Tired of Tossing & Turning? ADHD’s Secret Sleep Fixes Revealed

As promised, here are a few of the techniques successful Hunters have shared with me (and a few I use, myself) to get enough sleep in this very non-hunter world.

Image by Engin Akyurt from Pixabay

Last week, I wrote at length about how about science has found that about two-thirds of ADHD Hunters have difficulty getting to sleep, staying asleep, or both. As promised, here are a few of the techniques successful Hunters have shared with me (and a few I use, myself) to get enough sleep in this very non-hunter world.

* Sleep hygiene — Sleep hygiene is at the core of most sleep therapies practiced by therapists and sleep clinics. It begins with the NLP concept of anchors.  Just like when you smell your favorite food, you salivate and feel hungry; there are hundreds of specific “anchors” that we all have accumulated throughout our lives.

Anchors are the result of repeated exposure to one thing that links to another. Pavlov’s dogs are the most well-known example, but the reality is much deeper and far more pervasive in our lives. An exposure — whether it be to another person, place, thing, or situation — produces a predictable (conscious or not) response.

For example, when I was a kid my parents had 20,000-plus books in their basement.  Around the age of 8 or 9, I got tired of sharing a bunk-bed and bedroom with my brother (there were 4 boys and my parents in a 3-bedroom, 1-bath house), so dad let me carve a corner of his downstairs library out, using bookshelves as walls, to create my own bedroom down there.

The books smelled like a library or a second-hand-store (where dad and mom had bought almost all of them), and we’d spent most of the weekends of my childhood driving around central Michigan to Salvation Army and Goodwill stores looking for collectible books. And my grandmother owned and ran an antique store in Newaygo, Michigan, where I spent my summers.  To this day, when I walk into a used bookstore, thrift store, or library, I’m instantly transported emotionally and psychically back to being 10 years old.

We not only have these larger anchors, but we all also have hundreds of smaller anchors. Particular foods trigger memories and retrieve emotional states, as do certain old movies or TV shows, music, restaurants, places, and even people.

So, knowing this, the goal of sleep hygiene is to turn our beds from just another place into a powerful and unique anchor specifically for sleep.

The way to do this is pretty straightforward: Only get or stay in bed when sleeping or just about to. At night, stay up sitting in a chair reading or whatever you do (although watching TV or reading the computer can produce blue light that screws with your body’s production of melatonin/serotonin, the neuro-hormones that regulate sleep) until you’re genuinely tired and ready to go to sleep. Then go directly to bed and directly to sleep.

If (when!) you wake up in the middle of the night, get up and retire to your pre-sleep chair or couch or whatever and read or whatever you do to relax yourself enough to get sleepy again.  The key here is not to worry about it and not to put any effort into “getting sleepy” again.

While having anxiety or effort associated with getting back to sleep is a sure way to prevent the sleep from coming, if you just let your body tell you when it’s tired rather than trying to drive the process, you’re guaranteed (sometimes after a few weeks of practice) to end up sleepy again and return to bed.

When you wake up in the morning, get out of bed right away.  The bed should be anchored to nothing except sleep and, if you sleep with another person, sex.  Period.

Another dimension of sleep hygiene is regularity.  As much as possible, always go to and get up from bed at the same time every day. Even on weekends.  This deepens and strengthens the anchor, whereas keeping different bedtimes different nights scatters the anchor all over the place, weakening it considerably.  While our culture tells us it’s fashionable and appropriate to stay up late on weekends and sleep in on those Saturday and Sunday mornings, the reality is that for those with sleep problems such behavior is entirely counterproductive, both short- and long-term.

Other common-sense dimensions of sleep hygiene include sleeping in a quiet and dark room, with the temperature below normal room temperature.  One last thing, that’s used mostly for autistic kids but lots of Hunters report helps them sleep, is to use a “weighted blanket” — you can easily find them online — where the quilted blanket itself has built into it 20 or 30 pounds worth of metallic or stone beads that cause it to rest heavily on the body.

