Tag: Mindfulness

ADHD and Sleep Part 2: Why You’re Not Getting Enough Sleep

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ADHD and Sleep Part 2: Why You’re Not Getting Enough Sleep and What to Do About It.

 

The Link Between ADHD and Sleep Issues

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD ) is commonly associated with sleep disturbances. It’s important to know that you’re not alone. It is believed some 50 – 75% of all adults with ADHD report some problems with sleeping. These can include difficulty falling asleep, difficulty staying asleep, and not feeling rested upon waking. Understanding the unique challenges faced by individuals with ADHD can shed light on why sleep issues are prevalent and what you can do to address them.

Why You’re Not Getting Enough Sleep

If you’re not asleep, you’re likely either awake doing something or tossing and turning as you try in vain to switch off your overactive brain. Here are some common reasons why you might be awake past bedtime:

Pre-Sleep Activities

  • Staying Active Until Bedtime: Engaging in stimulating activities right before bed can make it hard for your brain to wind down.
  • Night-Time Productivity: Many with ADHD find night-time peaceful and conducive for concentrated work, often leading to late nights.
  • Technology Use: Phones and computers emit blue light that keeps the brain alert – thus making rest difficult.
  • Evening Entertainment: Watching TV or films, especially if you have a TV in your bedroom, can delay sleep.
  • Socializing: Conversations and social activities can push back your bedtime.
  • Working Late: Meeting deadlines or finishing tasks can lead to staying up late, which cuts into sleep time and keeps your mind active.

Mental and Physical Factors

  • Worry and Rumination: Those with ADHD often experience worry and rumination, making it hard to fall asleep.
  • Physical Restlessness: A lack of daytime movement can contribute to restlessness at night, so finding the right amount of daily exercise is crucial.
  • Processing Time: There’s a theory that ADHD brains need more time to process daily events, which can extend into late-night hours.

What Hampers Sleep

Several factors in your environment and habits can hinder sleep:

  • Bright Lights: Excessive light in your sleep environment can prevent you from falling asleep.
  • Room Temperature: A too-warm room can be uncomfortable.
  • Technology in the Bedroom: TVs, computers, phones, and tablets can disrupt sleep.
  • Clutter: A cluttered room can create a sense of chaos, making it hard to relax.

Strategies for Better Sleep

To improve sleep quality, focus on your pre-sleep routine and sleep environment:

Pre-Sleep Routine

  • Reduce Caffeine Intake: Avoid caffeine several hours before bedtime.
  • Wind Down: Spend at least one hour before sleep relaxing.
  • Limit Alcohol: Avoid excessive alcohol consumption before bed.
  • Stop Eating Early: Finish eating at least 1.5 hours before bedtime.
  • Exercise Timing: Exercise no later than 2-3 hours before bed.

Sleep Environment

  • Remove or Modify Technology: Use screen filters for warm light and switch devices to Airplane mode.
  • Cool Down: Keep your bedroom at a lower temperature than the rooms you were in before.
  • Warm Shower: Take a warm shower before bed to cool your body core.
  • Dedicated Sleep Space: Use your bedroom only for sleeping or napping.
  • Consistent Routine: Go to bed and wake up as near as possible to the same time every day.
  • Background Noise: Use quiet music or white noise to help lull you to sleep.

Building Better Sleep Habits

Remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day. Improving sleep habits takes time and patience. Start with one or two changes, such as adjusting your pre-sleep routine or modifying your sleep environment. Even little adjustments can significantly improve your sleep quality, giving you more energy and focus during the day.

By understanding the challenges and making mindful changes, you will enjoy the benefits of better-quality sleep and improved overall well-being.

Lost something again? A fresh approach to keeping track of your stuff.

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Lost something again? A fresh approach to keeping track of your stuff.

Are you a person who’s always losing things? There’s your keys, your phone, your purse, your glasses. They are never in the place where you think you last saw them, are they? Or where they ought to be, in that special basket by the door, or on that hook next to the stairs.

Why not? Well maybe you, like many others, are not fully paying attention when you put your keys down. Because you’re busy thinking about other things.

When you’re busy in your head thinking, it’s pretty much impossible for you to notice what you are doing with your hands or anything you’re carrying. For much of our days we are going through life on autopilot. We can eat, walk, and even drive whilst thinking about other things entirely. Some studies show that maybe as much as half of our lives are spent on autopilot, and that goes for everyone, not just people with ADHD. No wonder we lose our stuff!

