157 - Sleep Routine Ideas For The ADHD Adult

Today you get to experience the power of leveraging a community. This week I asked the ADHD Big Brother Community to share their sleep routines, and the results were awesome! Lots of insights and great ideas!

Mentioned in this episode - the ASMR story used by one of the members

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

I'm pretty sure we all know that getting good sleep is a big deal, right? Like we're all kind of like, uh, you know, if I could just get my myself to go to bed on time and fall asleep, and if I could wake up on time, then everything would be wonderful. It kind of feels like literally every single one of us is saying that. Or we're saying that at some point in our lives. I'm saying it right now. So let us figure this out together. Let us join hands and discuss sleep routines. You are listening to ADHD Big Brother, the podcast for adults struggling with their ADHD and comorbid depression symptoms. I'm your host, Russ Jones, author of The Standing at the Top, believer that you can actually have a smile in your life despite this diagnosis. So let's make some sense out of this struggle. Let's learn some stuff, let's laugh at some stuff. Ladies and gentlemen, here's some stuff. Welcome to the podcast. How do you do? Uh do you do pretty good? Excellent. I'm doing pretty good. Uh let's get them let's go right into the mental health update and then let's get into sleep. So every week I share where I'm at with my mental health. Uh, the good, the bad, the weird. It's just one little effort in the sea of efforts at normalizing talking about our skull spaghetti. And this week I'm feeling pretty good. Pretty good. I've been dating a woman who is super cool, uh, and she's a total nerd. And I'm not afraid to say that. Anybody that enjoys sitting through Marvel movies for the upteenth time um is uh tops in my books. And she's a Seinfeld dork, and that is just we are connecting big time. And I'd say in terms of mental health, I'm I'm feeling pretty good. Um there are and maybe you guys can relate to this. There's like and I know I've talked about this before, but where like on any given day, you I can have some really amazingly positive moments, and then I can slip into some dark moments, and in all in the same day, the brain, she just loves to fuck with us, doesn't she? It's like this school spaghetti of ours, it's fascinating like that. And so, really, in summary, it's uh good mental health week. Yay. Um, one of the things that I've noticed lately is that post being sick uh and coming out of depressive episodes, it's like there's a lot of bad habits to now undo. Do you guys ever notice that? Does that happen to you? Like, do you like I'll relate it to being sick, but there's just this whole fuck it. I don't care, I just want to eat whatever I want. And then the second I get a taste of a bad habit, that's my new routine. It's there's no effort required to turn a bad habit into a routine. Like there's a I I had chips at like 10 p.m. one night, and so that just became my routine because it tasted good and it felt good in the moment. So I'm like, oh, who cares about the feeling bad about it? I'm this isn't my routine now. And so my sleep is a major part of that. And I can say definitively for me, when I get poor sleep, other things suffer. And all those routines that were in place, the ones that were there to help me with my focus, they're shot. And it's like they're always the first to go, aren't they? So it was perfect that in in the ADHD Brother community, one of our newest members, Raul, uh, gave a suggestion on an episode about sleep. And not just me jabbering on and on about it, but what does the community do for their sleep routines? And I thought that was brilliant. For those of you that are maybe new to the podcast, the ADHDB Brother community, it's not just a um like a hey, join my Facebook group or whatever. It's literally like this Uber support system set up to provide accountability and support and guidance and education and ideas for those of us who struggle with our ADHD symptoms. And like we need help with the doing of the things. Our community is about actively moving our needles forward on goals in a way that specifically works for our skull spaghetti. So, like the marketing pitch here is basically like it's really a no-brainer if you actually need the help. It's a a three-month membership costs less than the price of a single session of ADHD coaching. You just have to show up and you'll start moving forward. And additionally, members uh in the community get a free coaching session with me when they finish onboarding just to get that extra start. So it really sells itself once you're in there. And if you show up, you will get something out of it. We've got daily accountability, we have monthly Zoom chats, we do weekly planning, we're sharing our insights and our struggles because that, in my view, is how we succeed. Constant ideas, iterations. We