Diane Dempster
We watch our kids have a hard time getting up in the morning. We watch them not sleeping enough. We read the statistics, and then we get scared. We go into fix-it mode. And when we're in fix-it mode, we're less collaborative. We're less experimenting. 

Elaine Taylor
Welcome back, everybody, to another conversation in the Parenting with Impact Podcast. Diane and Elaine here, and we're going to talk about sleep.

Diane Dempster
Which is a great way to start the year, right? And fun fact, it's like the end of the day here, and I'm not tired, but we're going to talk about sleep, so. 

Elaine Taylor
This is so interesting. We were trying to go through and figure out what have we talked about in sleep in the past? Have we done podcasts on this? And what I was saying to Diane is we've been curating content here for almost 15 years. It's hard to find somebody who will talk about sleep and ADHD or autism or neurodiversity issues. It's identified as one of the lead issues people deal with. And yet, there's not a lot of people out there who have an expertise in it. Because, in some ways, they haven't figured out what to do about it. Do you know what I mean?

Diane Dempster
And it's, there's so much complexity to it. And so I don't, I'm going to, we pride ourselves on being able to make things easy and straightforward. And hopefully we can do that with this conversation. 

Elaine Taylor
So here's what I know, what I've learned, what we've learned over the last 15 years about sleep, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna highlight ADHD, but that's just because that's where the research is, but this is not just ADHD. I would say really anybody who's dealing with executive function challenges are going to have an impact with sleep. What we know is that there is a direct correlation that a lot of people with complex issues like neurodiversity also struggle with sleep. We know there's a high correlation of sleep apnea and other sleep disturbance issues. So there are sleep issues that are medically coexisting. We know that there are some nutritional slash chemical issues going on in the body that can facilitate sleep that may be deficient in people with ADHD. For example, people with ADHD may have a deficiency in magnesium, which can aid with sleep. We know that a lot of people who take ADHD medication may have sleep implications as a result. 

Diane Dempster
Because of when they take their meds or they don't take their meds. 

Elaine Taylor
Right, or what happens and so there are a lot of people who sometimes will take sleep medicines or related kinds of supplements or who will take melatonin to help with sleep, especially for children. A lot of our kids get referred for sleep studies or kids and adults. So there are, and when, years ago, I was one of the experts on a Pfizer, the pharmaceutical company Pfizer was doing one of these non branded education campaigns, and they had four national, international experts. They had us doing all these resources and stuff for parents, and one of the four was a sleep expert. We have an article on the site by Dr. Shives because it was such a prominent issue that they identified, and this is probably 10 years ago. One of four, they found somebody who was willing to talk about sleep and ADHD, which is not always easy to do. So we're going to put in the show notes, the articles that we do have over the years, Ari Tuckman, Roberto Olivardia, Dr. Shives. So we'll make sure that we've got what resources we have. And, and so that's the context I wanted to place, if you're struggling with sleep. If you're a kid struggling with sleep, if it's either hard to go to sleep, hard to stay asleep, or hard to wake up, then that's probably not a great surprise, and this conversation, this episode is for you, and you're not alone.

Diane Dempster
And, and I think beyond that, check me on this, Elaine, is that we really want to focus on taking a coach approach to the challenge, whatever the challenges you have. If you have a kid who's elementary age who has a hard time falling asleep or has a hard time getting up, or if you've got a teenager or a young adult, or if you're having a hard time, we really want to talk about how to move forward and make change more than giving you a lecture on all the things that happen, because I think that that's what it can feel like. 

Elaine Taylor
What it is. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I need to understand that this is real, that if you're struggling with it, there's a legitimate reason that, frankly, the medical community may not have caught up with our identification of the problem. 

Diane Dempster
Yes. True. 

Elaine Taylor
Yet. And we do know that meditation and mindfulness and there are people who use all kinds of things to aid and support in sleep, and there's a lot of effective resources, behavioral resources out there.

Diane Dempster
And this is one of those things where I think parents, particularly parents of teens and young adults. And those of us who really worry about our co-parents who have a hard time with sleep, it's really hard because you legitimately cannot make another person sleep, but you cannot. You could maybe make them go to bed, but you can't make them sleep. And so if we're trying to influence, help support our loved ones. This one is like one of those ones that becomes differently challenging, I guess, is what I want to say. 

Elaine Taylor
So, yeah, beautiful. Alright, so we've set the stage. Now, here's the next thing I want to say because we can break this down. When you're trying to figure out how to take aim, how to address the issues, part of it is identifying what's the problem you're really having and what's the problem under the problem, right? And when it comes to sleep, it's usually falling asleep, staying asleep, or getting up. Is that fair? Or maybe getting enough sleep. There's two different parts of. One of it is falling asleep and the other is putting yourself to bed. The very first article I ever wrote about 20 years ago was Why Can't I Put Myself to Sleep? And I have to tell you, we worked with a coach, my husband and I, for years trying to get ourselves to have a better sleep hygiene. And it's a hard one for two adults with ADD who like to stay up at night. Because if it were up to me, my circadian rhythm, I would be up till 1 or 2 in the morning and sleep till 10. That would be ideal for me. My mother is doing that. 

