Episode 25: Mental Health and Sleep Part 1: Managing ADHD

Show notes:

Throughout October, which is known as ADHD Awareness Month, people come together to educate the public, reduce the stigma, and support those affected by ADHD. So, to uncover the challenges faced by people with ADHD and how to recognize it early on, we’ve invited not one, not two, but three very special guests for this special episode: Dr. Carrie Jackson, Nikki Kinzer, and Pete Wright.

Episode-related links:

A Comprehensive Guide To Understanding ADHD and Sleep
New Data Shows Just How Much Sleep Impacts People With ADHD: What to Know
Viral TikTok Says ”T-Rex” Sleeping Position is a Sign of ADHD — Here’s What Experts Have to Say

Transcript:

Dr. Shelby Harris: How are you sleeping? Are you sleeping? I’m Dr. Shelby Harris, Director of Sleep Health at Sleepopolis, and this is Sleep Talking with Dr. Shelby. Today we’re talking about ADHD with Dr. Carrie Jackson, Nikki Kinzer, and Pete Wright.

But first, is falling asleep as easy as ABC? According to TikTok, it could be. In an original post from @len.xxxx, one great sleep hack is to go through the alphabet from A to Z, naming items in any category you choose to distract your mind from negative thoughts. For instance, if the category were singers, you might say A is Avril Lavigne, B is Beyonce, C is Cher, etc. Or for vegetables, you can do A for asparagus, B for broccoli, C for corn.

For best results, it’s recommended to pick a category that’s somewhat challenging and to breathe deeply. According to the original post, the exercise is best for worriers or overthinkers, but as with anything, results may vary and the hack might not work for everyone. If you obsess over the game, for example, and grab for your phone to Google answers, which I might do, it probably won’t help you fall asleep any faster.

So I say, give it a try the next time your mind is racing in bed. It might not do that much, but then again, it might just be that thing to settle down after a long day. Carrie, Nikki, Pete. What do you think of the alphabet sleep hack? Would you ever try it?

Nikki Kinzer: I think I would get frustrated and I would have to have it be an open category of anything that I think of that starts with an A, a B, you know, it couldn’t just be a specific category and maybe it might work if it’s open.

Dr. Carrie Jackson: It’s funny because I actually saw this on a TikTok video the other day and I tried it out at night, but for me it did not work. I just started thinking about three things and then at that point I was like, I’m done. I can’t think about it anymore.

DS: Another way to do it that I do, cause I love to bake, I go through different cupcake combinations. So I’ll be like vanilla cupcake, vanilla buttercream, red velvet cupcake. That tends to work. It’s just a focused thing to take your mind off of everything else.

Pete Wright: But then my mind is only focused on cupcakes and how much I want cupcakes. That is probably the worst- I just got here on this show and I can already tell you that’s the worst advice I’ve ever heard. All I want is a cupcake now. Thanks for absolutely nothing. Can we medicate obsessive cupcake thoughts?

DS: I love it. I love it.

If you like Sleep Talking with Dr. Shelby, take a second right now to leave us a five star rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. It seems simple, but it helps us reach a lot more people to get them the rest they deserve.

And if you’re tired of hitting snooze, hit subscribe. A new episode of science backed sleep tips is available every other Wednesday on YouTube and everywhere you listen to podcasts.

Dr. Carrie Jackson is a licensed child psychologist, speaker, and author working in San Diego. She’s published work related to parenting, ADHD, and defiance. In addition to her private practice, Dr. Carrie Jackson is also an adjunct professor of child therapy at the University of San Diego.

Nikki Kinzer has spent her career improving living systems, eventually discovering her true passion, working with those who are living with ADHD. In 2010, she transformed her business to focus on coaching adults and college students with ADHD through Take Control ADHD. Nikki also co hosts the award winning Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast, fostering a global community of support alongside our final guest, Pete Wright.

Pete is a podcaster, photographer, and writer in Portland, Oregon. He was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult and has been working for more than a decade to build the systems that best support his work as a freelancer. As co host of the ADHD podcast. He serves to bring his experience living with ADHD to support others. Dr. Carrie, Nikki, Pete, we are so glad you’re here to help raise awareness during ADHD Awareness Month. Welcome everyone to Sleep Talking with Dr. Shelby.

PW: Thank you.

NK: Thank you.

Dr. Carrie: Thank you.