So what’s the solution? Well, one sure way is to pull yourself out of autopilot at the right moments, so you can pay attention to where you are putting your keys.  Catching our own autopilot behaviour as it is happening is the secret.

You can do this by building up your ability to catch yourself acting on autopilot. Think of it like a skill that can be improved on with practice. You get better at it the more you do of it, right? Or a muscle that gets stronger the more you exercise it. If you are training to lift weights you don’t immediately start with the heaviest weight, do you? You’d end up in hospital with a strained tendon or worse. So you start small with a weight that’s well within your capabilities and work your way up.

Use plenty of help and support to make it easy on yourself at the beginning. A good starting point is to use some kind of external prompt at intervals throughout the day. This could be any signal that comes from outside yourself which can call your attention to what you’re doing in the moment.

For example, choose an activity you already do several times a day – such as making yourself a hot drink or having a glass of water – and link that to consciously noticing what you’re doing right then. This will begin to build up your “noticing” muscles. Maybe you’re the sort of person who wants something that will be sure to rouse you out of your autopilot trance. You could use bells, alarms or any kind of noise that will grab your attention. If you are a visually oriented person, other options might be to have post-its, sticky notes or coloured dots strategically placed in odd corners of your home. Put them somewhere you’re sure to see them.

You can set up timed or random occasions for catching autopilot throughout the day. Why not get creative with this; finding new ways to gently prod yourself to consciousness with an alerting stimulus? Try several until you find something that works. You may need to swap them around from time to time once your techniques lose their novelty and become an invisible part of the furniture, when you don’t respond to them anymore.

Once you’ve noticed you are in autopilot, then what? Simply being aware of what’s happening in the here and now, aware of both your internal thoughts and feelings, and of your surroundings, can give you some space. A welcome break from the chatter in your mind.

You can regularly interrupt the current of mindless inattention, by bringing your attention back to the present. I tell my coaching clients they can do this by practicing catching themselves in autopilot and bringing their attention to what’s happening in and around them. Then I encourage them to stop whatever they are doing for a few moments and bring their attention to their breath. This is a form of Mindfulness practice; a way of “taking control of our attention (self – regulation) with an attitude of openness, curiosity and acceptance.” (Bishop et.al. 2004 – in Mindfulness: A proposed operational definition.) 

This way you give yourself a chance to notice, then choose what you want to focus on. By checking in with yourself at regular intervals throughout the day, you’ll give yourself opportunities to ask yourself “What do I want to do right now? What could be next?”

Once you learn to catch your own autopilot behaviour, you’ll begin to notice things you didn’t notice before.

You can learn how to pull yourself out of autopilot and back into the present with:

  • Gradual practice building up bit by bit.
  • External prompts like a certain time of day.
  • Linking to things you do regularly like drinking a hot drink or glass of water.
  • Setting up timed or random occasions to draw attention to what you are doing.
  • Auditory prompts like bells or alarms, or custom noises.
  • Visual prompts like post- its, sticky notes or coloured dots.
  • Stopping what you’re doing and bringing your attention to your breath.

Before long you’ll also become more aware of the times when you’re putting your keys down. And begin to remember where to find them later.

Anna Schlapp, AACC, ACC, is a certified ADHD coach who specialises in creative solutions to triumph over the hurdles of ADHD. Anna helps those with challenges in organisation to co-create personalised blueprints for leading more amazing lives. Read more of Anna’s strategies for empowered productivity on her blog. To find out how Anna’s unique system can help you maximise your potential, ask about a complimentary coaching session.

 

20 Top Tips to Tame Procrastination

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20 Top Tips to Tame Procrastination

witty epithet:I'm taking care of my procrastination issues, just you wait and see
  1. Slow the Action – Pause, Notice, consider your Options. Take Your Time. Someone once said, “If you don’t take your time, somebody else will.”

 

  1. Don’t go EAST ( Everything At the Same Time). Obviously you cannot do everything at once – can you? One thing at a time is plenty.

 

  1. Think how great it will be to have started this. Taking that first step releases amazing energy and power. 

 

  1. Remember it doesn’t need to be perfect. There’s no such thing as perfect. Good enough is fine for now. 

 

  1. Do something you feel attracted to for a set amount of time before approaching the task in hand. Following your interests wakes up your brain and makes you feel more motivated. It can also pay to get a quick win with doing something you are interested in, improving your mood and giving you a sense that things are moving forward. Try making a list and ticking or crossing out completed items.

