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.
>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.
>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?
The sign has been pretty specific that it's the first (specific condition), and not the latter.
To get the big thing out of the way: brain scans of people with ADHD show measurable differences in brain structure, activity, and neurotransmitter levels compared with neurotypical brains[1].
Secondly, ADHD is highly hereditary, to the tune of 75%+ chance[2].
But you don't need a brain scan for your answer. There's a reason ADHD is a thing in DSM (if it were merely "a set of common symptoms", it wouldn't be).
Each "symptom" (a manifestation of an ADHD trait) in and of itself may not be rare, and people in general may experience it during certain conditions.
ADHD is experiencing a hella lot of them off the list, for absolute majority of the time, all your life.
Please really, really pay attention to the example I gave. It looks like you glossed over it entirely.
And yes, I'm fully aware of the irony of asking someone to pay more attention in this thread.
> I wonder which direction a causal relationship between sleep and ADHD might be.
The ADHD --> horrible sleep causation is well established.
The horrible sleep --> ADHD symptoms become worse causation is also well established.
Horrible sleep --> ADHD causation is nonexistent. There is nothing indicating that ADHD could be an acquired condition. There's all the evidence to the contrary (you are born this way, as the song goes).
The study establishes that "fixing" circadian rhythm helps with ADHD symptoms, which is a Captain Obvious moment (full night's sleep makes brain work better, and we have difficulty getting it ever).
I'm not sure what other causation you are looking for.
That makes sense, thanks. I think that matches my prior understanding, but recently people seem to talk a lot about "acquiring" ADHD, often from doomscrolling tiktok or something like that, and I wasn't sure about how much of that is true. Based on what you're saying, it sounds like the ADHD a lot of people claim they have is about as real as the OCD they also claim to have (i.e. minor symptoms that vaguely match), and the real thing is much more life-altering and deserves to not be diluted.
> 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.
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 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 my entire ceiling 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 also wish I could find a situation like that. My tendencies have caused me a lot of problems in my career. It seems that most companies really prefer the 9-5 worker who does predictable, incrementally reviewable amounts of work every day at a steady pace instead of showing up with a big amount of work done once a week or so and doing who knows what the rest of the time.
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.
I still have problems, but my life categorically improved once I got diagnosed and treated for obstructive sleep apnea. I focus on things much better, I'm better at juggling tasks, and I'm just nicer to people, or at least my fuse is considerably longer than it used to be. Also I'm sure my wife is grateful that I'm not snoring or gasping for breath every night.
I would highly encourage anyone who can get a sleep study done to do it. Most insurance companies will at least cover the sleep study and sleep sleep apnea can lead to a lot of considerably-more-expensive issues later down the line. It's not very invasive anymore, all they had to do was have me sleep with a pulse oximeter for a few nights and apparently that was enough.
I've been using a smart switch to fade in a light (one of the "sun-like" full-spectrum ones) over my head in the morning and it's been really effective for regulating my circadian rhythm. Even with little sleep, I will naturally wake up in the morning at a much more regular time.
I have been using one of those sunrise alarm clocks for around 8 years now. If I go to bed at a reasonable time, the light will wake me up naturally before the alarm actually goes off. However, if I stay up too late the effect of the light fades. I'll sleep right through the light and need the alarm. On one occasion when I must have been really sleep deprived, I slept through the light, an hour of the alarm going off, and another 2-3 hours after that.
lists Melatonin, first, then behavioral pseudo-interventions.
stay tuned for more monthly product placements on frontiers in, best digested post prime time.
Welcome to your readjustment.
Willkommen beim Nachrichten.
hey, is anyone wondering if kleine & grosse Lauschangriffe are shared with private people or the guys working for these institutions are trustworthy enough and whether they actually deserved their Bachelor degrees or someone somehow decided they are worth it anyway? wait ... it's just a fucking Bachelors degree
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.
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.
> 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.
adhd is a socially constructed disorder with significant heterogeneity and is only becoming moreso with the advent of scrollable video media and patient communities/advocacy. i am highly skeptical of results pointing to an easily identified physiological cause. the studies cited in this paper are generally low quality and fall apart under scrutiny.