DS: Glad to have you here. So, to better understand ADHD, it might be best to really start with someone’s first hand experience of it. So, Pete, could you talk us through how you were diagnosed with ADHD? I know that you’ve been very vocal about it. So, what has the journey been like for you?

PW: I was diagnosed as an adult. It’s now been over 25 years. And I was diagnosed, I like to think, accidentally. I had just gotten married and, or I’d say we’d been married probably for about a year. And we went in to talk to our counselor for just, you know, a checkup, are we still communicating right? Are we eating enough cupcakes? The usual stuff.

And at the end of, you know, four or five sessions together, he looks at us and says, you guys are great. You’re going to be fine. Don’t worry about a thing. I think we’re done. Also, Pete, I think I’d like to talk to you about your ADHD. And I did not know that I had ADHD at the time. And that started a year’s long discernment process, first getting the diagnosis and then figuring out, you know, what all these words meant that actually defined my lived experience, and went back to help define the struggles that I had in high school, particularly in college, around having too much attention and having it fractured like stained glass. And I’ve spent the rest of sort of my adult life kind of on that journey. And I feel like I’m, I’m going into fireworks brain mode. You tell me what you need to know.

DS: How did, how did you get evaluated better? So you said it was recognized potentially at first, did you have any formal testing done? Like, what did that whole process look like?

PW: I did go through the formal testing process with a specialist, and then I went through a number of sessions. What did insurance pay for? Like 12 sessions with him.

DS: Okay.

PW: And that was all great. I also, like, my area of, sort of my flavor of ADHD is, you know, I lean toward inattentive. Meaning that all the hyperactivity that I have exists in my brain, you know, I deal with a little bit of leg stuff, you know, when I’m sitting still, I can’t sit still all that often, but mostly it’s, you know, I say fireworks brain because I have the thoughts that just go and I love to focus deeply on research and learning about these parts of my body and brain and how they work together.

And so, from that initial sort of kick out the gate from my therapist, I moved directly into kind of heavy duty research mode and that actually unlocked a whole new bouquet of issues going on in my brain and I discovered that my ADHD’s best friend is anxiety. And figuring out how to balance anxiety and ADHD and the dash of OCD that I live with and how to medicate those things and figure out the right molecule and the right dosage at the right time to actually alleviate and balance the behavior was critical. And I’m, you know, here, I said, 25 years on, still very much learning about that balance and what that means.

DS: So more of an open question to the others as well. But like, for example, Dr. Carrie, would you say that his description of ADHD kind of fits what you see with your patients? Because I know you see children, adolescents, all different ages, how would you describe what you see?

Dr. Carrie: First, I love the term fireworks brain. I mean, I think that is so spot on and that’s exactly how a lot of, like kids and teens I work with, they will describe it, but I think it can be such a wide range presentation and how kids, teens and adults can look. And, you know, for some parents, they will say, well, there’s no way that my child has ADHD because they’re not hyper.

And so exactly what you were saying, like, For some people, they lean more towards the inattentive side. Some people, it’s more hyperactive symptoms where they can’t sit still. For others, it’s a combination of those two. But one thing that a lot of people don’t know about ADHD, which I think is really, really interesting, is that these symptoms can actually change over time.

So if you or your child is diagnosed with the presentation of inattentiveness, as a child, it can actually change as they get older. So it’s not set in stone and it’s expected that their symptoms will change.

DS: Oh, that’s interesting. Nikki, what about for you? Do you see any difference with say, adult versus adolescence, girls versus boys, gender differences?

NK: Well, yes, and in personal experiences with my own daughter. So she was diagnosed when she was 14, she was in eighth grade. And when we first went to her primary doctor. They had us fill out some paperwork and they had her teachers fill out some paperwork.

DS: Okay.

NK: And when they were evaluating it, the primary doctor said, Oh, I don’t think she has ADHD. And I’m thinking, well… and the reason is because she’s really good at masking. And her teachers loved her and she was inattentive. So just like what you guys are talking about, the fireworks brain, everything was inside of her. And she’s so pleasant that she could just smile and you know, the teacher would be like, oh great, she’s paying attention when she’s like thinking about her gymnastics routine, you know? And so because of what I do and the expertise that I had, I knew that there was something more going on, so we ended up going to a psychologist who specializes in ADHD, did more intensive testing.

DS: Yeah.

