ADHD (7): Your body clock, sleep and why mornings are basically an extreme sport.
Urrgh… mornings. Some are great. Some are just flat-out deplorable.
There’s nothing I can say or do to magically make your mornings easier. I still struggle with them myself.
On Monday I get up, walk around the freezing cold house looking for the bathroom, grab my toothbrush and brush my teeth for two minutes… only to realise I never put toothpaste on the brush.
On Tuesday I get up, put one sock on, then my top, go to the kitchen and switch the kettle on, then wander back to the bedroom to finish getting dressed — the whole time craving sugar.
You see, the first part of the night I sleep lightly and toss and turn. The latter part of the night I sleep deeply, so the alarm clock always sounds like a plane crashing into the bedroom.
Sometimes I wake up naturally at 5 or 6am, bright and alert… but honestly, that still feels like the middle of the night.
Why Mornings Are Hard
The thing is, our body clocks often don’t work the way other people’s do.
Waking up early can feel like starting a laptop with 5% battery, 24 tabs open, and a half-finished Dark Souls boss fight running in the background.
You’ve spent two hours trying to fall asleep the night before (which, by the way, rarely works — if you can’t sleep, get up for a bit), so the morning always arrives about four hours too early and feels like a fire drill with a hangover.
From what I’ve heard from other people with ADHD, we tend to run into two main problems at bedtime:
- Overthinking at bedtime – you look something up on Google and suddenly it’s 5am.
- Time blindness – “just one more thing”… especially with games or YouTube.
A Couple of Simple Fixes
Don’t take your phone into your bedroom. If you know you’ll pick it up, leave it on the other side of the house and buy a cheap alarm clock.
Set yourself a proper bedtime and stick to it. Mine is 22:30. I go to bed at that time almost every day.
But going to bed doesn’t mean you have to fall asleep instantly. Some nights I sleep at 23:00, sometimes midnight. The important part is keeping the same bedtime.
If you stick to a consistent bedtime for long enough, your body does eventually adapt. It took me about six months, but it did start working.
Late Chronotypes
Another thing to remember is that this may simply be how you’re wired.
Many people with ADHD have what researchers call a late chronotype. That means:
- You get sleepy later at night.
- You naturally wake later in the morning.
- Your energy peaks in the afternoon or evening.
That mostly applies to me, although if I’ve had a really good night’s sleep I can actually feel pretty good first thing in the morning.
Night Brain vs Morning Brain
At night my brain feels like this:
47 ideas a minute. Perfect clarity. 110% motivation. I’m about to start nine new projects.
Morning me is more like this:
Who am I? Which socks do I put on today? (I only own two types.) Everyone can go away and stay away.
For a long time I thought I disliked my partner because she was difficult. Turns out, after a year of her not being around, it was actually just my sleep deprivation making my ADHD play the drama queen.
When I’m tired, my brain is like Scooby and Shaggy pretending to be a tall bloke in a trench coat — technically functioning, but a bit unstable.
The Honest Truth
Like I said at the start, I don’t really have a perfect solution for mornings because I still struggle with them myself.
The best thing I’ve found is having a consistent bedtime and hoping that over time your brain learns to shut down when you get into bed.
ADHD brains often run on a slightly different schedule, and sometimes the best thing you can do is accept that and work with it rather than constantly fighting it.
Join me next week when we cover:
“You can do anything — but not everything at the same time.”
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