Beyond the blatant appeal to authority, it is funny that you think even psychiatrists have a consensus on issues like these. Psychiatry is rightly described as the humanities arm of the medical profession.
As a person whose extreme lack of attention went away spontaneously once after a meditation retreat I am skeptical of most things anybody says about ADHD. The inattentiveness eventually came back a few months later but I am still squarely in "this is more complicated than people make it out to be" camp.
How do the authors disintangle cause and effect here? It doesn't follow that sleep issues are an underlying cause, and not just one of the MANY symptoms of ADHD.
For a time I had to wake up at 6AM for work and it was a period where I struggled the most with my ADHD symptoms.
I hope there is more awareness in the future about the importance of sleep for neurodivergent people. This could help with the social jet lag most of us feel with having to follow a schedule that simply does not work for us.
I was formally diagnosed as a kid but didn’t do the drug route due to my father not liking these new drugs. I’m in my 40’s now and only started enforcing a sleep routine 10ish years ago. Eg. Bedtime at 11 and get up when alarm goes off at 7:30. And the effect on me was astounding. Everything just levelled out. I still like/need a coffee in the morning.
I wish it was as easy as that. I naturally fall asleep later than the average person and forcing myself to sleep early does not permanently solve the underlying problem.
There seems to be some kind of hidden connection between autism and ADHD. At first sight the definitions are contradictory but in reality, many people have both. Sleep disturbance seem to be common among autistic people too.
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.
> The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Then what, the AI queries latest real-time status of their bank account to validate this? What a waste of GPU float computations.
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 aren't factors, but the original question was posed as if it was a general explanation, and it clearly cannot explain everything.
Three things that helped me with my circadian phase (to certin extend)
1) Melatonine 300mcg 5-6 hours befor desired sleep time
2) 10k lux light for 30m when waking up
3) Nobeltin (nootropic) it enhances clock amplitude, so I do get less sleepy during teh day and more sleepy at night ..
things taht kind of helped but find hard to keep: Keto
(I feel less sleepy on Keto, and easier to fall a sleep but it's been a while since ive been on keto)
+1 to melatonin. It took me a very long time to dial in the right dose though. It’s not like it’s some miracle cure but it has helped a bunch with being able to fall asleep at a reasonable time, sleep through the night, and thus wake up at a reasonable time. Which of course helps a bit with everything else
> so conditioned to being groggy in the mornings that I still find it hard to get up even if I feel fairly refreshed.
I am very much in the same boat. Mornings have never been my friend. Even the few restful nights and refreshed mornings I get are spoiled by learned grogginess and overstaying in bed.
That's part of the issue I had in terms of dialing in the right dosage. I was trying to use it off and on for about 20 years and could never get the right amount where it'd actually work at night but not leave me groggy in the AM. Part of the issue was for a long time it was hard finding the stuff in low enough dosages to even allow for this easily.
Turns out the answer is 500-600mcg for myself, but everyone's going to be different.
yes, melatonin is unfortunately misused commonly, especially in the US, where it's not regulated for whatever reason. If you take 5 to 20 mg, it can act as an immediate sleep aid, by overwhelming your body with unnatural amounts, with a higher chance of side effects like nightmares. For reference, the body naturally produces about 30 mcg to signal itself to fall asleep [1].
If you actually want to shift your circadian rhythm, the optimal dose is about 300 to 500 mcg (the actual absorption rate varies wildly between manufacturers and delivery methods), taken 4 to 6 hours before your sleep onset (note: when you usually go to sleep, not when you want to go to sleep). [2]
- 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.
I believe it. I even sought out medical advice on how to best deal with it all. I was given the usual recommendation of low-dose melatonin and light therapy.
However, my issue at the time was that I could never find a light with high enough lux values that I felt like I could trust. Plus, another issue with light therapy is that one can basically never stop for any moderate amount of time, and well, my ADHD makes that near impossible.
I honestly think I would have better success with sleep issues if I could just control my own schedule or have a flexible schedule, but that is not really a luxury most jobs can provide.
Melatonin 1mg 2 hours before bed worked for me in combination with wrap-around orange glasses (that filtered all blue light from screens and lighting) for the last 2 hours before bed. Also take magnesium and chamomile tea regularly, that layer on top.
