“ADHD adults are chronically sleep-deprived,” Dr. Dodson says. “The typical person will be wide awake at 3 or 4 a.m. and have to get up at 7 to go to work.”Like everyone else, ADHD adults need seven or eight hours of sleep a night to promote health and prevent fatigue during the day, says psychiatrist Clete Kushida, M.D., Ph.D., medical director of the Stanford Sleep Medicine Center in Redwood City, Calif. Studies have shown sleep deprivation can be as impairing as other adult symptoms of ADHD combined, Dr. Dodson says.And it can actually make other symptoms worse, adds Michael Coates, M.D., an adult ADHD expert and past chair of family medicine at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, N.C. “Sleep is critical for adults with ADHD,” he says.So how do you get the sleep you need? The following 9 tips from top experts can help.Better sleep method #1: Find out why you aren’t sleeping.
Before you start trying to solve your sleep problems, it’s important for you and your doctor to figure out exactly what’s causing them, says clinical psychologist Thomas Brown, Ph.D., associate director of the Yale Clinic for Attention and Related Disorders in New Haven, Conn. Separate issues need to be treated individually, he says.