do challenges with each other. And I've just started this process of uh having special guests and coaches that come to do exclusive workshops for us. It's pretty rad. And if you're listening to this on the original uh release date, Megs Crawford, professional organizer for the ADHD year, she's super badass. She's gonna be giving us uh uh an exclusive workshop in the community on the 14th. So it's coming up this next week. So if you're ever waffling about joining, get in there. And I'm not just the owner, I'm also a member. I live in there. I love it. Uh so and Raul had this brilliant idea, and it's gonna show you guys how rad it is to be part of an actively engaged community of ADHDers that are excited to support each other and help each other. So I created this post inside the community asking people if they wanted to share their sleep routines so that we can have a variety of options, we can perhaps be inspired by each other, and that what can be shared on the podcast. The results were amazing, and this is the kind of stuff that we can do for all kinds of ADHD struggles. And it truly shows how powerful it is for ADHDers to be members of an engaged community. Doesn't have to be mine, but I highly recommend a community. All right, so here's what the community had to say uh about sleep, and I'm not gonna do names, I'll just say member one, member two, I'll paraphrase because you know us, ADHDers, we love to share, we love it, and I love reading what people share. But in the spirit of you know getting to more of them, I'm gonna shorten as I see fit without you know getting rid of the meat. And so without further ado, here are ADHD Big Brother community members talking about their sleep routines. Member one, if I'm struggling, I will do cryptic crossword puzzles before bed as it requires just enough concentration to get rid of everything else in my head. Oh, that's that's clever. What I do have a problem with sometimes is waking up at 3 a.m. and not being able to sleep again. Uh, I find that listening to ASMR sleep stories, I have one that I've listened to hundreds of times, works best, but I have to really fight the urge to start looking at my phone as it's game over if I do that. Now, I had not heard about the ASMR sleep story. So, like uh she actually was super cool and she put a link to the one that she listens to. So I'm gonna put that in the show notes so you guys can see that uh and give that a thwack. That's like it's something I've never tried. And I think it might work for me, so I'm gonna give that a thwack on one of the nights that I'm struggling. But that was super cool. Great ideas. Uh, thank you, member one. Member two, I'll crawl into bed around 10 if I'm not sleep procrastinating by binging some sort of show or series. Guilty of that as well. I struggle with the revenge bedtime procrastination when I only have five hours to myself after operating in a high stress work environment. Like letting my brain turn to mush after work feels good and relaxing and unwinds me. But when I don't have boundaries around those behaviors, I know it's unhealthy. I can totally relate to that. A few things that works in my sleeping routine, listening to rain sounds every night, it quiets the thoughts and gives me something else to tune into. Also, I swear by eye masks, not only does it block light, but it literally keeps your eyes closed. Without it, my eyes are half open, looking around, tuning in elsewhere. That's uh a super cool idea, the sleep mask to block out the light. And then also, it's interesting how people are like to have um noises in the background. Um but that the mask actually reminds me of when I used to sleep when I was little. Uh, I didn't know that you were supposed to close your eyes to go to sleep. So when I was a kid, I would go to sleep just laying there staring at the ceiling, just staring at the ceiling, marveling at that at some point I will wake up. I will go from staring at the ceiling to just magically awakening in the morning. Oh my god, if only I had an iMass back then. So so far we have a couple people who have had some kind of a sound going, something about having an audible thing to put our attention to. That's interesting. Member number three, I have an app called Portal. It loops sounds from all over the world. Here we are. We're back to sounds. You can get the free version with the same six loops. I never seem to get tired of them. I can turn it up and run the ceiling fan if the neighbors' dogs hear something trivial and want to go on and on about it all night. Oh man, I can hard relate to the dog bark struggle. And then he continues. I try to hydrate and take a couple antihistamines because waking up congested can really mess me up. I can do caffeine until about 3 to 4 p.m. After that, there's no benefit. I try to not snack two to four hours before bed, but that is really one of my problems. My phone is set to do not disturb from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. That's