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.
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).
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...
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I have had the opposite effect. The days where I get 8 hours of good quality sleep per Oura and Garmin have been some of my least productive days, which is always contrary to my expectations. My most productive and focused days are usually when I get 5 hours after a few nights of solid sleep. It might relate to the hangover effect, but I've never really been hung over before so I don't know if that would affect me.
Can't speak for you but at least myself I find there's a delay of 24 to 48 hours before either sufficient or lack of sleep really catches up with me. It takes 2 to 3 nights of good sleep (unfortunately somewhat difficult to pull off) before I feel fully functional.
I did not see environmental factors in your consideration.
I got ADHD and Autism diagnosed as teen, the diagnostic was rather solid. Got methylphenidate for some months. I ran away from home with 17, i moved together with my girlfriend (at 26) into an emotionally stable environment and... the symptoms disappeared. No jactation, no special interests, no masking. Everything just disappeared. A bit of stimming remains. And a horribly fucked up sleep cycles.
Had undiagnosed RAD and CPTSD for longer than i'm self-aware. Severe emotional neglect for my first 17 years. Parental rejection plays a big part in here.
I'd be like, maybe i'm just a special case, and nothing of this applies to other people. But i see other ADHD-havers being too similar to me, and that includes hypervigilance and silent walking, which are apt adaptions to certain kind of childhood environments.
Maybe too much gets diagnosed as ADHD that is not genetic at all...
CPTSD literally rewires your brain and "appears" in diagnostic tests as ADHD: lower arousal in prefrontal cortex, overactive amygdala causing fast emotional response, impacted hippocampus, dopamine disregulation, etc.
Stress changes the layout of your brain along with your body's chemical responses. With ADHD, genetics seem to play a larger role where you can lack the stressors and still end up with the same end result. I wouldn't be surprised that treatments would work across both CPTSD and ADHD.
> CPTSD literally rewires your brain and "appears" in diagnostic tests as ADHD
This seems unexpectedly one-sided to me. It could equally be that ADHD is CPTSD from something that current knowledge does not consider traumatic (yet).
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
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
It seems like you might know - is there any correlation or information to read around light sensitivity and ADHD?
I don't know if it's because I'm in my 40s, have ADHD, or got on the meds. But it's becoming more noticeable the last couple of years.
I'm very sensitive to light in the morning and can't get back to sleep when the sun peeks in. And at night if my wife left her phone face up, I know when she gets a notification. I see the screen light up through my shut eyelids.
I've long since had to wear an eye mask to bed, which I hated until I found one I liked. The ones that do it for me are the weighted ones, in case you've never tried.
I tend to sleep with my arm over my face like a cat in the sun, which has messed up my shoulder a bit. So thanks, weighted makes a lot of sense, I didn't know they make them.
40s but no diagnosis of ADHD. I have a mask for summer time as I'm the same when the light peeks in. I bought a pair of cheap ones off amazon. I usually wake at dawn and put them on, then sleep hog-like.
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.
Exactly I’m glad to hear it from chronologist. I have schizoaffective, bipolar type, very affected by light changes.
I also have polymorphism in my melatonin, receptor genetics that are linked to this disorder. But I have several other genetics that make this a definite polygenic disease. So I highly doubt chronology efforts are going to work in a holistic way.
My heritage is from the Sami people of Finland. And my disorder is most likely related to that heritage and my sensitivity to light changes. But also changes in my diet. Specifically higher omega-3 fatty acids, and I mean really high.
Yes. Our rhythms tend to pattern the environment. And generations with the kinds of seasonal light changes you have close to the poles likely had a broad impact on many genes.
> Specifically higher omega-3 fatty acids, and I mean really high.
How much & for what? I remember seeing a paper many years ago which claimed better depression at about 2g+ EPA/day.
> But also changes in my diet.
You should seriously try "metabolic psychiatry" for at least 6months with daily blood tests on GKI 1-2 (what children with epilepsy do). Most popular is for bipolar.
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!
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 ?
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.
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?
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.
Ok after reading a chunk of this the correlation is pretty wild. Having the data it’s quite striking. Sleep intervention as a form of ADHD treatment has always seemed reasonable to me but this gives a lot more clarity to the approach and mechanisms.
For me, the seasonal aspect of it aligns with their blue light findings (both driving symptoms and aligning with improvement under the intervention of having a grow-LED garden setup on my desk), and in a second maybe related matter we’ve found using blue light blocking glasses an hour before bed to be the most impactful single intervention around sleep quality and onset (the ones that are like orange laser safety glasses, not the mildly reflective desk-work glasses)
I had great success reflecting 80,000 lumens of work lights off my living rooms ceiling during winter for a couple years.
At a new home, I remodeled four rooms to have three bands wide of LED lighting surrounding the ceilings, hidden from below by cove molding. It is an actual sunny day, with an “an actual” sunny sky inside. Winter, midnight, eclipse? Not a concern.