NK: And sure enough came out that she was inattentive ADHD with the possibility of having depression and anxiety. So be careful of those kinds of things as she goes into high school. And so I definitely see a difference with young women and women. I think it gets misdiagnosed a lot as depression and anxiety, which is an issue. You know, we’re good at masking. Men are too. And so it’s hard to know sometimes how those conditions relate to each other.

DS: Well, it’s interesting you said that because of your area of specialty, you were able to kind of notice it in your daughter more. What about someone who might not be an expert that might be wondering, like, my child isn’t the more stereotypical, like, you know, we’re talking about the hyperactive side. How would someone be able to start recognizing it in their kid if they’re suspicious?

NK: I think you have to listen to your children. Where are they struggling? And for her, she came to me. I didn’t actually see the symptoms myself, but she came to me and said, look, something’s not right because I was doing homework with someone and they did this homework assignment in 20 minutes and I know it would take me at least two hours to do.

And when I started, like, actually talking to her about where she struggled. She showed me her notebook, you know, when you first start school and you have all the dividers with every class and it’s supposed to be all nice and tidy. Oh, no, no, no. She just threw everything in the notebook, you know, as she got it. And I wasn’t aware of that.

So I think it’s important to listen to them. And if they’re struggling and they’re asking for help or something’s not quite right, we have to really pay attention to that. And, you know, it may not be ADHD, it could be something else, but we have to listen to them.

DS: Okay. So when we think about ADHD, just from my area of specialty, I often think of sleep quality, just how it impacts the ability to fall asleep, staying asleep, and even just maintaining a consistent sleep schedule.

What about for you, Pete? Did you ever notice any impact that it might have on your sleep as, you know, when you’re thinking back to when you were first diagnosed or before then, do you think it impacted it?

PW: You know, I was thinking about this this morning as I was kind of preparing for this show and I think it’s really interesting. I actually called my mom because, you know, who better to fill me in than someone who could bear witness to my own behavior. And, and I will say it took her a very long time to understand my ADHD as an adult. You know, her first response was, no, you didn’t. She came around, but she said, you know, it was, it’s really funny. Summers were really hard. When summer hit, i- even when I had a job, it was just a very different experience. I would come home from school, say during the school year, cognitively exhausted, right? Those neurocognitive systems had been working all day, whether they were, you know, working effectively or not, they’d been working all day.

Social situations were sort of high calorie burn activities. I was doing a lot of things with my brain. And at the end of the day, I would crash. Really hard. The difficulty was, you know, the teenage stuff, right? Sleeping too long, but getting to sleep was not a problem until summer hit. Then I couldn’t get to sleep. I couldn’t stay asleep and I would wake up way too early. It was as if I just wasn’t working hard enough to exhaust the systems that were constantly on.

I thought that was a really interesting thing and I’d never put all that together, right? When I went to college, it was the same thing, although I had, you know, more control and it was to a much greater degree a disaster because I had no, no framework. You know? I was kind of doing it all on my own and the sleep was impacted. But then in college, everybody’s sleep was impacted.

DS: Yeah.

PW: Right? Like we don’t learn great role model behavior from our peers in the dorms.

DS: Yeah. So you’re able to link it back to even when you were younger.

PW: Yeah.

DS: That’s interesting. The summer versus the school year. Dr. Carrie, is this something that you hear as well in your practice?

Dr. Carrie: Absolutely. And actually, like a lot of parents, they won’t describe the sleep difficulties as much, but they’ll talk about the bedtime routine. They will say, I just cannot get my child to get ready for bedtime.

It’s like they are a tornado of energy at the end of the night, no matter how much physical activity they do. It is so hard to get them ready to go to bed because all of the tasks and the executive functioning that go into it. Or even like, you know, how Pete was saying how sometimes kids, they can fall asleep really easy, but they’re still feeling very tired. And parents are like, I don’t know, are they not getting enough sleep at night? Like, are they going to sleep too late? Are they moving too much during the middle of the night? Parents will notice some other things typically in my practice before they will notice that there is the sleep that is off. It’s usually either the evening routine or the morning routine.

DS: That’s interesting. And what about the medications too, that are often used to treat ADHD? So something I’m often dealing with are some of the stimulants. So like, how do you deal with that with patients that you’re working with?