super smart. Setting your phone to do not disturb. I have no screens in the bedroom, just my phone. I keep on charge to run the portal app and check the alarm system or weather. I have plenty of books, and if I can't sleep, I'm asleep very soon after I start reading. I'm very similar to member three, in that reading a physical book for me will typically tire me out very fast. I get, I don't know if it's boredom or what, or my body's in bed, and I'm just it's I'll get through maybe a couple of pages and then I'm out. Uh I also struggle with snacking at night, so I think I'm gonna reintroduce that rule of like no snacks after 8 p.m. Something very black and white, just like it's you win or you lose this thing, and it's it's easier for me to just say no, I can't do a thing at a certain time. So we got some good nuggets in here so far. All right, member number four no caffeine after 4 p.m., no liquids after 8 p.m. Oh, this one's hardcore. Two hours before bed, this is what she does checks the skull spaghetti and do anything I missed. Okay, so skull spaghetti, that's our daily accountability space in our community. We we're we go after day streaks. So a lot of us will check what we said we were gonna do in the morning, and then oh shit, I forgot, so we scramble to do it so we don't lose our day streak. You know, whatever works, whatever gets the thing done. Okay, then she closes the window shades, dims all the lights, takes a bath, watch something on TV, take a low dose sleep supplement. Oh, look at all these. I I cycle between magnesium L-3-8, Ashwagonda, L-theanine, melatonin, valerian, and L-tryptophan. I personally, guys, I don't know what I just said. I know very little about these things. Ashwagonda, I thought was a reference from Black Panther. I don't know what any of these things are. Melatonin, I've heard about. Um, so do your own research on this stuff. Whether it's good for you or maybe it's total voodoo witchcraft. I don't know. Okay, so you let me know what you find out. Then she turns the thermostat down to 78. Right before sleep, my fiance and I, we say what we're grateful for from the day. It's a lovely way to end the day. Oh my god. Okay, so that sounds like a phenomenal way to put yourself into a positive, loving mood right before bed. That's awesome. Uh, then I mask, okay, that's popular. Earplugs and mouth card. So basically gearing up for the big game known as sleep. Um, if I have restless thoughts, I usually envision simple dance footwork exercises and it calms, occupies my brain enough to float off to sleep. I'm usually asleep between 9:30 and 10 p.m. Some days I wake up before my alarm goes off at 6 a.m. Some days I sleep till 7. I never thought I'd be a morning person, but it happened organically over the past several years. So this is a hardcore sleep routine. I love the idea that the sleep routine here begins two hours before bed, and it's not all about sleep. It's like, you know, there's skull spaghetti group stuff, there's TV watching in there, there's a bath, it really reads like this ultimate window, which is awesome. And I would imagine that over time the body just gets into that habit of this is the routine. This goes to this, and this goes to that, and this goes to the next thing, and then we fall asleep. That's super cool. Okay, lots of takeaways on that one. Moving on to member five. Member number five, what do you do for your sleep routine? Um, on an ideal day, I gather the dogs, catch up on the forums, social media, friends about an hour before bed, start winding down. Just before bedtime, I brush my teeth, fill the CPAP machine, crawl into bed, and tell the dogs to find their spots. At bedtime, I listen to a podcast that only requires listening, no video. There's a lot of sound stuff happening here. This is super interesting. In the morning, I have an alarm clock with a light, specifically a smart sleep wake-up clock. I think that's a brand, maybe. Um, sunrise in the bedroom always begins at 5 30 a.m. And I try really hard to reset myself at 6 o'clock a.m. every day and keep my bedtime at about 10 o'clock the next day. The further I get from the routine, the harder it is to have a good night. I really resonate with that last line. Like when my routines were tight, I would consistently get a good night's sleep and be able to wake up on time. So, but and when things go off the rails, it feels like everything goes off the rails. Okay, member number six. Uh, since nearly a year, I've been trying to get closer to the following routine, and at times I am very close. Oh, and he's this guy is from the other side of the planet. So I have to do all this math. 21 hour. Start prepping for bed. What is 21 hour? That's 9 p.m. Okay. This includes preparing coffee, breakfast, take the dogs for a pee, and go to the bedroom. Around 21:30.

SPEAKER_00 14:10

Let's just pretend he's in the military. Around 21.30, I do not allow random phone excursions into rabbit holes after 21 hours.