Individually nothing works, but the combination crossed a tipping point for me with radical change.
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.
That’s the endogenous period, that really only comes out as is in total darkness over many days. If the hour a day shift keeps happening even when you have access to sunlight, that would be interesting, though I’m not a clinician. Does the activity pattern drift till you’re in anti-phase to the solar day?
Generally the endogenous clock is approximate (hence the word circadian, about a day). But that’s because the day length has been constantly lengthening since animals evolved. Too slowly for us to notice, but the proteins that handle clocking are fairly ancient (though there are additional copies in humans compared to a fruit fly, say), and they aren’t locked in to favor a rotation period for Earth because there hasn’t been a stable period over long stretches.
The clock entrains to the environment, though. The more the daylight brightness to night time darkness shift in intensity, the higher amplitude their rhythms are, generally. Other signals also entrain them, like social activity, and the gut clock is a whole other complexity (kinda downstream of the brain clock but it can feed right back and wreck the central oscillation).
Any number of these factors can cause circadian effects, from a flatter rhythm, changed period, entrainment mismatch, etc.
In rare cases when a circadian gene itself is mutated, then you can have the clock period stretched significantly, and then synchronizing to the 24 hour day becomes really hard.
> The clock entrains to the environment, though. The more the daylight brightness to night time darkness shift in intensity, the higher amplitude their rhythms are, generally.
Well, this is also interesting, because I was born in Ghana and spent the first four years of my life there, and since then have always had insomnia issues, first in the Netherlands and now Sweden. However, the one time I visited Ghana as an adult for a month I slept like a baby.
I actually had a gut feeling that the much quicker shift from day to nighttime darkness and back played a big part in it, but wasn't sure why that might be the case. I assumed it was psychological somehow, that on some subconscious level I felt more "at home" in Ghana's natural environment because it's what my brain was "calibrated" on in the first years of its life. Would be interesting if that actually is the case in a circadian rhythm sense.
> That’s the endogenous period, that really only comes out as is in total darkness over many days.
And speaking of Sweden, I wouldn't be surprised if the short winter days probably do give enough "leeway" to approximate that effect.
I think yes, your early experience does a lot to set your clock, though there is plasticity/remodeling possible.
As for Sweden: the low light in winter definitely impacts the clocks function. But still not constant darkness, since even a bit of sunlight is some signal to the clock, and it’ll entrain.
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.
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).
Anecdotally, I've observed several families (including my own) where one child did not exhibit any ADHD behaviors through adulthood and another that did, separated by only one year and raised together. It's certainly possible there could have been some category of unnoticed traumatic events, but I think a genetic predisposition is more likely, no?
That said, I was likely jumping to conclusions on causality when the science is still out. CPTSD and ADHD may turn out to be the same thing, or may not. They just happen to "look the same" in brain scans.
Scapegoating also produces the pattern of only one symptomatic child. Or a invasive surgery. So, who knows.
In supportive environments you'll be able to tell the difference, by-birth conditions do not heal, while trauma will start healing off in a painful process that is somewhat comparable to peeling layers off an onion.
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 bipolar disorder, schizoaffective type, very affected by light changes.
I also have polymorph visits in my melatonin, receptor genetics that are linked to this disorder.
My heritage is a saw 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.
Well I do not really count, but I only eat seafood or venison, which bothy have higher long chain omega 3 and omega 6. I really have an issue with short chain PUFAs like from vegetables. I started this mainly because of my lipid profile. Very low HDL, high LDL, and a family history of herat attacks in our early 50's.
I found it helped my mood disorder stabilize and also my IBS-D.
I would say I get well over 2 grams a day though but to my the length and balance or omega 3/6 is important for me genetically.
> You should seriously try "metabolic psychiatry"
I would say I am doing it, only better, because I know my genetics and what some people miss is the type of fats they need due to polymorphism in FADS1 and FADS2.
Great! You're nearly there. Carnivore is the most potent form of keto in this scenario. What's left is to eat mostly ruminant meat, and, most importantly, eat the right amount of fat.