* Rumination — One of the most difficult things for Hunters to overcome when trying to get to sleep is the way the mind can run amok. Rumination is a cousin to worry and anxiety, and broadly defined as obsessing on thoughts of distress or disaster, typically in the future, without any consideration for solutions and often without putting those obsessive concerns into a less-threatening context.

We usually ruminate about terrible things that can happen in the future based on things we’ve done in the past, so there’s often a component of guilt or shame or embarrassment in the mix. When trying to get to sleep, rumination is often focused on the disaster that will happen the next day if we show up for work sleep-deprived or even fall asleep at the wheel trying to get to or home from work.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy has adopted a number of basic NLP techniques to deal with rumination, and they largely work.

The first is interrupting the rumination itself with internal self-talk.  When you start worrying/thinking about how badly that sales presentation will go in the morning if your brain isn’t working because you didn’t get enough sleep, quite literally say to yourself (inside your head) something like, “Wait a minute!  I can survive this.  I’ve done things before when I’m tired or sleep deprived, and they only rarely turned out badly. I can even use the old Claude Bristol self-talk method of looking myself in the mirror just before the presentation and telling myself that I’m wide awake and alert.  [It’s outlined in my book Adult ADHD: How To Succeed as a Hunter in a Farmer’s World.]  It may not work all day, but it’ll work for the important stuff.”

Perhaps the most important part of breaking rumination is to change your own internal tonality: how you hear your own internal voice when “thinking” or, essentially, talking to yourself while trying to get to or stay asleep.  As we get more and more worked up, our tonality tends to go up in volume, tone, and speed.  Pretty soon we’re talking to ourselves in a tone that both sounds like, and causes, something like a panic response.

So you can even try simply repeating the very words you were just saying in your head, but say them differently. 

For example, consider this typical insomniac internal dialogue: “I have to get up at 7, so I need to be asleep by 11 to get my 8 hours, but it’s already 10:30 and I’m not asleep yet so I’m starting to get worried that I might not fall asleep in time, so when my alarm goes off I’ll wake up sleep deprived and do a terrible job in that morning meeting where I have to make a presentation.”

If yours is like that, try this bit of NLP magic.  Instead of changing the words, simply drop the tone of your internal voice an octave, speak slowly as if you were in a slowed-down movie, and soften the volume with big spaces between words.  Because tonality actually communicates more meaning than do words (which are just abstract representations, whereas tonality is a direct-connect to your brain wiring), these changes can work like magic.  Try it; you’ll be astonished.

You can also remind yourself that while most people think that their sleep-deprivation is obvious to everybody at work or in social situations, the reality is that almost nobody ever notices, and your performance is only rarely diminished in any meaningful way.  To prove this to yourself, and give yourself something to talk with yourself when you begin to freak out about sleep deprivation, try purposely only getting five hours sleep one night this week, and then the next day push yourself through the day with enthusiasm and a smile and don’t mention it to anybody.  You’ll have a new tool to break that most common sleep-disturbing form of rumination.

Another way to interrupt rumination is to engage in problem solving while lying in bed with your eyes closed.  I discovered, when writing my first novel back 30 or more years ago, that when I went to bed and tried to lay out the arc of the novel in my mind, from the inciting incidents to the progressive complications to the crisis, climax, and resolution, the complexity of it all so overwhelmed my brain that it just gave up and went to sleep. Over the years, I’ve discovered that I can do the same thing by simply trying to diagram the story line of the most recent TV show or movie I’ve seen; it nearly always causes my brain to say, “Uncle! I give up! I’m going to sleep!!”

Thomas Edison himself played such mind-games to get himself to sleep. 