Dr. Carrie: Oh my gosh. Yes. So a first line of treatment for ADHD is of course, medication and stimulant medication is highly effective for ADHD symptoms, but unfortunately one side effect is it can absolutely affect sleep in some individuals. So, because it’s a stimulant, so it doesn’t work the same as coffee, but if you imagine if you have coffee later in the day, that does affect your sleep.

And so for some kids, it can certainly make it harder for them to go to sleep at night because of the stimulants. But also with that being said, for some people, they actually experience a calming effect with stimulants, you know, and it can make it easier for them to go to sleep. And I always tell parents, like, don’t let the concerns about sleep dissuade you from trying them out because certainly with the work and help of a psychiatrist or a pediatrician, there are many different things that you can try to reduce those.

DS: And there are many different types of stimulants out there too, right? So it’s not all just long acting. There are fast acting. There’s ones that you take at night that kick in in the morning now that people don’t often think about.

So there’s lots of different options out there. Nikki, what do you think, like, the whole organizational aspect when it comes to going to bed at night, right? That’s something that I see a lot with some of the people that I work with. Like, how would you deal with that for maybe say an adult or a teenager who’s really struggling to kind of get things in line to be able to go to bed at a certain time?

NK: That is a great question because that is a lot of what happens with coaching. When I’m coaching clients and sleep comes up as one of the main issues. And it goes to really evaluating like where do they find the challenge right now? Is it falling asleep? Is it not having a bedtime routine or having some kind of like calm down ritual, you know, to kind of slow that brain racing.

So we kind of, I have to dig in to also find out where their distractions are. A lot of my clients, I find that they get distracted by the devices. They get distracted by, I’m just going to do this one more thing. Or they feel like they have this, you know, burst of energy in the middle of the night. So they’re going to get all this stuff done.

I see this with mothers and fathers a lot where kids are in bed now, so I can get all this stuff done, which disrupts their sleep. And so for us, it’s really figuring out where are you right now? What would you like it to look like and is there some type of ritual or routine that we can start to practice?

With ADHD in particular, time blindness is a huge thing where, you know, they don’t know how fast time goes when you’re scrolling down social media. And so it’s being aware of some of those things to, you know, do you need to put a block on some of these websites? Do we need to have a different kind of an alarm clock that’s not your phone.

I remember having a client who really like went back and forth, like, no, I need my phone because it’s my alarm clock. And I’m like, guess what? There’s other alarm clocks. I swear that might work for you. You know?

DS: I tell people all the time, I still use the same alarm clock I had in high school from the mid nineties.

NK: Yeah.

DS: Right? So early 90s. They still work!

PW: With the absolute worst sound, right? It’s like the fallout shelter sound.

DS: Yeah. Exactly.

PW: Yeah. It’s bad news. And I just want to name it because it- we- we say social media all the time, but let’s be honest. It’s Duolingo. Right? Like everybody’s doing Duolingo at night. Right? Am I right? You people, you can do Duolingo during the day. If you learn one thing. You can do it during the day. Zaria is not going anywhere. You can, you can do it anytime.

DS: You and my husband. That’s funny. I mean, but I think like then it’s thinking like, Dr. Carrie, what about those limits with, like, with a teenager, right? That’s a tough one, right? Being able to make that time for sleep. So how would you set those limits to help so that they don’t become time blind?

Dr. Carrie: Oh my gosh, it is so challenging because even as adults, right, I have a hard time setting the limits myself when using my phone, using my screen time. And the reality is we live in a tech focused world where we need our devices for certain, things like in schools kids need them a lot.

So it’s much easier for parents to set up healthy screen time habits when they model it for themselves. So they set those screen time limits on it for themselves. And also when they start at a younger age, because if you wait until the time your child is a teenager, it’s going to be so much harder to bring it back in.

So start off younger when, when you’re talking with them about what is an okay thing for us to view together, like what’s healthy screen time viewing habits. And then when it comes to setting limits also for parents being very, very clear about what the limits are, why we are having them and why they’re helpful.

I find that so many parents I work with, they will say I really want them to learn to set limits on their own. And I’m like, I get that. But think about how we as adults, we need to set those screen time limits on our own. So we can’t expect a child with ADHD to use their devices without any limits themselves. So starting from a young age will help a lot.

DS: Yeah. And you have to model it for your kids as well, even if, ADHD or not. Right? If my almost 15 year old comes in and sees me on my phone in my bed. He’s like, why do I have to follow what you say? You don’t follow it yourself. Right? So you’ve got to really practice what you preach.

