction — that documented the norm of people waking up for an hour or two every night.  (The first city in the world to light its streets at night, for example, was Paris in 1667.)

And it wasn’t just that they were awake: there was a whole range of activities that medieval people engaged in in the middle of the night, complete with names and rituals for such behavior. Ekrich found more than 500 reports of what he called a “segmented sleeping pattern” in ancient medical books, personal diaries, literature and novels, and even in court records from the middle ages and Homers Odyssey.  Looking more far afield, he also found that modern African tribes (he specifically looked at Nigeria) who lived without artificial light also had this pattern of segmented sleep: it clearly was a human thing, not a cultural thing specific to ancient Greece or Medieval Europe.

Depending on how people lived and their interests, there were a variety of well documented uses for this “nighttime awakeness” period: religious people used it to meditate or pray (Ekrich found numerous medieval prayer manuals specifically for this period of the night); married couples would use it for sex or even eating a “mid-night meal”; while others (presumably with a full moon or candle or oil lamp) wrote, read, or even got out of bed and met with neighbors or invited people over for a light meal.

Hunter/gatherers and sleep

So why are we all, apparently, genetically wired to wake up for a few hours every night during the dark?

One possible theory ties right into the hunter/farmer hypothesis.  Hunter/gatherer peoples — 100% of all of our ancestors — were not only among the world’s most efficient predators, they were also frequently prey. Lions, tigers, giant reptiles, and, most dangerously, other human tribes all had an interest in tracking and killing our early human relatives.

And many (of the wild animals, at least) are nocturnal.

So for a community or tribe of humans to pretty much always have at least one person up and awake meant that there was always somebody on the alert for dangers to the group.

Much like “distractibility, impulsivity, and risk-taking” helped hunter/gatherers to be more efficient food collectors, similarly, having somebody always awake during the vulnerable night would protect the tribe from other species or other humans looking to make food out of them.

In other words, segmented sleep is part of an ancient survival system that we evolved with for, probably, millions of years that helped insure our survival and success as a species. If one person typically woke up after an hour or so, and another after three hours or so, and another after five hours or so, basically there was always at least one person awake all night.  The tribe or clan was safe.

But, just like the hunter gene helped us be successful hunters but became maladaptive in a world of farming and factories, so, too, the genetics of segmented or “biphasic” sleep helped us survive the dangers of the jungle or savannah but became, in the modern world, a problem.

Night Owls

We’re also told that Ben Franklin’s old aphorism of “early to be, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise” is the One True Way To Live.  And while that’s the case for about 40% of us, another 30% of us are actually biologically/genetically wired to go to sleep late and wake up late (and about 30% of us are pretty flexible in our sleeping habits).

A relatively recent discovery, Dr. Matthew Walker, Director of UC Berkley’s Center for Sleep Science and author of “Why We Sleep”:

“Night owls are not owls by choice,” Walker notes in his book. “They are bound to a delayed schedule by unavoidable DNA hard wiring. It is not their conscious fault, but rather their genetic fate.”  A difference in the CRY1 gene appears to make the difference, and, again, may well be a Hunter-world/era survival adaptation that guarantees that some of the tribe is always awake and alert to danger.

But the “get up early to get to the factory/school work” is so ingrained in our culture that we’ve even come up with new “disorder” words to describe people who aren’t genetically wired to be early risers, or to be “too-early” risers.  They’re called Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder (DSPD) and Advanced Sleep Phase Disorder (APDP). 

Like a left-handed person trying to fit into a right-hander’s world, or a Hunter trying to fit into a Farmer’s world, when a person who’s genetically programmed to be a night-owl gets a “normal” daytime job, they end up having to rely on all sorts of things to trick their body into sleep, from blackout curtains to high-dose melatonin to sleeping pills.  Ironically, just looking for a night-shift job would have solved most of their problem.

Hunters Sleeping in a Farmer’s World

Which brings us to the problems that people still carrying a highly active version of the Edison Gene face when sleeping.

Thomas Edison himself, in fact, exemplified this. Writing that “evidently I was inoculated with insomnic bactilli when a baby,” he rarely slept more than 4 or 5 hours a night, and often stayed up most or all of the night working on his inventions or reading, but made up for it by taking numerous short naps during the day.

His naps were legendary; he had a cot in each of his workshops, in his factory, and in his home. He went on a picnic in the woods with President Warren Harding and tire baron Harvey Firestone in 1921, and posterity recorded it with a famous (and easily searched on the internet) photo of Harding and Firestone sitting in lawn chairs chatting while Edison slept, head on a pillow, on the ground in a bed of flowers.

As ADHD as they come — so much so, as mentioned in detail in my book ADHD: Hunter in a Farmer’s World, that he couldn’t even survive elementary school — Thomas Edison not only exemplified creativity derived from distractability, but also personified the sleep-interrupted Hunter.

Next week, I’ll share some of the techniques successful Hunters have shared with me (and that I use myself) to get enough sleep in this very non-hunter world.