SPEAKER_01 14:17

I do not allow random phone excursions into rabbit holes after 9 p.m. I start with brushing my teeth and then give myself some options to meditate, stretch, do yoga, breath work, aim to be done around 9 45, then journal for five minutes and post to the forum, which is the ADHD Big Brother community, plan the next day and tick my habit tracker. I try to be done with all this by 10 p.m., but it's usually 10:15 to 10:30. Next I read fiction from a physical book for a few minutes, pages. That's cool. So that's a side note. A lot of people will say, Oh, I read off a Kindle or I read off of uh a screen or something like that. Um I'm really uh a strong advocate for the physical book. There's just something about it. I don't, you know, I don't know if they're right or wrong or good or bad or whatever, but there's just something about turning pages. It's great. Okay, I lost track now. Where was I? Next I read fiction from 10:30 lies lights out. Sometimes I'll try to sleep without listening to anything, but I fall asleep much faster if I listen to words, not music. Gotta be the right amount of interesting, not super engaging, but also not boring for it to work. There's more sound. A lot of us are really uh using sound uh to help us into bed. This summer these routines have gone flying out the window, and I noticed something weird. My restless legs are back. I hadn't thought of it, but I don't think I've had much of that in the last year, and I've had pretty intense RLS before and now. Uh I have an alarm on my phone and only one style mega alarm, best investment of my life. I sleep better because I don't worry about not waking up anymore. And I usually wake up before the mega alarm, which I place in random different spots around the room because I don't want to wake my wife up. I wake up at 6 and have some routines I'm trying to get in before leaving for work before 7.30. It's rare that I'm off before 7:40 a.m., but I love the lack of stress I get from getting up and leaving early when I manage. I hardly even recognize myself anymore. I've always slept until the very last moment, 10 minutes before I have to run out the door, up until two years ago. Super cool. That's really awesome to hear that he's he's on top of that now. Member number seven, we're just moving right along. Member number seven. Ironically, sleep is one of the things I absolutely struggle with the most, but I'll share what I do attempt most nights. No food after 8 p.m. works concurrently when I'm also doing intermittent fasting. No sugar foods after 6 p.m. Read a book not on a screen 30 minutes prior. If I didn't do my daily workout or some equivalent, my sleep will be compromised in some way. I'm convinced there is a quote unquote movement quota that ADHDers need in order for our nervous system to downregulate. But uh that's just conjecture. Some kind of nervine tea or tinctures, chamomile, hops, passion flowers, skull cap, tulsi are some good general purpose herbs, valerian. Ooh, that's the second Valerian person today. Uh Valerian is popular for this, but clinically it looks like almost 20% of people can actually be wired by this herb. Ooh. So Valerian could be good or bad. Plus, the next day Grogan is for some folks, like myself, is unreal. So I will mention this guy is a hardcore herbalist. Thousands of hours in herbalism training, but do your own research, man. Or join the community and ask him yourself. Be like, what's up with this passion flower stuff? What is a skull cap? Is that the top of someone's skull? Because that sounds like it might be criminal to do. I'll be following up on that. Okay, moving right along. This is we're seeing a lot of common threads here. I'm I'm seeing. So member number eight. Uh deciding how I do slash feel tomorrow is the main goal versus amusing myself before bed. In parentheses, no TV or scrolling. Uh take sleep meds on time, adjust room temperature, put on pajam jams, go potty, wash face and brush teeth, kiss my cat good night. Then go back and brush your teeth again. That's what I would do if you're gonna be kissing a cat. Um, but that's not on her list. Okay, lay down with lights off and blackout curtains drawn. Silence the phone, set the morning alarm, start a guided sleep meditation from my app or white noise, get my body in the right sleep posture and put the pillow over my head to block the noise. Put your put a pillow over her head. That I'm picturing, you know, like in the TV shows when someone tries to murder somebody in the hospital and they put the pillow over their head. Wow. So be careful, be careful when you're doing that part of this. So I would just say, let's be careful. And then again, we notice that there's sound, something going on at night. Very interesting. All right, let's do member number nine. Member nine. What works for me, though it happens very infrequently, he says. Going to bed early, in bed or asleep by 10 p.m., waking up around 5 50 a.m. for work. No TV, only listen to music and start prepping work items for the following day. Clothes are picked, uh picked and ready for a morning shower. Lunch is packed, lightly clean, organized