So we see, I see, at least in my practice, I see people who have ADHD, who just have trouble falling asleep, so they have some insomnia. But then I see people who really have a delayed sleep phase. So they can sleep eight, nine hours, but they’re much more like night owl syndrome, and they get caught up doing all the stuff that we were just talking about with screens.

Do any of you ever have people talk with you about melatonin? Have you heard people talk about that? Is there a role for it in your practice?

Dr. Carrie: For me certainly, parents will ask me about it all the time. And I know from actually talking with you, Dr. Shelby, just about how it can be appropriate for ADHD kids, especially because their body oftentimes does not get tired as early on.

Sometimes that melatonin can be helpful. The one thing that you have shared that is really important is that oftentimes like the type of melatonin that is sold in stores is not the right dosage for kids. And so certainly connecting with a pediatrician or a sleep doctor around that is going to be hugely important.

DS: Yeah. The timing of it, the type that you’re getting, and we actually, I mean, we don’t use melatonin at least in sleep medicine all that often for kids, but we do have research showing with kids with ADHD neurodivergent kids, we do find that it is beneficial for some children. So, I don’t ever rule it out.

Like, you can use melatonin all you want, but if you’re not working on any of the organizational stuff that you were just talking about, Nikki, it’s not going to do all that much. Pete, do you ever notice, like, if you’re not getting as much sleep, do you ever notice it worsen some of your inattentiveness, your firework brain, do you notice a connection?

PW: Hmm. So, um, every day, yes. Uh, I notice the cycles, the energetic cycles throughout the day much, much more. Like for example, we were talking before the show, this morning was a rough morning, right? I woke up and I woke up too early. I woke up with an obsessive thought spiral. I could not shake from my head. I had to get up and move. I took the dog for a walk in the dark. Like I had to get going, but I know that there is a cost for that early morning productivity. There is a cost that will come multiple times later throughout the day, because I don’t necessarily have one grand swing where if I wake up too early, I’ll be tired at four or five. It’s, you know, right about one o’clock, I’m going to crash. And then again at three, and then again at seven, like it’s just, I notice those cycles. So I, I have to sort of mediate that. I do want to throw in the other, you know, I mentioned the best friend of ADHD, anxiety. Once I started really working on treating the anxiety / OCD parts of my brain, I found the sleep improved.

Because so many of the thought spirals that I would find myself in at night and keeping me up if I wake up in the middle of the night, usually the ADHD would cause me to hyper focus on them, but the fact that they were anxious thought spirals in the first place Is what I needed to work on and being able to address those and go to sleep with a greater sense of calm allowed me to stay asleep in a way that I hadn’t before so, you know I think that’s part of the trick of ADHD is figuring out like what is the dance that –

DS: Yeah.

PW: -the neurodiversity is doing in your head to lead to better sleep?

DS: So when you’re talking about treating the anxiety aspect, like what does that look like for you? Because people might be splitting hairs of what’s ADHD, what’s anxiety.

PW: For me, you know, I’ve, I’ve gone back and forth between ADHD medication. Right now I’m on a dose of a medication that is designed for ADHD OCD. And I find that once I get up to like fill the tank, so to speak, I find that I’m able to shake free the things that would cause me to perseverate.

DS: Yeah.

PW: In a way that I hadn’t before. And that allows me to sort of open the gate to better sleep. You know, my daughter, when they were first dealing with ADHD and first medicated, they said this, I feel like when I’m not on my medication, I am sitting at my desk trying to do homework, and there is a massive party outside. When I’m on my medication, I’m allowed to close the window. And that has resonated so wholly for me, since she first said that and I think that’s the same thing that the anxiety and OCD is allowing me to sort of treat the ADHD around the back door.

DS: Yeah.

PW: And improve my sleep as a result.

DS: That makes a lot of sense. What about for you Nikki, like are there any specific recommendations that you give to people you’re working with, you’re coaching, when it comes to sleep? So you were talking about like blocking certain websites, but are there certain things that you might recommend otherwise to patients?

NK: Well, the first thing I recommend is that they talk to their doctor.

DS: Yeah.

NK: And make sure that the medications are working the way that they need to be working. I think as a coach, the biggest thing is just making it a priority. Like we’ve got to make sleep a priority because it impacts your ADHD so much the next day. So does nutrition and so does stress management and all of that, but sleep is definitely a big one.