The amount of fat you need to eat is a bit unintuitive, so a bit rare to do it right without measuring with blood tests or previous guidance (or without eating mammoths or some type of high fat beast).
In grams it's at least 2g of fat for every 1g of (protein+carb).
Fish doesn't usually have this ratio, and normal meat neither because butchers trim it. And you can fight it by buying "beef fat trimmings", there are several ways.
The premise is you get medicine (or better!) level of benefits with fewer side effects.
So if it's 1 thing I could tell you is to buy that ketomojo!
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.
Any high level on what you'd do today? I'd love to get mine sequenced at a place that won't sell it to a health insurance place. I saw @pcollison post about unleashing coding agents on his being fascinating, I'd love to know more.
Be sure to use local coding agents! Not much use spending more to do more private sequencing then exposing the data to the internet some other way.
I’ve personally not (yet) sequenced my genome. That’s where my personal decision is at, and will remain till data ownership for genomic data isn’t guaranteed. That one big part of me I don’t want to surrender to the all consuming digital aether until I absolutely need a test.
When that time comes, I’d try get a whole genome assay. It’s pricier, but the data is gonna be there as more and more evidence about various polymorphisms come to light. Equally, such data is potent in the wrong hands. D
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.
It may or may not be useful to you, but when I am constantly tired I've found it can come from one of two things: not eating enough calories, or I need to take vitamin B12 supplements.
I'm probably tired from eating too much calories. Vit B doesn't help a lot. But I changed my lifestyle recently from almost constant sitting to almost constant standing, a lot more movement, less calories, lost a lot of weight (still a lot to go) and it helped, but not that much. I tried a lot of supplements along the way. Looks like I'm destined to be the pidgeon...
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.
@ycombinete Wow! What crazy timing. I woke up today with this exact same headache and situation. Seems to happen sometimes on the weekends. Thanks for writing this comment, I'll pay more attention to the timings.
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.
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.
> To be a circadian disorder, you’d have to have clock mutations, and ADHD really doesn’t have those.
Can you expand upon this? Because to my layperson eyes, this statement directly contradicts the content of the study. E.g.
> Brain and Muscle ARNT-like 1 (BMAL1) and Period circadian protein homolog 2 (PER2) are core components of the circadian clock in humans, which form a feedback loop to control gene expression in a cyclical manner. Downstream, attenuated BMAL1/PER2 rhythms in oral mucosa indicate weaker or desynchronized peripheral clocks, and symptom severity tracks with reduced PER2 rhythmicity, tying molecular clock strength to the clinical phenotype. Together, these data support a model in which individuals with ADHD consistently experience shifted endocrine signals (melatonin/cortisol) coupled with molecular disruptions via the loss of the rhythmic expression of clock genes.
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[ 0.28 ms ] story [ 109 ms ] threadhttps://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/
> see this title
> oh man that would explain a lot
> 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
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.
The sign has been pretty specific that it's the first (specific condition), and not the latter.
To get the big thing out of the way: brain scans of people with ADHD show measurable differences in brain structure, activity, and neurotransmitter levels compared with neurotypical brains[1].
Secondly, ADHD is highly hereditary, to the tune of 75%+ chance[2].
But you don't need a brain scan for your answer. There's a reason ADHD is a thing in DSM (if it were merely "a set of common symptoms", it wouldn't be).
Each "symptom" (a manifestation of an ADHD trait) in and of itself may not be rare, and people in general may experience it during certain conditions.
ADHD is experiencing a hella lot of them off the list, for absolute majority of the time, all your life.
Please really, really pay attention to the example I gave. It looks like you glossed over it entirely.
And yes, I'm fully aware of the irony of asking someone to pay more attention in this thread.
> I wonder which direction a causal relationship between sleep and ADHD might be.
The ADHD --> horrible sleep causation is well established.
The horrible sleep --> ADHD symptoms become worse causation is also well established.
Horrible sleep --> ADHD causation is nonexistent. There is nothing indicating that ADHD could be an acquired condition. There's all the evidence to the contrary (you are born this way, as the song goes).
The study establishes that "fixing" circadian rhythm helps with ADHD symptoms, which is a Captain Obvious moment (full night's sleep makes brain work better, and we have difficulty getting it ever).