kitchen, and living room makes leaving the apartment in the morning easier. Oh, that sounds good. Especially like and that's what you come home to, right? So that's pretty cool. Um, self-care relaxing, like drinking sleepy time tea and reading, melatonin, not daily, but a few times a week. It's the second time I've heard that one. Um, more or less turning off electronics and distractions, a quiet apartment, making my slog of a morning wake up easier the night before, treating my future self with kindness because I know I struggle with sleep and wake up. Eye mask, I like the pressure of something on my eyes. Couple we've had a few people that are into eye masks. Uh, some kind of background noise. Either pink noise or only piano instrumental. Items above are not consistent or frequent, but the times I do them or remember, I feel so much better. And then he goes on to say what he struggles with. I I know going to bed early is one of the things that benefits me the most, but I sometimes feel incapable of doing that because I want to do other things. That's supremely common, and that's that whole you know we talk about revenge bedtime procrastination, right? Where we want to make sure that we get our time in so we we stay awake because uh you know we want to finish out the day. But I have another member that actually speaks to that, so I'm gonna we'll hold off on that. Um he struggles with eating food past 8 p.m. Me too, brother. God dang it. That's all my that's on my to-dos. Um, and then waking up immediately and not snoozing, which is also another thing for me, which I do have a workaround for that. And one of the other members had mentioned this, putting our phones on the other side of the room so that when the alarm goes off, if it's an obnoxious enough that makes us have to get up, then we get up and we shut it off. And then we're already out of bed, so we're more likely to keep the day going. And then we have member 10 who says, I think we're on member 10. Are we in okay? Let's just even if we're not, let's just pretend. Member 10 says, uh, this is the usual routine goes like this. Decide I'm ready for bed, turn off lights 30 minutes to an hour before I want to sleep, and then sleep. Wow, that's that's a tight routine right there. Uh then you wake up, Earl Grey or Macha Latte. Half because I love me, a tea half because I almost stopped the sentence at that. Half because I love me. I just I love me. So matcha latte, okay? Half because I love me a tea latte, half because it really helps give me energy, but it doesn't increase my anxiety or make me jittery like coffee. Ooh, that's a good one. Breakfast consisting of a protein vegetable, but no carbs, to very little carbs, so I don't feel sluggish. It has some good vitamins and protein for energy. That's a good good point. I I I've read it that having protein. Is good for ADHD. And then I uh we have a community member, Rivka, who's really um been a good person for me to talk to about health stuff, and so I'll be asking her, I'm like, I what do I do? You know, like how do I replace the oatmeal and all the carbs for breakfast? And she was like, Russ, the answer is always vegetables. So that's kind of my mantra that I've I've adapted. Thank you to Rivka, is basically when I'm wondering what to eat, I can always just say, the answer is vegetables. So this person's ideal routine goes like this: prepare clothes for the day, shower, yoga nidra or yin yoga, wake up. My favorite fast-paced song. Oh, she wakes up and shakes some booty. There's a booty shaking in the morning. Bonus if it's done with the mirror eye contact, or make some faces in the mirror, and the weirder the better. How freaking cool is that? Yeah. Don't break eye contact. Staring contest with your own face while you are shaking thy booty. Then a 30 minute plus workout, Earl Grey latte because she loves herself. Because she loves breakfast protein and veggie, head to work, and then more or Earl Grey for work. That sleep routine blended right into the day routine right there. Um that's super simple and good. Especially I like the end where there's some body movement at the end of the day. Like some of that yoga stuff. I've been thinking about qigong. Uh, what do you guys do? Do you guys do anything like that? That's for another episode. And then finally, number 11. I'm literally there's pages. This guy wrote a super long article in the community in the share your insights section. So I am gonna go through on his key takeaways, because this will be way too long to read. So his key takeaways, which this is a phenomenal read, but uh, I don't want to go to bed. So not going to bed needs to cost me something, and that cost has to be something better than what I'm staying up to do. That is super, super insightful. Um, number two, my willpower focus time awareness is shit, especially at night. So I need layers of things that force and inspire me to stay on task. Number three, by doing my most cherished, quote unquote, important but not urgent things in the morning, the revenge bedtime procrastination thing at night is way less. How bitter can I be? I already got to do the things, and as