The associations with ADHD really are there, but that may just also be because a huge number of brain processes have a circadian regulation, and those get disrupted by whatever is causing ADHD.
The causality is also bidirectional, because whatever ADHD does could cause light exposure behavioral changes, which could leave a circadian phenotype.
In general, a huge number of diseases have circadian phenotypes. To be a circadian disorder, you’d have to have clock mutations, and ADHD really doesn’t have those. So calling it a circadian disorder feels off.
But from personal experience, the linkage is strong enough to warrant deeper research, and beyond that, there’s some steps we can take ourselves. Regular walks in nature, going out to get sun… all generally useful things to do that do seem to help ADHD as well.
> The causality is also bidirectional, because whatever ADHD does could cause light exposure behavioral changes, which could leave a circadian phenotype.
This seems the most likely given my own experience with ADHD and sleep issues. Good sleep alleviates some of the worse aspects of ADHD. Conversely bad sleep exacerbates ADHD symptoms which can also worsen sleep, etc.
My 23andme profile says I have genes associated with delayed sleep. ADHD (and autism) really seem like they're driven by a cluster of multiple genes with many overlapping between people with the condition(s), but not all.
One rationale for that is how surprisingly prevalent ADHD is across many societies, which only makes sense to me if there's multiple genes which combine and which together confer various advantages to societies as a whole (if not to the individuals). One of the gene sets seem to be sleep issues. It makes sense in a pop-psychology level evolutionary biology where the "creative" types also tend to stay up later which might give them more focus time, or perhaps for story tellers / poets recounting tribal history, etc.
I hope this area gets more research. These things are highly inheritable among families.
The night is my best time too, but I’d hesitate to say that for most folks this has to do with the night being quieter.
The clock just has that spread. And I’d argue it makes evolutionary sense. You want people who are alert later, in a group. But this holds for most animals too.
In my case I interpret it as my "safe time". At night, the world sleeps, and no one is waiting on me, or going to randomly interrupt me. When other people sleep, obligations sleep too.
There’s no clear set of genes that causes delayed sleep. You definitely have those rare mutations of core clock genes which causes their circadian cycle to have distinct properties, one of the outputs of which is a natural sleep preference that’s out of phase with typical societal rhythms, but is still a normal amount of sleep, and its consolidated and restful etc.
But the clock itself has a population wide variation in its actual period. It varies between 23.8 hours and 24.6 hours, and everyone far from the 24 hour ideal pays a tax. The clock either has to phase advance or phase delay to synchronize, and over time that has all kinds of impacts, including on sleep, but also memory and learning, stress, attention…
The whole system is clocked. Every cell in our body runs a 24 hour cycle, driven by the transcription, translation, inhibition and breakdown of the core clock proteins. They’re in a negative feedback loop, with a time delay, and all kinds of mutations can shift the overall period of the clock. If it’s of a core clock protein, the effect will be strong, but other genes cycle or have their functions in a cycle due to the clock, and feed back into the clock, so small mutations can accumulate to cause circadian period variation.
It’s also why you see circadian phenotypes in all kinds of diseases. Definitely needs more research, but the research is also hard. You need to observe the body in high resolution over many time points to start making sense of all this, and that’s expensive and exhausting. We’ll get there, though.
> It varies between 23.8 hours and 24.6 hours, and everyone far from the 24 hour ideal pays a tax.
As a person with ADHD and who noticed that whenever I have a few weeks off (so no schedule restrictions, so to speak) my sleep schedule seems to advance by almost an hour a day, this sounds like it might explain a few things.
Yeah if I allow it my sleep schedule shifts about 45 minutes a day. Eventually it'll "flip" my day after a month or so instead of going to bed late now I'm getting up early. However it also feels like not all the biological rhythms follow it.
I have had the opposite effect. The days where I get 8 hours of good quality sleep per Oura and Garmin have been some of my least productive days, which is always contrary to my expectations. My most productive and focused days are usually when I get 5 hours after a few nights of solid sleep. It might relate to the hangover effect, but I've never really been hung over before so I don't know if that would affect me.
Can't speak for you but at least myself I find there's a delay of 24 to 48 hours before either sufficient or lack of sleep really catches up with me. It takes 2 to 3 nights of good sleep (unfortunately somewhat difficult to pull off) before I feel fully functional.
I did not see environmental factors in your consideration.
I got ADHD and Autism diagnosed as teen, the diagnostic was rather solid. Got methylphenidate for some months. I ran away from home with 17, i moved together with my girlfriend (at 26) into an emotionally stable environment and... the symptoms disappeared. No jactation, no special interests, no masking. Everything just disappeared. A bit of stimming remains. And a horribly fucked up sleep cycles.
Had undiagnosed RAD and CPTSD for longer than i'm self-aware. Severe emotional neglect for my first 17 years. Parental rejection plays a big part in here.
I'd be like, maybe i'm just a special case, and nothing of this applies to other people. But i see other ADHD-havers being too similar to me, and that includes hypervigilance and silent walking, which are apt adaptions to certain kind of childhood environments.
Maybe too much gets diagnosed as ADHD that is not genetic at all...
CPTSD literally rewires your brain and "appears" in diagnostic tests as ADHD: lower arousal in prefrontal cortex, overactive amygdala causing fast emotional response, impacted hippocampus, dopamine disregulation, etc.
Stress changes the layout of your brain along with your body's chemical responses. With ADHD, genetics seem to play a larger role where you can lack the stressors and still end up with the same end result. I wouldn't be surprised that treatments would work across both CPTSD and ADHD.
> CPTSD literally rewires your brain and "appears" in diagnostic tests as ADHD
This seems unexpectedly one-sided to me. It could equally be that ADHD is CPTSD from something that current knowledge does not consider traumatic (yet).
I am not sure the distinction goes in this direction. Rather than "shouldn't be diagnosed as ADHD" I would sooner say "ADHD should be treated in multiple ways"
It's very typical for there to be overlap between inevitability and environmental circumstances
Exactly I’m glad to hear it from chronologist. I have schizoaffective, bipolar type, very affected by light changes.
I also have polymorphism in my melatonin, receptor genetics that are linked to this disorder. But I have several other genetics that make this a definite polygenic disease. So I highly doubt chronology efforts are going to work in a holistic way.