I'm not sure what other causation you are looking for.
[1] https://www.adhdevidence.org/blog/finding-order-in-the-compl...
[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6477889/
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.
At a new home, I remodeled four rooms to have 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 my entire ceiling 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 is not coverage.
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.
Eliminating the unpredictability of crossover time would be a big improvement.
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 would highly encourage anyone who can get a sleep study done to do it. Most insurance companies will at least cover the sleep study and sleep sleep apnea can lead to a lot of considerably-more-expensive issues later down the line. It's not very invasive anymore, all they had to do was have me sleep with a pulse oximeter for a few nights and apparently that was enough.
stay tuned for more monthly product placements on frontiers in, best digested post prime time.
Welcome to your readjustment. Willkommen beim Nachrichten.
hey, is anyone wondering if kleine & grosse Lauschangriffe are shared with private people or the guys working for these institutions are trustworthy enough and whether they actually deserved their Bachelor degrees or someone somehow decided they are worth it anyway? wait ... it's just a fucking Bachelors degree
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...
All those peoples with doctorates who spent their lives studying the human brain are wrong, but you alone know the truth.
please educate yourself: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8328933/
I hope there is more awareness in the future about the importance of sleep for neurodivergent people. This could help with the social jet lag most of us feel with having to follow a schedule that simply does not work for us.
go bed earlier then ffs
problem solved I guess
> The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Then what, the AI queries latest real-time status of their bank account to validate this? What a waste of GPU float computations.
I don't know about Frontiers in Psych specifically, but, see also: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAcademia/comments/1oi5dhy/whats_...
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 aren't factors, but the original question was posed as if it was a general explanation, and it clearly cannot explain everything.
1) Melatonine 300mcg 5-6 hours befor desired sleep time 2) 10k lux light for 30m when waking up 3) Nobeltin (nootropic) it enhances clock amplitude, so I do get less sleepy during teh day and more sleepy at night ..
things taht kind of helped but find hard to keep: Keto (I feel less sleepy on Keto, and easier to fall a sleep but it's been a while since ive been on keto)
However, it's almost like I'm so conditioned to being groggy in the mornings that I still find it hard to get up even if I feel fairly refreshed.
I am very much in the same boat. Mornings have never been my friend. Even the few restful nights and refreshed mornings I get are spoiled by learned grogginess and overstaying in bed.
Turns out the answer is 500-600mcg for myself, but everyone's going to be different.
If you actually want to shift your circadian rhythm, the optimal dose is about 300 to 500 mcg (the actual absorption rate varies wildly between manufacturers and delivery methods), taken 4 to 6 hours before your sleep onset (note: when you usually go to sleep, not when you want to go to sleep). [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melatonin
[2] https://www.circadiansleepdisorders.org/info/PRC.php
- 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.
However, my issue at the time was that I could never find a light with high enough lux values that I felt like I could trust. Plus, another issue with light therapy is that one can basically never stop for any moderate amount of time, and well, my ADHD makes that near impossible.
I honestly think I would have better success with sleep issues if I could just control my own schedule or have a flexible schedule, but that is not really a luxury most jobs can provide.
Tried it with gusto over about 3, among a ton of other things. Didn't work for me at all.
> we propose a pragmatic, behavioral-first clinical pathway
Read: cheap
> Read: cheap
I mean, if it works great, if it doesn't there's a lot of other options.
Individually nothing works, but the combination crossed a tipping point for me with radical change.
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.
Generally the endogenous clock is approximate (hence the word circadian, about a day). But that’s because the day length has been constantly lengthening since animals evolved. Too slowly for us to notice, but the proteins that handle clocking are fairly ancient (though there are additional copies in humans compared to a fruit fly, say), and they aren’t locked in to favor a rotation period for Earth because there hasn’t been a stable period over long stretches.
The clock entrains to the environment, though. The more the daylight brightness to night time darkness shift in intensity, the higher amplitude their rhythms are, generally. Other signals also entrain them, like social activity, and the gut clock is a whole other complexity (kinda downstream of the brain clock but it can feed right back and wreck the central oscillation).