And so if they’re struggling and they’re only getting four or five hours of sleep and they’re still trying to get through the day, you know, that’s one of the things that we’re always working on is the whole person, which includes not just the ADHD symptoms, but how are you taking care of yourself and sleep is a big one.

DS: It’s a 24 hour day. Not just the few hours here and there, right?

NK: Yes. What about, Dr. Carrie, do you have any resources that you recommend to people, support groups, books, podcasts? I’ll have everyone speak up. Like what are some of the things that you might recommend?

Dr. Carrie: If you are someone who is interested in learning through reading, I absolutely love The 12 Principles of Raising an ADHD Child by Dr. Russell Barkley. He also has a YouTube channel that I absolutely recommend. It is amazing. Tells you all the greatest research on ADHD, but breaks it down into bite sized pieces. Amazing.

And then I also have a lot of free resources for parents, like some guides that are great for you to download if you are the parent of a child or a teen or a tween. And then I also run some groups for parents where you can actually learn actionable skills related to the challenges you experience with raising an ADHD child. So things like how do we get our child to follow a bedtime routine and get them to bed on time because sleep is so important like you were saying, right? So what are those actual steps that we will take?

And also I do want to say like, as someone who works with kids with ADHD, a lot of the parents that I worked with, they also have ADHD, right? And so the strategies that I share in my free guides and also my groups, they’re not going to be some things that you aren’t going to be able to follow through with because I think that’s so important. We need to make the resources available to parents who have ADHD and the kids who have ADHD because it goes hand in hand.

DS: Nikki, how hereditary is ADHD?

NK: Very much so.

PW: All, all the hereditary.

NK: It’s very hereditary. I mean, you, you can probably pinpoint like where it’s coming from. I know for our family, it, it specifically comes from my husband and his family.

PW: It’s a very short family tree.

NK: Yeah. It’s a very short family tree. The issue though is that ADHD, we didn’t have the awareness, right, that we, we have now. And so there’s many great grandparents and grandparents that never got diagnosed and there’s many parents that maybe have not gotten diagnosed until, you know, later in life, but it is very common and something to be aware of.

DS: Any other resources that Pete or Nikki, that you guys like to recommend to people who are interested in learning more?

NK: I would say ADDA, a resource for Adults with ADHD. They have several different kinds of support groups. I don’t know this for sure, but I bet you they might have one for sleep. And if they don’t, I’m sure that they talk about it.

CHADD is also a wonderful organization that’s, you know, in many places. Local ADHD support groups. I mean, there’s a lot of psychologists and therapists out there that do group coaching and do group therapy. I would definitely look into that. We also have the ADHD conference that’s coming up in November in Anaheim, California, and they’re actually doing a new one that’s going to be an online conference in March of 2025. And so there’s definitely different places to look to find out, you know, what articles and things like that they have around psychotherapy.

DS: Pete, any books that you’ve gravitated, you said you went deep into the research, so anything that you’ve-? Yeah.

PW: Dr. Olivardia, Roberto Olivardia is amazing. We’ve had him on our show to talk about the sleep challenges with ADHD specifically and he’s terrific. And so I think I look for his resources and his writing as well as, you know, Ari Tuckman. Has talked a bunch about sleep as well So for me if I tie back into the anxiety, uh, I look for Russell Ramsay who has talked a bunch about, you know, breaking that ADHD anxiety generator that we live with. So those are a couple of names that I feel like are ever present in our discussions around, you know, living with ADHD.

And I think, you know, in terms of resources, I just want to throw out, like make sure when you’re looking for a doc yourself or a doc for your kids, that you have somebody who is specifically willing to play with you a little bit. Recognizing that you just, you’re not going to get it right the first time. And it could be dosage. It could be the molecule. It could be the time. We learned that from Bill Dodson, who told us, look, you got to do all of the things. You gotta be able to play with all of the vectors.

And if you don’t have a physician that’s willing to work with you and test with you every two to three weeks to make sure you have the right thing- I love so much that Dr. Carrie is here to just be my, uh, lived experience validator. Like when I say something and her head nods, I’m like, okay, that was okay. I just got checked out. You know what I’m saying? Like, those are the things that I think really matter. It’s the best resource you can have is someone who’s willing to really play with you and get the right thing for you or your kids.