My heritage is from the Sami people of Finland. And my disorder is most likely related to that heritage and my sensitivity to light changes. But also changes in my diet. Specifically higher omega-3 fatty acids, and I mean really high.
Yes. Our rhythms tend to pattern the environment. And generations with the kinds of seasonal light changes you have close to the poles likely had a broad impact on many genes.
> Specifically higher omega-3 fatty acids, and I mean really high.
How much & for what? I remember seeing a paper many years ago which claimed better depression at about 2g+ EPA/day.
> But also changes in my diet.
You should seriously try "metabolic psychiatry" for at least 6months with daily blood tests on GKI 1-2 (what children with epilepsy do). Most popular is for bipolar.
Hmm… surprisingly sparse. Some chronobiology labs have good outlines. YouTube has a few good videos, including some from the Royal Society Lectures that walk you through the basics of the clock, this one especially:
This one is a very approachable one on sleep and rhythms, and especially talks about why mental health disorders and sleep disruption tend to co-occur.
A few years I was playing around with analyzing my own genome and found a needle in the haystack: an unstudied clock gene mutation (in CRY2), which, after correspondence and tests from scientists in the field, is effectively confirmed to delay the clock. Sort of unbelievable story, will write it all up some day.
As far as ADHD is concerned, I’ve never been officially diagnosed but certainly have some traits (and notably missing others); it makes me suspect that ADHD is probably a cluster of different etiologies, some caused by circadian issues, some not.
I’ve often wondered if having this variant would be useful at all for chronobiologists in the field to study / observe. Feel free to shoot me an email (in bio).
This was before AI got good, so I would do it differently today.
Back then, I got my genome sequenced via nebula genomics (no longer around). I found a lab that screens ~150 genes that potentially contribute to circadian disturbances. I punched all of those genes into this software called gene.iobio that came with the nebula report, which reports any potentially interesting variants and links out to Clinvar. There were a ton of results, everyone carries loads of these harmless variants, but the one that jumped out was in a gene I knew played a critical role in clock timing, and amazingly, that was it.
Oh wow! I congratulate you on your efforts and curiousity.
Cry2, or Cryptochrome2, is from a fascinating family of genes. I’m a chronobiologist by training and pursuing independent research in it, so I’m always fascinated to hear more about how it feels like from the inside.
Looking forward to the write up, and would you provide some info before that happens, like how does one even start analyzing your own genome, where do you even sequence it? Isn't it supposed to be huge?
You find a (preferably local, clinical grade so HIPAA/GDPR applies) lab to do a sequence of your DNA. There's some parameters (e.g. coverage rate of your sample) to consider so you might want to look around as prices and services offered will vary.
They'll return a BAM file to you which contains your genome, consider this the raw data. You can take this data to screening services that specialize in analyzing your genome for specific purposes. E.g. here's a service that specifically analysis for the sake of genealogy: https://www.yfull.com/
I've only dipped my toes into the topic but that's my base understanding so far, it's pretty intimidating at times but quite interesting.
being a night owl isn't the same as suffering from circadian rhythm disorder. it just means that you are a night person. the suffering happens if you are a larch but live like a night owl because your circadian rhythm is messed up. and adhd messes that rhythm up.
Wow that's insane. For me, if I sleep too late, regardless of how much I sleep, I still feel tired. But I'm definitely not a morning person because I just hate going to bed early. It might be a work thing too, idk.
You might try intentionally getting excess sleep and going for a reasonably high intensity run as soon as you get up. If you do decide to test that be sure to give it at least a few days to adjust before coming to any conclusions.
got this same issue. as a teen I'd just sleep 13 hours and then be groggy and in pain for the rest of the day. now I'm just incapable of sleeping more than 7 hours, I have to wake up, do something else for an hour, then go back to sleep for 1-2 hours to be finally rested.
Similar here, but it’s not a headache, it’s a feeling of tiredness and unease with too much sleep (8+ hours).
I average about 6 and it gets as low as 3.5-4.5 during the week, with a catch up 8 every so often. I get wicked and debilitating migraines which relate to missing the catch up 8 hours or missing my daily bike rides (30-40km).
Potentially sleep apnea? Doctors will tell you it doesn't cause headaches, but getting low oxygen sleep definitely caused headaches for my wife. She didn't have any of the classic risk signs (young, normal weight, did not complain of tiredness) but had nearly constant headaches. The CPAP was life changing, turns out she was tired and the headaches basically went away forever.
What about something hormonal ? I feel like colloquially we think of just the obvious ones but don't vitamin D and Melatonin potentially have links here ?
It seems like you might know - is there any correlation or information to read around light sensitivity and ADHD?
I don't know if it's because I'm in my 40s, have ADHD, or got on the meds. But it's becoming more noticeable the last couple of years.
I'm very sensitive to light in the morning and can't get back to sleep when the sun peeks in. And at night if my wife left her phone face up, I know when she gets a notification. I see the screen light up through my shut eyelids.
I've long since had to wear an eye mask to bed, which I hated until I found one I liked. The ones that do it for me are the weighted ones, in case you've never tried.
I tend to sleep with my arm over my face like a cat in the sun, which has messed up my shoulder a bit. So thanks, weighted makes a lot of sense, I didn't know they make them.
40s but no diagnosis of ADHD. I have a mask for summer time as I'm the same when the light peeks in. I bought a pair of cheap ones off amazon. I usually wake at dawn and put them on, then sleep hog-like.
Hello chronobiologist. First time I read that noun, and had to look it up on wikipedia. Very interesting domain of sciences. What are you working on? What methods are you using?
For a long time I had a really annoying issue where I would not be able to sleep because of a post-nasal drip cough that only appeared at night. During the day, I had no nasal congestion, runny nose, etc. Turns out I'm allergic to lavender and there is a lavender bush that blooms at night outside my bedroom window.
Beware that Frontiers In is a very low quality outlet and most scientists stay far far away from it (unless they really need a publication the next three weeks since they have that tenure track review coming up).
> Frontiers has an artificial intelligence review system for submitted manuscripts, which now includes verification of the reviewers’ and handling editors’ conflict of interest statements, the company said.