As he noted in his diary in July 12, 1885, “Awakened at 5:15 a.m. My eyes were embarrassed by the sunbeams. Turned my back to them and tried to take another dip into oblivion. Succeeded. Awakened at 7 a.m. Thought of Mina, Daisy, and Mamma G. Put all 3 in my mental kaleidoscope to obtain a new combination a la Galton. Took Mina as a basis, tried to improve her beauty by discarding and adding certain features borrowed from Daisy and Mamma G. A sort of Raphaelized beauty, got into it too deep, mind flew away and I went to sleep again.”

An external and more modern rumination-interrupt is to use a podcast. For each of us the content will be different, but — counter-intuitively — choosing a podcast on a topic you care about or need to know about is often best.  Because I do a 3-hour radio show every day, I need to keep up with the news, and because science is also often a part of my program, I usually listen to either the BBC daily podcast or one of the many great science podcasts out there.  At first, I’m fascinated, which instantly breaks the rumination habit.  Once that’s gone, my brain shuts down and when I wake up I only remember the first five or ten minutes of the podcast.

While rumination is a topic worthy of its own book, it’s important to note that excessive or daily rumination is also associated with clinical depression and panic disorders; breaking the habit of rumination, particularly at night, is one of the more commonly successful techniques used to treat those two conditions.  Replacing your bedtime rumination not only facilitates sleep, but is a tremendous help to mental health overall.

Hypnosis

Milton Erickson, MD was one of the most famous hypnotists of the mid-20^th century, and his work formed a large part of the basis of Richard Bandler’s and John Grinder’s compilation/invention of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP).  His wife, Betty, came up with what Milton referred to as “the Betty Technique” to put herself and others to sleep.  It’s a very simple pattern induction for self-hypnosis that leads to sleep.

Betty’s system used three of our senses, and went like this:  First, lying in bed with your eyes closed, notice what you’re “seeing” behind closed eyelids.  After attending to that for a few moments, shift your attention to what you’re hearing, even if the room is largely silent. A few moments after that, shift your focus to sensations in your body, your kinesthetic sense. Then repeat the entire sequence over and over until you’re asleep.  Typically, it takes between three and seven repetitions to knock yourself out.

Working with an actual hypnotist is a good way to learn self-hypnosis with more complexity than the Betty Technique.  Usually a person can learn self-hypnosis in just a few sessions. 

Another option is to use one of the sleep “apps” that are available for smartphones.  Scottish clinical hypnotherapist Andrew Johnson has some of the most popular and effective of these apps, where he guides you through a light hypnotic induction and into a deep, restful sleep. 

Sound-and-light machines

Certain frequencies of brain activity are associated with certain states of mind.  Beta frequencies are associated with thinking and even anxiety, while Alpha frequencies are sometimes called the “bliss” states. Theta is what we experience as we fall asleep and wake up, and appears to have a strong association with creativity. And Delta, the deep, slow-waves in the brain, are associated with sleep.

Neuroscientists have discovered that it’s possible to induce particular brainwave frequencies by stimulating the eyes and ears at these specific frequencies.  Several companies make glasses and headphones that connect to custom-built minicomputers to produce the frequencies in a sequence that imitates the normal process of falling asleep, offering them for both professional and consumer use.

People with any possibility of epilepsy should avoid these devices altogether as they can stimulate seizures.  But for the average, healthy person they can be a useful way to train yourself to quickly fall asleep.

The importance of sleep

While Thomas Edison was convinced that sleep was “wasted time,” we now know that it’s essential to normal mental and physical function.  During sleep, our brain cleans itself of the toxins it’s accumulated through the day’s metabolic process, leading to more efficient function.  During dream-sleep, we integrate the day’s activities and memories and form long-term memory, which is why altering sleep with drugs or alcohol often produces long-term memory failure.

In summary, sleep is important, even critical.  That said, anxiety about sleeplessness is perhaps even more destructive than the sleeplessness itself.  It’s important to develop internal self-talk that shuts down freak-outs about not falling asleep fast enough or waking up at night, and reassures you that no matter how much sleep you end up getting you’ll be just fine over the long term.

And to know what your personal “normal” sleep pattern is…and to do what you can to accommodate it.