DS: Not everything is so manualized every time. Like, I’m a CBT, cognitive behavior therapy person, but you have to look at the person and you have to see them as a whole. Not everything is do this, plug in this. And if you see a physician or anyone who’s very stuck in their way and thinks that this is the only thing that’s going to work, think twice.

PW: Or very stuck in their 15 minute or 12 minute slot that they get with you, right? That is a huge challenge and we just have to recognize that’s a reality and we all have to do our best on the team to make the right choices.

Dr. Carrie: And vet your people because, like, the providers that you work with, they mean so much. And so you are going to want to find someone that’s a fit for you. And if you see someone, a therapist, psychologist, psychiatrist, the first time qnd they’re not q fit for you, you absolutely can change. If you want to find a better provider, also, I know Nikki, you mentioned CHADD, and I don’t know if other people know that CHADD has a provider resource referral as well, where you can look up providers who are usually trained in ADHD and they have coaches as well there too.

DS: That’s awesome. Yeah, I think, I say this all the time too, you are the expert on you and you are the consumer. Ask around, get the expert advice. Same thing goes for sleep medicine, right? So when it comes to sleep, you want to make sure -Society of Behavioral Sleep Medicine has really great clinicians, many of whom are psychologists, and understand that link between ADHD and sleep.

So before we wrap up, I’m curious if there’s anything you don’t get asked about ADHD, whether it’s related to sleep or not, that you wish more people really knew about.

NK: You know, I would say that typically the focus is always around the challenges and how to deal with those challenges. And so I, I would love to have more conversations around accepting ADHD and the impact that it has on a person in their daily life and the strengths around ADHD.

DS: I like that. What about you, Pete?

PW: I feel like we are still dealing with a lot of cultural baggage that we drag from our youth, particularly in our sort of generation, which is everything I learned about ADHD as a kid was that it’s scary and that kids are put into other places and made to do different things and you don’t want to be one of those kids.

And I think we now, having grown up with those messages, I want to take that message and say, look, it’s time to break it. It’s time to break those traditional assumptions. Now as parents, as educators, as leaders. Let’s figure out how we can all sort of be in this boat together. It’s time.

DS: One thing I’m going to add is that a sleepy child, especially doesn’t always look sleepy. So they often look hyperactive. So it’s something to keep in mind that we weren’t really talking about so much earlier, but if you have a child who is sleep deprived, who has any snoring, consistent snoring, those are things that you want to bring up because I think you can have ADHD and you can have sleep apnea, for example, or sleep deprivation, but it doesn’t always mean that it has to be both things. So, if there’s any of that sleep deprivation or snoring, definitely bring that up to your doctor too, because we want to rule that out.

So everyone, we always like to end with a segment that we call Something to Sleep On. It’s one last point you want to share with anyone looking to change their sleep habits. Pete, do you have any final thought for our audience? Given everything we discussed, maybe something to sleep on?

PW: We started doing a month ago, my wife and I, started doing deep stretches with Yoga Body. Lucas at Yoga Body is my hero and he tells me what to do and I do it and I sleep really well, you guys. I sleep really well.

DS: That’s wonderful.

PW: Yeah.

NK: I would say be careful of the all or nothing thinking that happens with ADHD. And even if you’ve tried something before and it didn’t work, practice it again. Keep practicing these strategies.

DS: It’s a tool belt of different things to try.

NK: Yes.

DS: What about you, Dr. Carrie?

Dr. Carrie: Find a way to make bedtime rewarding because for most people it’s not something that you automatically want to do. So whether it’s doing Duolingo or if it’s your child reading a book they really want to read in bed, find a way to make it more exciting for them.

DS: Dr. Carrie, Nikki, Pete, thank you so much for being here. This is a really important topic that I don’t think people talk about enough and I really am glad that we’re focusing on it not just this month, but hopefully we’ll talk about it more every month. So thank you all for being here and teaching us more about this.

PW: Thanks so much.

NK: Thank you.

Dr. Carrie: Thank you.

DS: Thanks for listening to Sleep Talking with Dr. Shelby, a Sleepopolis original podcast. Remember if you’re tired of hitting snooze, hit subscribe or follow right now in YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you’re listening. And for even more sleep tips, visit sleepopolis.com and my Instagram page @sleepdocshelby. Today’s episode was produced by Ready Freddie Media. Our Senior Director of Content is Alanna Nuñez. Our Head of Content is Molly Stout and I’m Dr. Shelby Harris. Until next time, sleep well.