 

  1. Do something physical first. Physical movement can not only help break the deadlock, it also releases helpful hormones, brain chemicals etc and allows you to re-oxygenate your blood. Your brain will thank you for it.

 

  1. Take the pressure off. Too much pressure will release stress hormones like cortisol, effectively shutting down your brain in a most unhelpful way. Try one of the many free Mindfulness apps to help short circuit feelings of pressure.

 

  1. Create a plan. Creating a plan will help to clarify your intentions and make it easier to see what needs to be done, and in what order. Check out this article for some basic planning techniques to try.

 

  1.  Think of just having a first go at it, like a draft or prototype. This strategy gives you the combined benefits of taking the pressure off ( see no.7 above)  and also gives you the opportunity to think in more flexible terms. This way you provide yourself with multiple opportunities to refine your task/project/ideas, avoiding both perfectionism and the dread of making mistakes.

 

  1. Chunk things down into doable pieces. If tasks seem too large and vague, they will appear far more off-putting. Making them smaller will make them easier to do.

 

  1. Get clear on what your very first step will be. When you think you have your first step worked out, check it out by imagining yourself doing it and asking, “What do I need in order to be able to do this?” For instance if the first step is to call someone, maybe you would need to have the number in front of you before you can make the call. So the first step is to find out the number. Then you can ask the question again. “What do I need to do in order to find out the number?” It may be you need to look it up on your computer. So the first step then becomes switch on my computer. Continue asking this question repeatedly until nothing stands in the way of you taking that first step immediately.

 

  1. Do a tiny bit of a tiny bit. This is similar to the example above, no.9 where we get put off by large or complicated tasks with lots of moving parts. Try subdividing your projects into mini- projects, and then into individual steps. One step could take maybe two minutes or less, and is therefore much more likely that it can be fitted in somewhere.

 

  1. Have a back-up plan for if things go differently to how you would like. Having a Plan B can be reassuring, and provides an alternative to get on with, should you run into snags with your first plan.

 

  1. Set a timer. Think of the amount of time that does not fill you with dread, maybe 10 mins or 5 mins and set a timer to do it for that long. Give yourself permission to stop after that.

 

  1. Make it fun. Having fun is a sure way to stimulate the brain neurotransmitters that will help you get motivated and into Action. 

 

  1. Have rewards lined up for yourself for the effort you put in, rather than using achievement alone as your success criteria. As Carol Dweck has written, ” … [W]e can praise wisely, not praising intelligence or talent. That has failed. Don’t do that anymore. But praising the process that kids engage in: their effort, their strategies, their focus, their perseverance, their improvement. This process praise creates kids who are hardy and resilient.”  from this article on Growth Mindset versus Fixed Mindset.

 

  1. Get support from a buddy, friend or workmate. Support from another can vary from simply  having someone in the same room while you are working, to cooperating on a task together, or asking someone to help you by regularly checking in on you.

 

  1. Pay attention to setting your environment up to suit the way you work best. Everyone is different. Some need silence to be at their best,  a tidy desk, a hot drink and their favourite pen. Others need their favourite music in the background, can work with piles and clutter all around them, drink only water, and work best in a cosy armchair. Experiment to find out what works best for you.

 

  1. Have a race with yourself. Having a race with yourself adds an element of competition and fun. Try using a timer to see how much you can get done in “x” amount of time.

 

  1. Think how you will feel once this has been completed. Will you feel relieved? Glad? Proud? Triumphant? Ready to do it all over again? Get in touch with those feelings and really imagine yourself into that place you will be after you have done this. Research reveals that future imagining and past remembering are stored in the same area of the brain. By using our imaginations to vividly create a desired future, the brain begins to tap into this information as though this future already exists, and is a memory that the brain can work with, helping the brain to problem solve and generate solutions to make your plans a reality.

Anna Schlapp B.A., AACC, ACC, is a certified coach with the ADD Coach Academy and the International Coach Federation. Specialising in ADHD and Creativity, Anna helps talented people like you find ways of being more creatively productive and productively creative.

Get in touch to schedule your complimentary coaching session with Coach Anna.