Having all that intense light reflecting off entire ceilings creates soft diffuse lighting, no shadows, even though it is extremely bright.
Helped a lot with waking up and avoiding depression, all year round.
On the sleep treatment, anything that can help sleep is good, my body has always operated well on a 30 hour day, which means terribly almost all the time, by default. But I do a lot of things that help, so my sleep is pretty good most of the time.
I would see sleep aids as a pretty narrow interventions relative to my ADHD.
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.
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
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 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.
> E.g., you have a family to feed, and your ability hold a well-paying job hinges on your performance.
I am in this situation, forcing me to adapt and get up early like most normies.
My job performance did not improve. And going to sleep early only makes me more miserable, because now I have exactly zero personal, interrupt-risk-free time.
> E.g., you have a family to feed, and your ability hold a well-paying job hinges on your performance.
I can do all of these things anyway. Of course, this does present the potential reality that were I able to sleep like people, I could be even more successful, but after a near death experience, then disability, I've learned to be happy with where I am.
I'm not sure that's an entirely fair way to frame that. ADHD people can be highly motivated by reward, but being motivated isn't enough to consistently navigate the path from wanting something to getting something. Reward can make you want something more, and even try harder for it, but ADHD means that sometimes no matter how much you want something and how hard you try it just doesn't happen.
I'd frame it differently: ADHD people are highly motivated by reward, but like, actual reward, not an uncertain promise of unclear reward at indeterminate point in the future, whose causal connection with motivated behavior is tenuous at best - which is, somehow, how most people apparently motivate themselves.
N=1 here, but for me, anything that's more than an hour or two in the future rapidly loses any motivating power; any reward that happens after more than a day may as well happen at infinity.
>I'm not sure that's an entirely fair way to frame that. ADHD people can be highly motivated by reward, but being motivated isn't enough to consistently navigate the path from wanting something to getting something.
We seem to have a different understanding of the word motivate.
I use it in a very straightforward sense: motivation is the energy to move forward to your goal. It's motive force.
For example, I might understand that I need to file taxes, pay fines, or apply for such-and-such benefit, I might want to do that for the rewards (or lack of bad consequences for filing late), but I just can't motivate myself to do it until it becomes an urgent emergency and everything is on fire.
As in, I can't get myself to move on this task.
>ADHD means that sometimes no matter how much you want something and how hard you try it just doesn't happen.
We fully agree here.
Executive functioning is a better term to use, but people are familiar with motivation more.
> We seem to have a different understanding of the word motivate. I use it in a very straightforward sense: motivation is the energy to move forward to your goal. It's motive force.
Both meanings look like they're valid uses of the term. The "to cause to take action", "to cause someone to behave" and "to incite/actuate/propel" definitions focus on what initiated an action/behavior, while most of the definitions I found focus on just having or providing a reason/incentive/desire/enthusiasm/encouragement for an action which applies even if that action never actually materializes.
to give (someone) a reason for doing something
to be a reason for something
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/motivate
To provide with an incentive or a reason for doing something; impel:
To cause to be enthusiastic
to give incentive to
to provide with a motive or motives; incite; impel.
https://www.thefreedictionary.com/motivate
To provide someone with an incentive to do something; to encourage; to actuate.
To animate; to propel; to cause to take action.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/motivate
to cause someone to behave in a particular way:
to make someone want to do something well:
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/motivate
It's more literal than that. The prospect of reward is very literally not motivating. It does not provide motive force. It does not make us move.
We consciously want the thing, but that isn't enough for executive function to kick in, so "I need to get off the sofa so I can make tasty dinner" results in not having moved two hours later.
Or just: you have a family, including children who need you to be a responsible adult first thing in the morning (every morning) whether you like it or not
A delayed sleep/wake cycle is only relevant in the context of a society where people are forced on an unnatural sleep schedule. You could get a full 9 hours of high quality sleep every single night and still be considered to have a delayed sleep/wake cycle disorder.
Some people are just night owls. A large percentage of night owls have ADHD. I think they can linked without it meaning that people with ADHD have to learn to get up at 5AM.
Keep staying up late if that's what feels natural for you, but it's probably worth making sure that you're still getting enough sleep and that you don't have other issues (like sleep apnea) keeping you from getting the quality of sleep you need. There's a lot of other health issues associated with sleep disorders and sleep problems will tank people's ability to focus even when they have non-ADHD brains.
It's hard to interface with society this way. I'm the same as you and have waxed and waned many times. There are periods where I'm all about being social and living a normal life. There are other times where I'm just down to only sleep when I'm dead tired (as opposed to using drugs to keep me in normal rhythm). There are tradeoffs
This is my feeling too, going to sleep early feels like I’m missing out on so much. My entire family other than my late father has been this way since forever, we almost never go to bed till 2-3 am.
> 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.
>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.
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.
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