ADHD Relationships: Acceptance is Very Powerful Stuff!
Acceptance is really powerful stuff! Get to know your own body’s rhythms
Sometimes, celebrating and working around our personal differences constitutes one of the best ways to make relationships work. Acceptance is really powerful stuff!
From Kenneth on the ADHD Forum on CompuServe:
“Early to bed and early to rise” was one of Ben Franklin’s favorite sayings. He must have been like me: I function best in the morning.
I’ve intuitively known this all my life, but for the past ten years I’ve been married to a woman who’s a classic night person.
She stays up until at least midnight every night, drags herself out of bed in the morning to drink three cups of coffee before going to work, and then sleeps literally until noon on Saturday and Sunday to catch up on her lost sleep.
Thinking that the nature of marriage was compromise, or something like that, for years I’ve been following her pattern. The problem is, though, that I can’t store up my need for sleep the way she can. I’m burned out by Wednesday, and by Friday I’m dying.
It took me several years to figure out that there wasn’t something wrong with me in this regard. I always figured that if she could do it, I should be able to, too.
I took sleeping pills sometimes, because if I get over-tired I have trouble going to sleep (I don’t understand it, but it’s true). I took coffee in huge quantities in the morning, and then when my ADHD was diagnosed I switched to dexedrine. That made it even harder to sleep, but at least I was functional at the office during the week.
Then last year I attended a conference for entrepreneurs put on by IBM. One of the speakers, oddly enough, was a doctor who was a sleep expert. He said that some people can store up their sleep bank account, and others can’t. He said that people who need more sleep and don’t get it become distractible, impulsive, and grumpy. (That was me!)
It sounded to me, from listening to him, that my sleeping patterns were making my ADHD worse, and his information also helped me to stop feeling guilty for not being able to stay up like my wife does.
So I started going to bed at 10pm, and my wife would stay up and watch TV downstairs (she’s a late-night comedy junkie). The difference was amazing: I now wake up in the morning refreshed, looking forward to the day. I don’t crave coffee or even use much of the dexedrine any more. And my ADHD symptoms are less severe.
At first my wife and I fought about this: I wanted her to come to bed with me at ten, and she thought I was being unreasonable and couldn’t understand why I couldn’t work the same way she did.
Finally we decided that we must just have different body chemistries or something, and she now lets me go to sleep without getting upset. We have an agreement that either one of us can wake the other up to make love, so it hasn’t hurt our sex life much; in fact, in some ways it’s improved it and added variety to it.