I used to regularly get good sleep for a while pre-pandemic, but ever since then my sleep has become so dysregulated and I’ve basically become dependent on weed to fall asleep. It’s gotten to the point where I get nerve pain and restless legs (that in itself contributes to insomnia) if I don’t get high before bed, no idea if this is a shared experience with other NDers. On top of the fact that this makes weed less fun and it makes my tolerance out of control, I also don’t like relying on a substance to fall asleep as it seems to just make it more difficult to try and go without the longer I continue this pattern. I am trying to refrain from using weed to fall asleep for the next short little while but the first night I’m unable to fall asleep at all. Anyone have any advice or experience with a similar situation or just for regulating sleep in general? I know sleep difficulties are part and parcel of the autistic, ADHD, ND experience generally. I can’t function if I don’t get good sleep and I’m desperate.
I also have diagnosed audhd and have had sleep problems for as long as I can remember until literally around this time last year. It sucked when I was younger because nobody took me seriously when I told them I was having serious sleep issues. I have always had problems falling asleep and staying asleep. To make it worse, it felt like no matter how much sleep I got, I woke up feeling tired and poorly rested anyway.
To fix my problem, first I started limiting ANY drug usage (which includes caffeine and weed) to early afternoon at the latest. When it comes down to it, making these a part of a schedule makes anybody potentially mentally and physically reliant on them, and seeing as audhd predisposes people to extra vulnerability to becoming reliant on them, it’s no wonder I ended up becoming so dependent on them to stay awake/fall asleep. Second, I started taking vitamin D immediately when I wake up in the morning. I’ve also tried to limit phone usage, especially within an hour of trying to go to sleep. There are admittedly some nights that I just can’t put the damn thing down, and on those nights I inevitably end up sleeping worse. I don’t have the science to back it up, but I assume it’s the fact that while I would like to sleep, my chronically dopamine/serotonin deficient body is screaming at me to pick the dopamine/serotonin machine back up and scroll through my phone again. To help with this, the nights I feel I can’t put the phone away I try to do something that is more chill and has a set end, like doing all of the daily NYT puzzle games.
This combination of things has literally changed my life. Not only do I sleep through the night, which has been incredible, but I wake up most days feeling well rested. I am seldom tired during the daytime and very rarely feel the need to nap. Most shockingly, I never realized how overstimulated I was getting in everyday life just from being poorly rested. My tolerance for being in uncomfortable situations/environments is so much higher that I feel burnt out about 10% of the time I used to. It’s such an incredible difference that I thought I’d never experience after having lived my entire life simply believing I was bad at sleeping.