It’s exhausting because I spend a good portion of the day waiting for my mind to start working, and it’s pretty inefficient. I’m trying to figure out what this is all about, like is it temporary due to burnout, Strattera, or something else.
Non-24h sleep disorder is a common comorbidity with ADHD. If you are always tired when you wake up this is likely the cause.
Non-24h sleep disorder
omg that is me! I’ve always had trouble staying on a 24 hours sleep schedule. I just keep falling asleep later and later, until I get so tired from sleep too late and waking up early, that I finally crash. this has been my life story.
Could be both that and burn out and/or depression. Talk to a professional, not the internet, about this.
I do it until I fall asleep at like 3pm and then wake up at midnight and then it takes a few days to get back to a “normal” pattern until slowly the 3pm crash comes back around
yeah, im thinking of doing a reset next week. i’ll stay up all night and go to sleep at a decent time the following night.
Yep. I don’t have it diagnosed because my sleep study didn’t show anything so apparently I don’t have anything 🙄, aka I don’t have sleep apnea so sleep medicine didn’t care, but I almost certainly have non-24h. During covid lockdowns I slept when I was tired and ended up on a 25.5 hour schedule. I actually woke up and was awake. It was great.
pls enjoy a recent research paper: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32538895/
So very much yes. I’m not on any meds like strattera or stimulants like Adderall, and I definitely take the entire morning to get going.
Unless there’s an emergency at work that requires adrenaline and attention, I don’t produce much of anything until the afternoon.
You’re not alone!
I’m quite useless for at least the first one and a half hours after waking up. My strategy is ritualization. In this time I do the same things in the same order every working day: I get up, make breakfast for our cat, take my meds, switch on the coffee machine so it can heat up, shower, shave, brush my teeth, dress, emty the dish washer, make coffee for my self and (if she is already awake) one for my wife. Then pack my lunch, grab my headphones and go to the bus stop. All those things I can do with minimal brain capacity since I have done them the same way thousands of times. And when I arrive at work I’m at least 80% awake.
Takes me 16 hours of trying to wake up, then I go to bed and try again the next day.
It takes all of the spiders a while to leave your head
Facts
No.
- Make sure you’re well hydrated after getting up
- Make sure you’re always getting out of bed immediately after the alarm goes off
- Make sure your alarm goes off at the same time every day
- Make sure you’re getting up at the first alarm
- Make sure you’re going to sleep at the same time every day
- Make sure you’re showered before sleeping
- Make sure your bed sheets and room are clean before sleeping
- Make sure you’re off your phone for as long as possible before sleeping
- Make sure you’re not drinking coffee too late into the day
- Make sure you’re at least getting a brisk walk worth of exercise during the day
I am exhausted and dysfunctional on anything less than 8 and a half hours of sleep. If I sleep 8 hours a day starting Monday, I have a headache and killer migraine by the weekend.
Way more people are like me than people realize, but society has somehow normalized 8 hours of sleep. That said, good sleeping habits are worth so much and improve your day by immesurable amounts. Once you start taking sleep seriously, there’s no going back.
Edit: Lol@ victim mentality. Up to you if you want better sleep or not
Good luck keeping on a lot of that with ADHD
It also doesn’t work for everyone even with following it strictly. Just because something works for some, doesn’t mean it works for everyone.
