You’re exhausted and you know you need to sleep. You may have even spent half the day thinking about how tired you are and resolving to go to bed earlier so you can “catch up” on rest. Yet the second your head hits the pillow that’s when the second wind kicks in.
Maybe you should update your LinkedIn. And tomorrow, you can’t forget to submit that form you meant to submit today. And you need to figure out what you did with that spare set of keys and text Tommy back. Maybe you should just draft a couple emails now in bed while they’re on your mind and schedule them to go out tomorrow morning so nobody knows how weird you are for being up at 2 am on a Tuesday night.
There may have been a time when you chalked up your late night antics to being a night owl — and there’s some biological basis for this. Everyone has a chronotype, aka your body’s natural internal clock that determines your preferred times for sleeping, waking, and feeling most alert. For some lucky people, their chronotype easily aligns with sunrise and sunset. They’re the “early birds” who get the worm and the ones who can slide into bed and get a good night’s sleep, ready to do it all over again the next day with minimal bags under their eyes.
For others, their chronotype — which also determines your peak times for concentration, physical performance, and creativity — may have them going to bed early in the morning and either waking up later in the afternoon or beginning their day in a sleep deficit and the heavy feeling of falling behind.
If you’re consistently struggling to get a good night’s sleep with ADHD, you’re not alone. Sleep struggles are a well-documented feature of ADHD, with insomnia and sleep disturbances — including trouble falling asleep, frequent waking at night, and poor sleep quality — affecting up to 80% of adults and 82% of children with ADHD.
It’s not just a matter of poor sleep habits or a lack of discipline, even if that’s what you’ve been told. Research has also established a strong relationship between ADHD and disruptions in circadian rhythms, or the body’s internal clock that helps regulate when we feel awake and sleepy. Studies have found delayed melatonin onset, altered cortisol rhythms, differences in the rhythms of certain clock genes, and a greater tendency toward an evening chronotype among people with ADHD. The connection is significant enough that researchers have proposed that circadian dysfunction may play an important role in ADHD for a substantial subset of people.
ADHD can also make the process of going to bed harder. Difficulties with transitions, regulating attention, keeping track of time, and quieting mental activity can all make getting to bed and actually falling asleep surprisingly difficult. In other words, if you find yourself exhausted all day only to feel wide awake at bedtime, there may be more going on than simply needing to “try harder” to go to sleep.
Does that mean you have to accept staying awake later than you want to, and pulling from limited reserves the next day? Not necessarily. Understanding what’s keeping you awake can help you build a sleep routine that works with your ADHD brain rather than against it.
Why is it so hard to go to bed with ADHD?
Knowing that you need more sleep and actually getting yourself into bed at a reasonable hour are, unfortunately, two very different things.
Going to bed requires a surprising amount of executive functioning. You have to notice what time it is, stop whatever you’re doing, resist the temptation to start something new, remember all the little tasks involved in getting ready for bed, and somehow convince a brain that may still be seeking stimulation that the fun is over for the day.
For people with ADHD, there are a few places where that process becomes challenging.
Your brain gets louder when everything else gets quiet
During the day, your attention is being pulled in a million different directions: work, texts, errands, other people, appointments, notifications, the dog, the laundry you keep walking past.
Then you finally get into bed and remove most of that external stimulation.
Suddenly, your brain has plenty of room to remind you about everything you haven’t thought about yet, like the conversation you had three days ago or an exciting creative idea that feels too important to leave until the morning.
“Five more minutes” is rarely five more minutes
Time blindness, or difficulty accurately sensing the passage of time, is common with ADHD.
At night, that might look like picking up your phone at 11:15 p.m. to watch one TikTok and before long, receiving the notification instructing you that you’ve reached your daily limit.
Stopping is its own executive-function task
Sometimes the issue isn’t that you don’t want to sleep. It’s that you can’t seem to stop doing whatever you’re already doing.
ADHD can make transitions difficult, particularly when you’re moving from something stimulating or rewarding to something considerably less stimulating. Watching a TV show is more exciting than brushing your teeth, working on something is more exciting than turning off your laptop, and being awake is more exciting than attempting to lie completely still in a dark room for eight hours.
When you think of it this way, bedtime is actually asking a lot of your brain; it’s asking it to go for the less dopamine-filled activity.
Nighttime might be the only time that feels like yours
There’s another reason why you might be having trouble sleeping. Maybe you don’t actually want the day to end.
If you’ve spent all day working, commuting, caring for other people, meeting deadlines, masking, or generally doing things because you have to do them, nighttime may be the first stretch of hours when nobody is asking anything of you.
So you try and reclaim some of that time. One more episode. Another chapter. A little scrolling. Maybe you finally work on the creative project you’ve been thinking about all day.
This is sometimes called revenge bedtime procrastination: sacrificing sleep to get leisure time you didn’t feel like you had during the day. If this is your pattern, the solution may involve more than simply putting your phone in a different room at 10 p.m. It may be worth asking why staying awake feels like the only opportunity you have to enjoy your life.
So, how do you actually build an ADHD-friendly sleep routine?
First, abandon the fantasy that tomorrow you’re going to become an entirely different person who meditates for 20 minutes, journals, drinks herbal tea, stretches, reads exactly 10 pages of a book, and is peacefully asleep by 10:30 every night.
If that genuinely sounds enjoyable to you, great.