Ok after reading a chunk of this the correlation is pretty wild. Having the data it’s quite striking. Sleep intervention as a form of ADHD treatment has always seemed reasonable to me but this gives a lot more clarity to the approach and mechanisms.
For me, the seasonal aspect of it aligns with their blue light findings (both driving symptoms and aligning with improvement under the intervention of having a grow-LED garden setup on my desk), and in a second maybe related matter we’ve found using blue light blocking glasses an hour before bed to be the most impactful single intervention around sleep quality and onset (the ones that are like orange laser safety glasses, not the mildly reflective desk-work glasses)
The following (informally described) symptoms are well-known consequences of ADHD:
- Delayed Sleep Phase [1]
- Staying Up Late [2]
- Revenge Bedtime Procrastination [3]
Newsflash, getting a full night's sleep helps alleviate ADHD symptoms, while being perpetually sleep-deprived wrecks us.
But there are reasons why we stay up late. Simply forcing us to sleep doesn't address those reasons.
Which is why I wrote about it so much, and keep spamming these links even though it feels so darn obvious. Not to the authors of the study, it appears.
I'm not sure that's an entirely fair way to frame that. ADHD people can be highly motivated by reward, but being motivated isn't enough to consistently navigate the path from wanting something to getting something. Reward can make you want something more, and even try harder for it, but ADHD means that sometimes no matter how much you want something and how hard you try it just doesn't happen.
I'd frame it differently: ADHD people are highly motivated by reward, but like, actual reward, not an uncertain promise of unclear reward at indeterminate point in the future, whose causal connection with motivated behavior is tenuous at best - which is, somehow, how most people apparently motivate themselves.
N=1 here, but for me, anything that's more than an hour or two in the future rapidly loses any motivating power; any reward that happens after more than a day may as well happen at infinity.
It's more literal than that. The prospect of reward is very literally not motivating. It does not provide motive force. It does not make us move.
We consciously want the thing, but that isn't enough for executive function to kick in, so "I need to get off the sofa so I can make tasty dinner" results in not having moved two hours later.
> E.g., you have a family to feed, and your ability hold a well-paying job hinges on your performance.
I can do all of these things anyway. Of course, this does present the potential reality that were I able to sleep like people, I could be even more successful, but after a near death experience, then disability, I've learned to be happy with where I am.
> E.g., you have a family to feed, and your ability hold a well-paying job hinges on your performance.
I am in this situation, forcing me to adapt and get up early like most normies.
My job performance did not improve. And going to sleep early only makes me more miserable, because now I have exactly zero personal, interrupt-risk-free time.
Or just: you have a family, including children who need you to be a responsible adult first thing in the morning (every morning) whether you like it or not
It's hard to interface with society this way. I'm the same as you and have waxed and waned many times. There are periods where I'm all about being social and living a normal life. There are other times where I'm just down to only sleep when I'm dead tired (as opposed to using drugs to keep me in normal rhythm). There are tradeoffs
A delayed sleep/wake cycle is only relevant in the context of a society where people are forced on an unnatural sleep schedule. You could get a full 9 hours of high quality sleep every single night and still be considered to have a delayed sleep/wake cycle disorder.
Some people are just night owls. A large percentage of night owls have ADHD. I think they can linked without it meaning that people with ADHD have to learn to get up at 5AM.
Keep staying up late if that's what feels natural for you, but it's probably worth making sure that you're still getting enough sleep and that you don't have other issues (like sleep apnea) keeping you from getting the quality of sleep you need. There's a lot of other health issues associated with sleep disorders and sleep problems will tank people's ability to focus even when they have non-ADHD brains.
This is my feeling too, going to sleep early feels like I’m missing out on so much. My entire family other than my late father has been this way since forever, we almost never go to bed till 2-3 am.
>Lots of the things on this site are normal things that everyone experiences to some degree ...right?
Everyone may experience some of those things some of the time, particularly if they are overwhelmed, overworked, overstressed, etc.
ADHD is experiencing most of these most of the time - as in all the time - for your entire life.
As an analogy: everyone may experience toe pain sometimes if and when they stub their toe on kitchen table leg.
But if it hurts like that all the time, for your entire life - you'd get it checked out, right? There are solid chances something is different about your body.
Now multiply that by 100.
To reword this: say, each relatable entry on that page is a 2% likelihood of ADHD.
If you relate to 100 of them, the chances you're not ADHD drop to 13%.
I've got enough people through an official diagnosis this way that this page, in itself, is a decent enough diagnostic tool.
How much do you think ADHD is a specific mental condition that one either has or doesn't have, versus a set of common symptoms that can have many causes? I wonder which direction a causal relationship between sleep and ADHD might be.
Pretty much anything we don't have a detailed mechanistic understanding of falls into the latter category - an arbitrary bag of sometimes unrelated symptoms, ie a fundamentally statistical categorization - regardless of what anyone might try to claim. This applies to everything across the natural sciences and medicine. If we can't model it in minute detail then we do not truly understand it and anyone attempting to claim otherwise is full of shit regardless of whatever credentials they might have somehow managed to stumble into holding.
Exactly this. Particularly in mental health, where verifying a mechanistic explanation is hard (at least doing so ethically is), many of the well-known problems are defined as clusters of highly correlated symptoms, because that's the best we can do at this point - but this is useful.
Not all highly correlated symptoms will turn out to have a common mechanistically-explainable cause, but all symptoms of a mechanistically-explainable cause obviously are highly correlated.
> Newsflash, getting a full night's sleep helps alleviate ADHD symptoms, while being perpetually sleep-deprived wrecks us.
being perpetually sleep-deprived wrecks everyone. If you've got ADHD getting the sleep you need won't cure it, but it will make it easier to manage. If you don't have ADHD, but a lot of the symptoms fit for you, getting sleep might those all go away.
Then add in the use of powerful stimulants (e.g. Adderall) to power through a workday, only to have that cause insomnia that night, and a wrecked sleep schedule for the following 3 days.
Yup I absolutely fall off a cliff if I'm consistently consuming a stimulant. That includes caffeine. It's actually a problem where I have to be careful that I'm not having it too early (as opposed to late) in the day otherwise it will wreak havoc on my life.
in my case I need to take it at a perfect time where it stops working just after I go to bed. Take it too early and it will stop working before I go to bed and I won't fall asleep because my mind will distract me from it. Take it too late and I technically will sleep, but I won't actually feel rested in the morning.