Diane Dempster
And maybe that's the first point we want to hit home on. And we can maybe write this down as we're doing this so we can summarize it. But the first point is part of this is circadian rhythms. And everyone is different. I know, like, just in my family with my kids, I had one that likes to go to bed really early and, one that likes to get up really early and, one that cannot get up really early, and one that has to stay up really late. And I remember really distinctly when we were working on this with my youngest, and we figured out that she could go to bed either before nine, but if she didn't hit nine o'clock, she was going to be up till 11:30. Yep. And it was because of the circadian rhythm-y kinds of stuff, not anything to do with her neurodiversity. And so that's the first piece to pay attention to is that everybody's circadian rhythms are different. Different times of the year are different. This is, we're recording this at a time of the year where the days are very short. And I know that this time of year, I need nine hours of sleep regardless. And in the summer, I can get away with fewer hours of sleep. And so part of this is knowing what your body naturally leans towards and what works for you or doesn't work for you. 

Elaine Taylor
And it's very funny because when we're raising little children and babies, we tend to become really aware of their sleep habits and patterns. We understand that about them. And then as they get older, we may forget. I know I used to talk to my kids a lot about the hour-and-a-half sleep cycle and knowing what your sleep cycle is and planning things based on your sleep cycle, and my kids still now as young adults will say, I'm taking a nap. I need an hour and a half. Will you wake me up in an hour and a half? Or I'm setting an alarm because they know what their cycle is.

Diane Dempster
Your cycle,  and I think that's the other that's so that ties into the circadian rhythms. Another child we were working with on waking up in the morning, and we realized that if they went to bed at 10 p.m., they could get up in time for work. Okay. Or if they went to bed at 1:30 in the morning, they could get up for work on time, but it was like they were trying to go to sleep in between 10 p.m. and 1:30. It was messing up with their sleep cycle. And so it was almost impossible for them to get their feet on the floor at a particular time because their sleep cycles were getting in the way.

Elaine Taylor
Yeah, let's take a quick break and then come back. 

Elaine Taylor
Welcome back, everybody. Elaine and Diane here talking about sleep and trying to do that in the middle of the day. Here's what I'm thinking. We do want to get to, like, how do you navigate all these different pieces, whether it's going to sleep, deciding to go to sleep, staying asleep, or waking up. Before we do that, we were in an office hours call with members of our community, and I had this huge epiphany, and it was funny because I was talking to this group, 50 people on a call, listening in, and I'm having this moment of, I've been doing this for 20 years, and I just realized that we talk a lot in our community about transitions and about how difficult transitions can be, getting out of the house in the morning, starting homework, finishing homework, getting to bed, we talk a lot about transitions in a school environment for our kids, just asking them to stop one project and move to another.

Elaine Taylor
Pencils down can be the hardest thing you can ask it to do. How do I stop being here and go to recess? Or how do I stop recess and come back? Transitions are hard in our community. And what I realized is that sleep is the ultimate transition. Going from wake to asleep, or from sleep to awake, or from sleep to awake back to sleep, all three of those, right? All of those are really major transitions that are particularly hard to do for at least two of them when your brain's not clicked in yet, right? If you're waking up in the middle of the night and trying to go back to sleep or waking up in the morning, you're still in that fog. And so you're trying to transition when your frontal lobe may not be clicked in, and conversely, when you're trying to go to sleep in the evening, if your brain's really clicked in, it's really hard to transition to. Okay, now I'm gonna chill out and slow down and go to sleep. 

Diane Dempster
Or, if you're a human of a certain age, you wake up in the middle of the night, and your brain goes a million miles an hour. It's a very similar sort of thing. It's like, I've got to transition from an active brain to a quiet brain, from a quiet brain to an active brain. And that's an enormous step that we don't necessarily even think about. 

Elaine Taylor
And it's, the experts talk about sleep hygiene and all the things we're supposed to do and start dimming the lights and getting into our pajamas and all these things that we know we're supposed to do, and we can talk about that a little bit more later. But what I realized is that I never even realized that the reason I'm supposed to do it is because it helps with the transition. And so I really want to raise just the conscious awareness that this is a really hard thing for people with neurodiverse brains to do. We are asking us to do the hardest thing there is to do, which is to transition during times when our brain is potentially least responsive to putting any systems in place to try to achieve change.

Diane Dempster
Well, and especially I was, I'm thinking about this particular parent who has a teen, and the teen knows that they need more sleep. So it's in that space where it's like, the parent knows they need more sleep. And the teen is a night owl and the dad has a really busy schedule. And so the teen gets home and starts homework at 9 PM, and the teen is a perfectionist, and the teen wants to get their homework done. And so the teen is like engaged and excited and doing amazing work on their homework from 9 PM till 1 AM till 2 in the morning. And so it's this, there's this conflict here of this is the best time for this kid to be productive, theoretically, based on what we know about this human. It's going to bump into what do we do about getting, making sure this human is getting enough sleep. 

