How Can I Sleep With All That Noise In My Head?
No, I don't mean the noise telling you the little purple men are coming. I mean the mental chatter that keeps a lot of people with ADHD from falling asleep. You might feel like you're tired, but your mind is not.
Except that really, you are tired, and the brakes on your mind are really, really tired. And not working for you. And now your thoughts won't shut up. Here are some things that work for me:
- Find the right level of stimulation to calm thoughts. This means something (such as reading or a puzzle) that's interesting enough to occupy me but not compelling enough (like a book I can't put down) to wake me up more. For me this means a magazine – I read New Scientist or The Week- or short stories.
- Chill out. This tip comes partly from the last blog post; it’s about making sure you can wind down instead of getting amped up. For me this might mean, for example, no computer after dinner. No stressful conversation topics after dinner
- Tailor your own version of counting sheep. This will be a mental exercise that is hard enough to focus you but easy enough to keep your mind on. I count to several hundred and often forget I’m counting and have to start over. The process of returning to it and continuing on is calming. I might also focus on an imaginary point in front of me.
- Don’t force it. If the mental noise is keeping me up, I get up and read some more. If I’m too tired to read, but my brain is still spinning, I watch tv. “relaxing” my mind won’t work by just breathing or taking a bath at this point, because all that chatter in my head makes me more tired, and less able to get to bed.
That last point makes me think: it’s rather like your chatterbox mind is a young child overtired, who just keeps playing and can’t quiet down. In fact, just like at other times with ADHD, the mind’s director can’t step up and say “time to quiet down!” Biggest tip here?
Don’t fight against it. IF all you can do is step back and notice, that’s where to start.
May 06, 2011 @ 23:37:24
So, bedtime was meant to be an hour ago, but instead I got swept up in reading your blog and thinking about my own addness. I keep having “how can she see into my brain?!” moments – exciting! … And now I can’t calm my brain down enough to stop reading/thinking and go to bed). Seems slightly ironic…
My usual way to lull my brain too sleep is listening to an audiobook on sleep timer (started doing it with books on tape when I was 8, & it only works with super familiar books) and play a few games of freebie solitaire on my iPod. Hoping it works tonight. I have my doubts.
May 07, 2011 @ 18:19:15
Thankyou for this!
I have put a lot of thought into explaining this to my husband lately. He doesn’t understand why I don’t just GET I BED! But I find that I must:
-quiet things down (this often includes cleaning up so that I can focus a bit better)
– work through at least some of the trains of though in my head
– Focus on SOMETHING (that comes to a nice tidy finish) long enough to quiet the other thoughts in mu head.
Its a good prescription for me!(Also helps me get things done… if I’ve been holding ideas in my head all day long without a chance to look into them, NOW is he time.)
though,it DOES often put me staying up LAT.. since my kids don’t go down till 10.
And my HUGE challenge is in coming to bed if my hubby goes first (while my brain is still too chatty to sleep!!)