Nah, I'm taking a very minimal dose (adjusted) and I know that my sleep is less deep and shorter. Without medication I sleep around 8 hours, with 6:30-7 hours.
The best that helps sleep in my experience is doing sports. Lots of it.
When are you taking it? There are a lot of studies that indicate that stimulants HELP sleep.
You should re-evaluate what is happening to you as it is not an ideal situation: it may be possible you have something else instead of ADHD (or together with ADHD) or you maybe taking it too late in the day.
I had great success reflecting 80,000 lumens of work lights off my living rooms ceiling during winter for a couple years.
At a new home, I remodeled four rooms to have three bands wide of LED lighting surrounding the ceilings, hidden from below by cove molding. It is an actual sunny day, with an “an actual” sunny sky inside. Winter, midnight, eclipse? Not a concern.
Having all that intense light reflecting off entire ceilings creates soft diffuse lighting, no shadows, even though it is extremely bright.
Helped a lot with waking up and avoiding depression, all year round.
On the sleep treatment, anything that can help sleep is good, my body has always operated well on a 30 hour day, which means terribly almost all the time, by default. But I do a lot of things that help, so my sleep is pretty good most of the time.
I would see sleep aids as a pretty narrow interventions relative to my ADHD.
I had a contractor and an electrician! There is some significant power draw.
It’s been five years, so I expect the best components are different, more efficient and cheaper.
In winter, the lights can be considered part of my heating system. In summer, windows get opened. If I did it again, I would have some little fans up there expelling air from the cove directly outside.
But that is fine tuning. I am really happy. (When the lights are on. /h)
The 30 hour day feeling resonates. If I have no external schedule or I'm just living as I see fit, I end up gravitating to 3am bed, ~12pm wake sorta schedule. The only real problem is that it's functionally incompatible with jobs and many other services, even fully remote
I also work best in long bursts of up to 12 hours, with days of full rest in between bursts. I don't do well with a five days a week 9-5 work schedule.
And timeline urgency / time pressure tends to do well at putting me into deep flow state, whereas it can be hard for me to get into flow state for work otherwise.
I'd love to find myself a situation in which I can work like you describe and have it now be side-eyed by normies. That's exactly how I want to live/work, and I've never really found a place that will let me do it, so I just keep rolling through these completely incompatible arrangements that eventually kick me out.
> And timeline urgency / time pressure tends to do well at putting me into deep flow state, whereas it can be hard for me to get into flow state for work otherwise.
As long as there's a tangible reason the deadline is urgent, then I feel the same way. If it's just an arbitrary demand then I don't respond like they'd hope. My brain knows when something is truly urgent and when it's not.
I noticed that my bedtime drifts because after 11PM it's finally quiet enough to do anything productive. Before that it's just impossible to work. After I started living alone, I finally could go to sleep at a sane time since I didn't have to wait hours for everyone else to calm down enough to let me think.
I can confirm this effect. One winter I left 2x300w living room lights on perm, and it had a dramatic effect. The only issue is that its nice to turn lights off at night, and if you do that, now you're in habit-dependent territory.
one thing i've been paying the adhd tax on is automating / making habits lower activation energy. smart bulbs / blinds are a great thing for me especially when i am already in bed and have too much executive dysfunction to walk 3 feet to the light switch / shade
Ah on the 30 hour day: I had some success living a 28 hour day for a few months, which has the nice property of meaning your awake hours are identical week to week making it at least somewhat possible to interface with polite circadian society.
6x 28 hour days pack cleanly into a 7-day week, so all Mondays you wake at the same time, then all Tuesdays you wake 4 hours later and so on. It was one of the most productive times of my life but ultimately left my partner feeling unhappy and lonely.
> ultimately left my partner feeling unhappy and lonely.. do our best with 24 hour days
Impossible to express just how deeply frustrating it is to have the “sleep when I want you to, not when you want to” kind of fight. Over and over. For decades after being a grown ass adult.
It’s weird that it has to be explained to 24h normies but pressuring someone to alter a part of their biology like this is wrong. Gosh honey, plastic surgery might be uncomfortable in an ongoing way for you, but I’m willing to take that risk. Gee babe, I see you need a vegan/carnivore lifestyle but please change this just doesn’t work for me.
People can always make these things their red line and force the issue I guess, find out where the other person’s red line is. The weird part is that the sleep thing is generally accepted as reasonable and polite society kinda regards the other behaviors as very unacceptable
This is all well and good until you have children to look after. Expecting one parent to pick up the slack because you want to go to bed at 4am is not fair.
I didn't read the person's story that way. I took it that the other partner felt unhappy and alone, which is a reasonable way to feel. It doesn't sound like it was a fight to me, but a discussion.
Has anyone considered that one reason for being/staying awake late at night that's very salient for ADHD people is that night tends to be much quieter, so it's a period when it's much easier to think/read/work without constant interruptions. Noise pollution isn't taken seriously enough.
That's a good point, although at the same time, even the most quiet environment can only help so much to stave off distraction and once hyperfocus starts there's very little that can pull you away.
It's not just a lack of interruptions or even the lack of potential interruptions, but that I can let my guard down knowing that I'm not inadvertently ignoring someone.
That's why I'm reading this at 1:55AM local time! It definitely gets quieter, though, I'm in the suburbs so not that noisy to begin with. But now, no cars, animals outside mostly asleep (hear an owl sometimes), cell phone stops trying to scam me via voice and text messages, not even aircraft flying overhead (they start between 4-5 am, which is also when the first cars can be heard). Can hear my heartbeat in my ears. But my tinnitus is a lot louder. No job, so no need to get up early though I typically manage before noon.
I wouldn't say I "have ADHD" but I do have a what I call an "attention prioritization and low energy disorder" that nothing i've ever tried has helped. I hear stimulants might help, but never tried em, can't get em.
I agree that that worsens the problems, but I grew up in a quiet, boring village before internet distractions or mobile phones, where this could not have been a factor, and I still had/have insomnia issues (and ADHD).
I'm in my late 40s, which meant that childhood didn't have internet and folks didn't start getting it in their homes more commonly til my late teens.