Any number of these factors can cause circadian effects, from a flatter rhythm, changed period, entrainment mismatch, etc.
In rare cases when a circadian gene itself is mutated, then you can have the clock period stretched significantly, and then synchronizing to the 24 hour day becomes really hard.
Well, this is also interesting, because I was born in Ghana and spent the first four years of my life there, and since then have always had insomnia issues, first in the Netherlands and now Sweden. However, the one time I visited Ghana as an adult for a month I slept like a baby.
I actually had a gut feeling that the much quicker shift from day to nighttime darkness and back played a big part in it, but wasn't sure why that might be the case. I assumed it was psychological somehow, that on some subconscious level I felt more "at home" in Ghana's natural environment because it's what my brain was "calibrated" on in the first years of its life. Would be interesting if that actually is the case in a circadian rhythm sense.
> That’s the endogenous period, that really only comes out as is in total darkness over many days.
And speaking of Sweden, I wouldn't be surprised if the short winter days probably do give enough "leeway" to approximate that effect.
As for Sweden: the low light in winter definitely impacts the clocks function. But still not constant darkness, since even a bit of sunlight is some signal to the clock, and it’ll entrain.
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.
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.
That said, I was likely jumping to conclusions on causality when the science is still out. CPTSD and ADHD may turn out to be the same thing, or may not. They just happen to "look the same" in brain scans.
In supportive environments you'll be able to tell the difference, by-birth conditions do not heal, while trauma will start healing off in a painful process that is somewhat comparable to peeling layers off an onion.
It's very typical for there to be overlap between inevitability and environmental circumstances
I also have polymorph visits in my melatonin, receptor genetics that are linked to this disorder.
My heritage is a saw 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.
Well I do not really count, but I only eat seafood or venison, which bothy have higher long chain omega 3 and omega 6. I really have an issue with short chain PUFAs like from vegetables. I started this mainly because of my lipid profile. Very low HDL, high LDL, and a family history of herat attacks in our early 50's.
I found it helped my mood disorder stabilize and also my IBS-D.
I would say I get well over 2 grams a day though but to my the length and balance or omega 3/6 is important for me genetically.
> You should seriously try "metabolic psychiatry"
I would say I am doing it, only better, because I know my genetics and what some people miss is the type of fats they need due to polymorphism in FADS1 and FADS2.
The amount of fat you need to eat is a bit unintuitive, so a bit rare to do it right without measuring with blood tests or previous guidance (or without eating mammoths or some type of high fat beast).
In picture it would look like this: https://x.com/KetoCarnivore/status/1725957981995737234
In grams it's at least 2g of fat for every 1g of (protein+carb).
Fish doesn't usually have this ratio, and normal meat neither because butchers trim it. And you can fight it by buying "beef fat trimmings", there are several ways.
The premise is you get medicine (or better!) level of benefits with fewer side effects.
So if it's 1 thing I could tell you is to buy that ketomojo!
This place has good videos: https://www.youtube.com/@metabolicmind
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.
I’ve personally not (yet) sequenced my genome. That’s where my personal decision is at, and will remain till data ownership for genomic data isn’t guaranteed. That one big part of me I don’t want to surrender to the all consuming digital aether until I absolutely need a test.
When that time comes, I’d try get a whole genome assay. It’s pricier, but the data is gonna be there as more and more evidence about various polymorphisms come to light. Equally, such data is potent in the wrong hands. D
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.
Can you expand upon this? Because to my layperson eyes, this statement directly contradicts the content of the study. E.g.
> Brain and Muscle ARNT-like 1 (BMAL1) and Period circadian protein homolog 2 (PER2) are core components of the circadian clock in humans, which form a feedback loop to control gene expression in a cyclical manner. Downstream, attenuated BMAL1/PER2 rhythms in oral mucosa indicate weaker or desynchronized peripheral clocks, and symptom severity tracks with reduced PER2 rhythmicity, tying molecular clock strength to the clinical phenotype. Together, these data support a model in which individuals with ADHD consistently experience shifted endocrine signals (melatonin/cortisol) coupled with molecular disruptions via the loss of the rhythmic expression of clock genes.
Other studies have found links with more CLOCK genes: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10824139/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guanfacine