soon as I wake up, I will immediately get to do those things again. So, number four, those things I do will be done in a much more deliberate way with less quote unquote side quests and bullshit because I don't have the time to screw around or get decision paralysis. That is I I love that. Um, number five, before I go to bed, I am reminded again of and I get to quote unquote relive the accomplishments of the day. Gratitude journal, streaks app. Number six, by getting to the cherished things in the morning, I can be present with my family and enjoy them rather than feeling panicked that I'm never getting to those things and feeling angry at myself because of being a procrastinating fuck up and then being edgy with them because it, you know, you know, but unable to tell them why because of the shame, and then feeling even worse. And number seven, I don't need to be rigid. I shared the most quote unquote ideal version of these routines, but I leave room for plenty of flexibility both with nighttime and morning, so that I still get something satisfying, even if I'm tired or things come up, stuff like that. It's not about perfection or not screwing around on YouTube sometimes. It's about making this a conscious choice rather than just something that happens because of my ADHD. That is super these are some super good takeaways. And just so you know, uh, and I I might be getting this wrong, so he'll correct me if I'm wrong, but he sets up these things in the morning, are these things that he wants to do. And I know one of them in particular is music. And so he only has a certain amount of time to do music before he has to go into work. So if his if his sleep routine is shit and he wakes up later, he's just screwed up his time for playing music because that was in the morning. So when he's saying that it has to cost him something, that's a pretty that's a pretty big cost to be like, oh, I don't get to do the music now because I've totally screwed up my night and I've I've slept in and blah, blah, blah. So super profound, very good stuff. Man, this is such a cool experiment for learning about how we all handle sleep. Like what here's my big takeaways for uh for this for myself, and it's to it's to continue working on cementing in my own sleep routine. But when I was kicking butt, I would I would do a short timed pickup of the apartment. I'd have a glass of tea, I would do a short guided meditation, no media 30 minutes before bed, then I would read a physical book prior to going to sleep, and that would usually knock me out. And I would keep my phone on the other end of the room so I couldn't be pulled to look at it. I think I mentioned that earlier on this episode. That helps that would help me to get out of bed because I'm a total snoozer lately. This is a really good exercise in seeing what is possible when you're a member of an engaged community, right? Like, so here's you know, I only shared 10 or was it 11 of members who have shared their sleep routines, and I got a number of things out of it. I was like, okay, so I need I would I'm gonna look into this Valerian and Melatone and see what the what all the fuss is about on that. I may try to do the eye mask just to go to sleep with it. I'm reminded that sleep, like having some kind of a white noise or some kind of a sound seems to be very popular amongst our kind. So that's something worth exploring. It's it's worth trying some various things, whether it's white noise or whether it's uh one of those ASMR deals. Um, I'm super, super intrigued by that. But these are this is the kind of thing where ideas are integral to us, and you don't really get that when you're out in the normy world not interacting with groups of ADHDers. So it's I I can't recommend joining a community enough. Uh I would love for you guys to join ours and add to our ongoing dialogue of ideas. But I think the challenge I think for this week is rather than build the ultimate sleep routine that we try and fail because it's just too much too soon. What is one thing that you can incorporate into your ongoing construction of your ultimate sleep routine? For me, I think it's gonna be reading a physical book in bed 30 minutes before I go to sleep. And this will actually take care of the whole no media before bed thing, because I'll be reading the book 30 minutes before bed. That one thing may be a super help, and then I'll add on to it once I get that cemented in. What's it gonna be for you? God, there's a lot of good ideas in this episode. And if this is the kind of thing that you're needing for your ADHD, like the ideas, the iterations, suggestions from people who struggle in the same way that you do, then I want you to join the ADHD Big Brother community. Get in there. Link in the show notes. Link a Rooney in the show note of Roonies. And if you like this episode and if you'd like a community-filled episode on another topic, please reach out via the adhcapher.com website. Let me know. This was such a super fun experiment, and I want to do more of these. So uh let me know. And with that, I hope you guys have a fantastic sleep routine filled week, and I will talk to you later.