That doesn't mean distractions weren't there, and those distractions are still around if I live with other people. Growing up, a lot of distractions were parents and siblings. Exciting things on television with lots of noise that I'd notice. Libraries were brutal - quiet places where I would notice people shuffling papers, turning pages, and going about their activities in "silence". I was always better off when folks would just leave me alone to do stuff with lots of background noise so I wouldn't notice stuff - or just being alone. Staying up late gave me that.
It doesn't take modern life or a boring place to be free from distractions.
Ok, that is your situation, and you have my sympathies, but that doesn't change the fact that I didn't have those issues, and grew up in an very calm environment without noisy distractions. And that's not just memory, if visit my family it's still a very quiet and calm space, including during the daytime, and it still doesn't fix my insomnia.
I'm not saying that these can't be factors, but the original question was asked in a way that suggests it might be a general explanation, and it clearly cannot explain everything.
- My time in the field of psychology has made me think that the use of imprecise language for describing psychology has a large and problematic societal impact
ADHD is correlated with but is NOT a "circadian rhythm disorder". This is definitionally true.
There are many causes of ADHD. One of them is likely sleep issues.
I absolutely have ADHD that impacts my life, but I sleep like an absolute stone, and unlike my partner, can fall asleep within minutes of my head hitting the pillow most of the time. I get 6-8 hours of sleep per night, and it does not seem to have cured me.
I found that more than 8 hours made a massive difference to me. That being said the only way I could maintain this was having a toddler who wakes up every night.
Walk outside so that the morning sun can directly hit your eyeballs. Don't stare directly into the sun. Try to look at something a little bit off axis. Your eyes should feel somewhat uncomfortable if you are doing this correctly. Do this every day for 3-5 minutes. You can accomplish this incidentally by just doing normal stuff like taking care of your own lawn and going for a run.
Light coming in from a window is generally filtered. Light being bright can be very deceptive. Even if the temperature is correct. Your eyes crave that deep infrared energy that LEDs and energy efficient windows actively reject.
I go to bed at 9pm and wake up 3-4am. As a person with ADHD, this schedule helped me the most. Hardest part is not easily being able to go to sleep if I'm awake in the middle of my sleep.
Before this I used to sleep very late, even when I was a kid, and morning schedules were too hard. This way, there's no oversleep risk.
Dr. Sandra Kooij is a good person to look up if you are interested in adult ADHD and sleep. She has a book about it. From what I remember, there are a few things that are known:
1. a large majority of ADHD sufferers are phase-delayed and struggle with insomnia
2. you can induce ADHD-like symptoms in normal people by restricting sleep
3. Some of the interventions that improve sleep timing and quality affect ADHD (but it isn't a total cure)
> 1. a large majority of ADHD sufferers are phase-delayed and struggle with insomnia
I would think this wouldn't be such a problem if society would acknowledge night owls exist and allow work to adjust accordingly. Forcing a night owl to live the life of a morning lark is likely not the best way to get their best work. The person suffers who has to try and live in a world not designed for when they sleep, and the employer suffers by getting less out of those people.
I have ADHD and left to my own devices I would go to sleep somewhere between 2-4am. At work, I don't function so well before about 2pm some days... and by that point that day is almost over.
Completely agree, and tend towards the same schedule. I don't even mind working in-person with people, but this idea that everyone should just be uniformly aligned to operate on the same hours is alienating and humiliating at times.
This would depend on the individual, or so my sleep team, including my sleep doctor suggest.
It is better for me to align with a pattern where I get some level of restful sleep, as opposed to one where I do not ultimately.
In an ideal world, you are obviously correct, but in the world between a severely disturbed sleep where I get a handful of hours of actually restorative sleep, vs once where I actually sleep for 7 hours? One wins over the other.
And yes, given I have an entire medical team (for other reasons, I have a SCI) I have done about everything you can to resolve sleep. Between ADHD however, symptoms related to the SCI etc, we really do just have to go with whatever we can reasonably get.
As long as you're getting enough sleep and some sunlight what's the problem? I'm guessing that a lot of people who are night owls aren't getting that, and that a lot of people who have other health issues (especially sleep disorders) end up living the night owl lifestyle, but I don't see why it should matter what specific times you go to bed.
> I have ADHD and left to my own devices I would go to sleep somewhere between 2-4am. At work, I don't function so well before about 2pm some days... and by that point that day is almost over.
Indeed. I've struggled with it since childhood, not only me. The same "symptoms" for lack of a better word are seen with my mother, my aunt and my grandmother. All are night owls, all sleep poorly etc.
For whatever reason, regardless of how much sleep i've had, my brain begins to kick into high gear with a clarity of thought and capacity to dedicate myself to things starting at about 9PM. This remains true REGARDLESS of sleep, how well rested I am, general health, etc. I could have had NO sleep for 24 hours, still be away at 9PM the next night, and it's like a switch.
The ONLY time this ever differs, for reasons still unknown, and where I fit into "normal society" is for whatever reason, when I visit Russia (which I have not done for some time for obvious reasons.)
When I am in Russia, with no effort at all, I sleep normal hours without issue, and wake up during the day time actually well rested. This ceases once I return to my timezone. This same pattern is not seen when say, I visit the US instead.
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The associations with ADHD really are there, but that may just also be because a huge number of brain processes have a circadian regulation, and those get disrupted by whatever is causing ADHD.
The causality is also bidirectional, because whatever ADHD does could cause light exposure behavioral changes, which could leave a circadian phenotype.
In general, a huge number of diseases have circadian phenotypes. To be a circadian disorder, you’d have to have clock mutations, and ADHD really doesn’t have those. So calling it a circadian disorder feels off.
But from personal experience, the linkage is strong enough to warrant deeper research, and beyond that, there’s some steps we can take ourselves. Regular walks in nature, going out to get sun… all generally useful things to do that do seem to help ADHD as well.
This seems the most likely given my own experience with ADHD and sleep issues. Good sleep alleviates some of the worse aspects of ADHD. Conversely bad sleep exacerbates ADHD symptoms which can also worsen sleep, etc.
My 23andme profile says I have genes associated with delayed sleep. ADHD (and autism) really seem like they're driven by a cluster of multiple genes with many overlapping between people with the condition(s), but not all.