If it doesn’t, your bedtime routine doesn’t need to look like that.
The goal is to make the transition to sleep easier and more automatic, not to create another elaborate routine that you can fail at and subsequently feel bad about.
1. Start your bedtime routine before bedtime
If you want to be asleep at 11 p.m., 11 p.m. probably shouldn’t be when you first start thinking about getting ready for bed.
Give yourself a runway.
Set an alarm 30 minutes to an hour before your intended bedtime that tells you it’s time to start wrapping things up, as well as a couple of other alarms that break down the bedtime process into multiple steps. For example:
10:15 p.m.: Finish what you’re doing.
10:30 p.m.: Brush teeth & wash face.
10:45 p.m.: Get in bed.
External cues can be especially helpful when your internal sense of time isn’t giving you much warning that the night is disappearing.
And if you’re someone who reflexively dismisses alarms, experiment with putting your phone somewhere that requires you to physically move to turn it off.
2. Give your thoughts somewhere to go
You don’t need to solve tomorrow at midnight. But your brain may be reluctant to let go of something if it thinks you’re going to forget it or if it’s something that’s actively stressing you out.
Keep a notebook beside your bed, use a notes app, or leave yourself a voice memo. When something pops into your head put it somewhere you trust yourself to look tomorrow.
Think of it less as journaling and more as outsourcing your working memory.
The goal isn’t to process every thought. It’s to reassure your brain that you’re keeping track of and prioritizing the things you need to.
3. Make the boring thing easier and the stimulating thing harder
Willpower is not a particularly reliable sleep intervention at 1 a.m. Instead, change the environment.
If your phone reliably keeps you awake, charge it somewhere you can’t reach from bed. If you get distracted halfway through your bedtime routine, keep the things you need visible and easy to access.
The fewer decisions and opportunities for detours between “I should go to bed” and “I am in bed” the better.
4. Work with your body clock, not just your bedtime
What you do after you wake up may matter just as much as what you do before bed.
Light is one of the strongest signals your brain uses to regulate its circadian rhythm. Getting bright light, ideally natural outdoor light, earlier in the day and reducing bright light exposure later at night can help reinforce the distinction between daytime and nighttime.
5. Figure out what staying awake is doing for you
If you continually sabotage your own bedtime despite knowing exactly how miserable you’ll feel tomorrow, resist the urge to conclude that you’re simply bad at sleeping.
Get curious and ask yourself: what do I get from staying awake?
Maybe you need stimulation before your brain is willing to settle down, maybe you’re anxious about tomorrow, or avoiding lying quietly with your thoughts. It may also be that 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. is the only time in your entire day that belongs completely to you so that’s when you tend to unwind or hyperfocus on something interesting.
Better understanding your motivation for staying up can help you develop a more sustainable sleep system that doesn’t come at the expense of your health.
What if you’ve tried all of this and still can’t sleep?
Sometimes the answer isn’t another bedtime hack.
Persistent sleep problems can have many causes, and ADHD isn’t necessarily the only one. Insomnia, anxiety, depression, medication effects, sleep apnea, restless legs syndrome, and circadian rhythm sleep disorders can all affect sleep.
If you’re regularly struggling to fall asleep or stay asleep, experiencing significant daytime sleepiness, waking up gasping or snoring heavily, or finding that poor sleep is interfering with your ability to function, consider talking with your doctor or a sleep specialist.
But if the problem seems to be less “My body physically can’t sleep” and more “I know exactly what I’m supposed to do, but I cannot seem to consistently do it,” that’s something therapy can help with.
How can therapy help with ADHD and sleep?
One of the particularly frustrating things about living with ADHD is accumulating an enormous amount of knowledge about what you’re supposed to do.
But turning what you know into something you can consistently do is often where ADHD gets in the way.
Therapy can help you identify what is actually happening between “I want to go to bed earlier” and “Why am I reorganizing my Google Drive at 1:37 a.m.?”
Maybe transitions or time blindness are the sticking point. Or maybe nighttime anxiety takes over as soon as the distractions disappear. It could also be that perfectionism has you staying awake trying to finish everything before you’re “allowed” to rest.
A therapist who understands ADHD can help you identify those patterns and build systems around them rather than repeatedly asking you to overcome them through willpower.
Therapy can also help with the thoughts and emotions that often accompany ADHD and sleep difficulties: racing thoughts, anxiety, rumination, shame, and the familiar promise that “tomorrow I’ll finally get my life together.”
For people experiencing chronic insomnia, cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) is an evidence-based treatment specifically designed for sleep problems. CBT-I works addressing the underlying thoughts and behaviors that contribute to sleep problems by combining elements like stimulus control and sleep restriction with traditional CBT. Preliminary research has also found promising results when CBT-I-based treatment is adapted for adults with ADHD.
The goal isn’t to transform you into someone who effortlessly falls asleep at 9:30 p.m. every night. It’s to understand your brain well enough that you can stop fighting the same battle every evening and hopefully get some sleep.
Gwen is a Master’s level clinician training at Hunter College. With a background in journalism, Gwen brings curiosity and attentiveness to her work, creating a space where clients feel seen and understood. She draws from psychodynamic therapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, ACT, and DBT to support clients navigating Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, mood disorders, chronic illness, and major life transitions. Her approach is flexible and insight-oriented, helping clients build resilience and make sense of patterns that may be keeping them stuck.