One rationale for that is how surprisingly prevalent ADHD is across many societies, which only makes sense to me if there's multiple genes which combine and which together confer various advantages to societies as a whole (if not to the individuals). One of the gene sets seem to be sleep issues. It makes sense in a pop-psychology level evolutionary biology where the "creative" types also tend to stay up later which might give them more focus time, or perhaps for story tellers / poets recounting tribal history, etc.
I hope this area gets more research. These things are highly inheritable among families.
I know because I am on the spectrum and suffer from overload. At night is my "flow time" when the creativity happens.
The clock just has that spread. And I’d argue it makes evolutionary sense. You want people who are alert later, in a group. But this holds for most animals too.
But the clock itself has a population wide variation in its actual period. It varies between 23.8 hours and 24.6 hours, and everyone far from the 24 hour ideal pays a tax. The clock either has to phase advance or phase delay to synchronize, and over time that has all kinds of impacts, including on sleep, but also memory and learning, stress, attention…
The whole system is clocked. Every cell in our body runs a 24 hour cycle, driven by the transcription, translation, inhibition and breakdown of the core clock proteins. They’re in a negative feedback loop, with a time delay, and all kinds of mutations can shift the overall period of the clock. If it’s of a core clock protein, the effect will be strong, but other genes cycle or have their functions in a cycle due to the clock, and feed back into the clock, so small mutations can accumulate to cause circadian period variation.
It’s also why you see circadian phenotypes in all kinds of diseases. Definitely needs more research, but the research is also hard. You need to observe the body in high resolution over many time points to start making sense of all this, and that’s expensive and exhausting. We’ll get there, though.
As a person with ADHD and who noticed that whenever I have a few weeks off (so no schedule restrictions, so to speak) my sleep schedule seems to advance by almost an hour a day, this sounds like it might explain a few things.
Can't speak for you but at least myself I find there's a delay of 24 to 48 hours before either sufficient or lack of sleep really catches up with me. It takes 2 to 3 nights of good sleep (unfortunately somewhat difficult to pull off) before I feel fully functional.
I got ADHD and Autism diagnosed as teen, the diagnostic was rather solid. Got methylphenidate for some months. I ran away from home with 17, i moved together with my girlfriend (at 26) into an emotionally stable environment and... the symptoms disappeared. No jactation, no special interests, no masking. Everything just disappeared. A bit of stimming remains. And a horribly fucked up sleep cycles.
Had undiagnosed RAD and CPTSD for longer than i'm self-aware. Severe emotional neglect for my first 17 years. Parental rejection plays a big part in here.
I'd be like, maybe i'm just a special case, and nothing of this applies to other people. But i see other ADHD-havers being too similar to me, and that includes hypervigilance and silent walking, which are apt adaptions to certain kind of childhood environments.
Maybe too much gets diagnosed as ADHD that is not genetic at all...
Stress changes the layout of your brain along with your body's chemical responses. With ADHD, genetics seem to play a larger role where you can lack the stressors and still end up with the same end result. I wouldn't be surprised that treatments would work across both CPTSD and ADHD.
This seems unexpectedly one-sided to me. It could equally be that ADHD is CPTSD from something that current knowledge does not consider traumatic (yet).
Edit: I think in practice this looks like normalisation of neglect and violence within a family.
It's very typical for there to be overlap between inevitability and environmental circumstances
I also have polymorphism in my melatonin, receptor genetics that are linked to this disorder. But I have several other genetics that make this a definite polygenic disease. So I highly doubt chronology efforts are going to work in a holistic way.
My heritage is from the Sami people of Finland. And my disorder is most likely related to that heritage and my sensitivity to light changes. But also changes in my diet. Specifically higher omega-3 fatty acids, and I mean really high.
How much & for what? I remember seeing a paper many years ago which claimed better depression at about 2g+ EPA/day.
> But also changes in my diet.
You should seriously try "metabolic psychiatry" for at least 6months with daily blood tests on GKI 1-2 (what children with epilepsy do). Most popular is for bipolar.
What about for someone who wants to better understand how sleep and their biological & cognitive functions are related?
https://youtu.be/KZJAmcpc9SE?is=5XZvvDQwLMC_rIdv
A book recommendation:
Internal Time — Till Roenneberg
Papers: 1. https://physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1113/expp...
Somewhat old, but still a good systems level review. We know some of this stuff to higher resolution now.
2. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7202392/
This one is a very approachable one on sleep and rhythms, and especially talks about why mental health disorders and sleep disruption tend to co-occur.
Royal Institution
Ty for the links and your other posts
A few years I was playing around with analyzing my own genome and found a needle in the haystack: an unstudied clock gene mutation (in CRY2), which, after correspondence and tests from scientists in the field, is effectively confirmed to delay the clock. Sort of unbelievable story, will write it all up some day.
As far as ADHD is concerned, I’ve never been officially diagnosed but certainly have some traits (and notably missing others); it makes me suspect that ADHD is probably a cluster of different etiologies, some caused by circadian issues, some not.
I’ve often wondered if having this variant would be useful at all for chronobiologists in the field to study / observe. Feel free to shoot me an email (in bio).
Back then, I got my genome sequenced via nebula genomics (no longer around). I found a lab that screens ~150 genes that potentially contribute to circadian disturbances. I punched all of those genes into this software called gene.iobio that came with the nebula report, which reports any potentially interesting variants and links out to Clinvar. There were a ton of results, everyone carries loads of these harmless variants, but the one that jumped out was in a gene I knew played a critical role in clock timing, and amazingly, that was it.
Cry2, or Cryptochrome2, is from a fascinating family of genes. I’m a chronobiologist by training and pursuing independent research in it, so I’m always fascinated to hear more about how it feels like from the inside.
Happy to share more if you ever want to connect. Tl;dr: feel from the inside is bad, would not recommend!
They'll return a BAM file to you which contains your genome, consider this the raw data. You can take this data to screening services that specialize in analyzing your genome for specific purposes. E.g. here's a service that specifically analysis for the sake of genealogy: https://www.yfull.com/
I've only dipped my toes into the topic but that's my base understanding so far, it's pretty intimidating at times but quite interesting.
If I sleep for 8 hours or more I get hypnic headaches, and massive all-day migraine-like headaches.
I have to sleep a max of 7 hours a night. Always feel slightly tired, but the alternative is headaches.
I average about 6 and it gets as low as 3.5-4.5 during the week, with a catch up 8 every so often. I get wicked and debilitating migraines which relate to missing the catch up 8 hours or missing my daily bike rides (30-40km).
I’d love a migraine cure.
idiot doctors what do they know
I don't know if it's because I'm in my 40s, have ADHD, or got on the meds. But it's becoming more noticeable the last couple of years.
I'm very sensitive to light in the morning and can't get back to sleep when the sun peeks in. And at night if my wife left her phone face up, I know when she gets a notification. I see the screen light up through my shut eyelids.
Eg see https://retractionwatch.com/2025/07/29/frontiers-retract-122...
problem solved I guess
I don't know about Frontiers in Psych specifically, but, see also: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAcademia/comments/1oi5dhy/whats_...
> see this title
> oh man that would explain a lot
Ok after reading a chunk of this the correlation is pretty wild. Having the data it’s quite striking. Sleep intervention as a form of ADHD treatment has always seemed reasonable to me but this gives a lot more clarity to the approach and mechanisms.
For me, the seasonal aspect of it aligns with their blue light findings (both driving symptoms and aligning with improvement under the intervention of having a grow-LED garden setup on my desk), and in a second maybe related matter we’ve found using blue light blocking glasses an hour before bed to be the most impactful single intervention around sleep quality and onset (the ones that are like orange laser safety glasses, not the mildly reflective desk-work glasses)
> see this title
> think authors are reversing causation hard
-- signed, a deep Night Owl
The following (informally described) symptoms are well-known consequences of ADHD:
- Delayed Sleep Phase [1]
- Staying Up Late [2]
- Revenge Bedtime Procrastination [3]
Newsflash, getting a full night's sleep helps alleviate ADHD symptoms, while being perpetually sleep-deprived wrecks us.
But there are reasons why we stay up late. Simply forcing us to sleep doesn't address those reasons.
Which is why I wrote about it so much, and keep spamming these links even though it feels so darn obvious. Not to the authors of the study, it appears.
[1] https://romankogan.net/adhd/#Delayed%20Sleep%20Phase
[2] https://romankogan.net/adhd/#Staying%20Up%20Late
[3] https://romankogan.net/adhd/#Revenge%20Bedtime
staying up late rocks. its the funnest. why would i give that up? just to pay attention better at work? no thanks.
You may eventually find yourself in a situation where the tradeoff is worth it.
E.g., you have a family to feed, and your ability hold a well-paying job hinges on your performance.
sigh
ADHD PEOPLE ARE NOT MOTIVATED BY REWARD[1]
We literally can't do the things we want and need to do [2].
We know full well the trade-off is worth it. It's just that we can't have it.
Sincerely,
--an AuDHDer
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3010326/
[2] https://add.org/demand-avoidance/
I'm not sure that's an entirely fair way to frame that. ADHD people can be highly motivated by reward, but being motivated isn't enough to consistently navigate the path from wanting something to getting something. Reward can make you want something more, and even try harder for it, but ADHD means that sometimes no matter how much you want something and how hard you try it just doesn't happen.
N=1 here, but for me, anything that's more than an hour or two in the future rapidly loses any motivating power; any reward that happens after more than a day may as well happen at infinity.
We consciously want the thing, but that isn't enough for executive function to kick in, so "I need to get off the sofa so I can make tasty dinner" results in not having moved two hours later.
I can do all of these things anyway. Of course, this does present the potential reality that were I able to sleep like people, I could be even more successful, but after a near death experience, then disability, I've learned to be happy with where I am.
I am in this situation, forcing me to adapt and get up early like most normies.
My job performance did not improve. And going to sleep early only makes me more miserable, because now I have exactly zero personal, interrupt-risk-free time.
It's not that there aren't tradeoffs, it's that we don't get to choose these tradeoffs (as in: the cost of choosing is huge and nonzero).
Some people are just night owls. A large percentage of night owls have ADHD. I think they can linked without it meaning that people with ADHD have to learn to get up at 5AM.
Keep staying up late if that's what feels natural for you, but it's probably worth making sure that you're still getting enough sleep and that you don't have other issues (like sleep apnea) keeping you from getting the quality of sleep you need. There's a lot of other health issues associated with sleep disorders and sleep problems will tank people's ability to focus even when they have non-ADHD brains.
but there's a strong cultural bias to judge people that wake up at 11am as lazy. and people that stay up to 4am are reckless.
but somebody that slept the same seven hours from 11pm-6am is pragmatic and responsible.
Everyone may experience some of those things some of the time, particularly if they are overwhelmed, overworked, overstressed, etc.
ADHD is experiencing most of these most of the time - as in all the time - for your entire life.
As an analogy: everyone may experience toe pain sometimes if and when they stub their toe on kitchen table leg.
But if it hurts like that all the time, for your entire life - you'd get it checked out, right? There are solid chances something is different about your body.
Now multiply that by 100.
To reword this: say, each relatable entry on that page is a 2% likelihood of ADHD.
If you relate to 100 of them, the chances you're not ADHD drop to 13%.
I've got enough people through an official diagnosis this way that this page, in itself, is a decent enough diagnostic tool.
Not all highly correlated symptoms will turn out to have a common mechanistically-explainable cause, but all symptoms of a mechanistically-explainable cause obviously are highly correlated.
being perpetually sleep-deprived wrecks everyone. If you've got ADHD getting the sleep you need won't cure it, but it will make it easier to manage. If you don't have ADHD, but a lot of the symptoms fit for you, getting sleep might those all go away.
And the cruel tragedy is that it becomes this self-reinforcing cycle.
Sleep bad > "Bad" ADHD day > Harder to fall asleep. Rinse. Repeat.
https://stephaniesarkis.com/blog/study-finds-that-stimulant-...
The best that helps sleep in my experience is doing sports. Lots of it.
You should re-evaluate what is happening to you as it is not an ideal situation: it may be possible you have something else instead of ADHD (or together with ADHD) or you maybe taking it too late in the day.
https://aasm.org/journal-sleep-methylphenidate-can-have-slee...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41397339/
At a new home, I remodeled four rooms to have three bands wide of LED lighting surrounding the ceilings, hidden from below by cove molding. It is an actual sunny day, with an “an actual” sunny sky inside. Winter, midnight, eclipse? Not a concern.
Having all that intense light reflecting off entire ceilings creates soft diffuse lighting, no shadows, even though it is extremely bright.
Helped a lot with waking up and avoiding depression, all year round.
On the sleep treatment, anything that can help sleep is good, my body has always operated well on a 30 hour day, which means terribly almost all the time, by default. But I do a lot of things that help, so my sleep is pretty good most of the time.
I would see sleep aids as a pretty narrow interventions relative to my ADHD.
Correlation would be nowhere near equivalence.
It’s been five years, so I expect the best components are different, more efficient and cheaper.
In winter, the lights can be considered part of my heating system. In summer, windows get opened. If I did it again, I would have some little fans up there expelling air from the cove directly outside.
But that is fine tuning. I am really happy. (When the lights are on. /h)
I also work best in long bursts of up to 12 hours, with days of full rest in between bursts. I don't do well with a five days a week 9-5 work schedule.
And timeline urgency / time pressure tends to do well at putting me into deep flow state, whereas it can be hard for me to get into flow state for work otherwise.
> And timeline urgency / time pressure tends to do well at putting me into deep flow state, whereas it can be hard for me to get into flow state for work otherwise.
As long as there's a tangible reason the deadline is urgent, then I feel the same way. If it's just an arbitrary demand then I don't respond like they'd hope. My brain knows when something is truly urgent and when it's not.
I did this for several years. It works great
6x 28 hour days pack cleanly into a 7-day week, so all Mondays you wake at the same time, then all Tuesdays you wake 4 hours later and so on. It was one of the most productive times of my life but ultimately left my partner feeling unhappy and lonely.
Fuck it we do our best with 24 hour days…
That's enough synchronization that I am going to give some thought to what the crossovers times with "normals" will be, and may try it.
Synchronizing across M-F, then adjusting between Friday evening and Monday morning, to repeat.
Impossible to express just how deeply frustrating it is to have the “sleep when I want you to, not when you want to” kind of fight. Over and over. For decades after being a grown ass adult.
It’s weird that it has to be explained to 24h normies but pressuring someone to alter a part of their biology like this is wrong. Gosh honey, plastic surgery might be uncomfortable in an ongoing way for you, but I’m willing to take that risk. Gee babe, I see you need a vegan/carnivore lifestyle but please change this just doesn’t work for me.
People can always make these things their red line and force the issue I guess, find out where the other person’s red line is. The weird part is that the sleep thing is generally accepted as reasonable and polite society kinda regards the other behaviors as very unacceptable
>get on the floor
>walk the dinosaur
I wouldn't say I "have ADHD" but I do have a what I call an "attention prioritization and low energy disorder" that nothing i've ever tried has helped. I hear stimulants might help, but never tried em, can't get em.
That doesn't mean distractions weren't there, and those distractions are still around if I live with other people. Growing up, a lot of distractions were parents and siblings. Exciting things on television with lots of noise that I'd notice. Libraries were brutal - quiet places where I would notice people shuffling papers, turning pages, and going about their activities in "silence". I was always better off when folks would just leave me alone to do stuff with lots of background noise so I wouldn't notice stuff - or just being alone. Staying up late gave me that.
It doesn't take modern life or a boring place to be free from distractions.
I'm not saying that these can't be factors, but the original question was asked in a way that suggests it might be a general explanation, and it clearly cannot explain everything.
- My time in the field of psychology has made me think that the use of imprecise language for describing psychology has a large and problematic societal impact
ADHD is correlated with but is NOT a "circadian rhythm disorder". This is definitionally true.
There are many causes of ADHD. One of them is likely sleep issues.
https://www.bmj.com/content/350/bmj.h68.abstract
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13899...
I'd be curious to see if there's been any larger scale follow up on this since.
Associations between sleep problems in children with ADHD and parental insomnia and ADHD symptoms
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11108211/
Light coming in from a window is generally filtered. Light being bright can be very deceptive. Even if the temperature is correct. Your eyes crave that deep infrared energy that LEDs and energy efficient windows actively reject.
Before this I used to sleep very late, even when I was a kid, and morning schedules were too hard. This way, there's no oversleep risk.
1. a large majority of ADHD sufferers are phase-delayed and struggle with insomnia
2. you can induce ADHD-like symptoms in normal people by restricting sleep
3. Some of the interventions that improve sleep timing and quality affect ADHD (but it isn't a total cure)
I would think this wouldn't be such a problem if society would acknowledge night owls exist and allow work to adjust accordingly. Forcing a night owl to live the life of a morning lark is likely not the best way to get their best work. The person suffers who has to try and live in a world not designed for when they sleep, and the employer suffers by getting less out of those people.
I have ADHD and left to my own devices I would go to sleep somewhere between 2-4am. At work, I don't function so well before about 2pm some days... and by that point that day is almost over.
It is better for me to align with a pattern where I get some level of restful sleep, as opposed to one where I do not ultimately.
In an ideal world, you are obviously correct, but in the world between a severely disturbed sleep where I get a handful of hours of actually restorative sleep, vs once where I actually sleep for 7 hours? One wins over the other.
And yes, given I have an entire medical team (for other reasons, I have a SCI) I have done about everything you can to resolve sleep. Between ADHD however, symptoms related to the SCI etc, we really do just have to go with whatever we can reasonably get.
Indeed. I've struggled with it since childhood, not only me. The same "symptoms" for lack of a better word are seen with my mother, my aunt and my grandmother. All are night owls, all sleep poorly etc.
For whatever reason, regardless of how much sleep i've had, my brain begins to kick into high gear with a clarity of thought and capacity to dedicate myself to things starting at about 9PM. This remains true REGARDLESS of sleep, how well rested I am, general health, etc. I could have had NO sleep for 24 hours, still be away at 9PM the next night, and it's like a switch.
The ONLY time this ever differs, for reasons still unknown, and where I fit into "normal society" is for whatever reason, when I visit Russia (which I have not done for some time for obvious reasons.)
When I am in Russia, with no effort at all, I sleep normal hours without issue, and wake up during the day time actually well rested. This ceases once I return to my timezone. This same pattern is not seen when say, I visit the US instead.
If only I could harness this magic...