Elaine Taylor
And that's similar to what we know. All the studies have shown about teenagers and that we have no business having teenagers try to go to school at seven in the morning. It is the worst time for kids and for teens. And yet, so many of us have schools with systems where the expectation is that they're not only going to be up and out the door but alert earlier than their brains are really wired for, which just brings us back to the context and the complication of it. So remember the coach approach, for those of you who are in the community, you know the model where we always start with taking aim. What's the problem we're trying to solve? What's the real issue? What's the change we want to see? Right?

 Diane Dempster
And one of the best stories that we have about this one and where we're taking aim, it's like if you're taking aim on getting to school on time, right, and we talk about this, it's like this sort of, okay, we're late to school all the time, so I want to take aim on mornings and it's a big, giant thing, and then one of the things we teach is, well, look at what's going on and look for the sticky spots and what's really going on in the mornings go.

Elaine Taylor
Because we are very clear, you cannot take aim on mornings. You have to take aim on a specific aspect of mornings. 

Diane Dempster
And there are 21 steps from the, 21, 22 steps from the pillow to the bus stop. And so if you go, okay, where are the sticky spots? I can tell you eight times out of ten, a parent will say, feet on the floor. The sticky spot is the feet on the floor. And we're taking aim on mornings, but what we really should be doing is taking aim on feet on the floor. And then the other thing that happens is that parents will say, we're late for school. I need to get my kid to bed earlier. They're jumping to a solution. I'm going to take aim on getting my kid to go to bed earlier, which may be a legit solution in some situations. Again, it's hard to influence when people go to bed and all those sort of things. If your kids are older, particularly, but we're taking aim on a solution rather than the challenge, which is my kids having a really hard time getting from this transition of sleep to wake with feet on the floor. And so that's really where we're taking aim.

 Elaine Taylor
Yeah. So, in the morning. So step one is to get clear on what the changes you want to see. And then the step two is to get curious and to really understand what's going on. Because very often as Diane was just saying, we put solutions in place, but we're solving the wrong problem because we haven't gotten clear enough on what the real cause of the challenge is. So when it comes to, so whether it's mornings or evenings, we're going to go into more detail in a second, but for this example, feet on the floor, we then have to get curious and figure out what might be preventing someone from getting feet on the floor. Is it that they don't hear the alarm? Is it that they're snoozing the alarm? Is it that they forgot to set the alarm? Is it they don't really believe? Like, what really is happening is different from they're not getting up. Go ahead.

Diane Dempster
And Elaine, as you were saying that, I'm thinking about the fact that you said the change you want to see, and so I think a lot of us as parents are like, the change I want to see is that I want my kid's feet on the floor at 7:15 and so and for some of us it's like I want my kid's feet on the floor without a fight I want my kid's feet on the floor without 17 reminders I want my kid's feet on the. It's like there's this caveat that comes along with it instead of, and so we want to be really clear, am I trying to reduce the fighting in the morning? Am I trying to reduce the number of reminders? Am I trying to get to school? Again, it's a sort of, am I secretly trying to make this happen so that I can get to school on time? 

Elaine Taylor
So I can get to work on time.

Diane Dempster
So I can get to work? That's another story of a client who is like fighting with their kid every morning because she was late for work.

Elaine Taylor
That’s right. 

Diane Dempster
The kid didn't really feel strongly about being on time for school, and so there's all these different nuances that come into play here. 

Elaine Taylor
So again, we're seeing it as a transition. And we wanna get really clear on what's happening underneath the initial problems so that we can create a solution or begin to work towards experimentation towards a solution. We're solving the right problem. So, what I was thinking about is another place to raise awareness when it comes to sleep. So there's sleep for us and sleep for our kids, and they're two things that happen in sleep. One is I've got to stop doing whatever I'm doing to turn my attention to start getting ready for bed or go into bed. So that's one thing. And then once I actually lie down and turn the lights off, then I have to go to sleep. Those are actually two different challenges that I'm trying to address if I'm trying to figure out how to get myself to sleep. And so if I'm solving the problem of I need a white noise machine or a CPAP machine if I'm solving one problem, but I'm not actually stopping. I'm not turning off whatever I'm binge-watching and go early enough and go into bed. Then, I'm still not going to solve the problems. We have to get very clear what the problem is we're going to solve. The other thing I want to just raise this came up in this call yesterday as well in office hours. So, I want to say it out loud here.

Elaine Taylor
Sometimes, people with, particularly with ADHD and executive function challenges are looking for stimulation. Strangely enough, sometimes they need stimulation to be able to go to sleep, to calm the brain down enough to go to sleep. And when I was a kid, I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia. When I was a kid, we would have a Coca-Cola before we went to sleep at night. My parents had no idea they were actually treating our ADHD because that was just a cultural thing. But now, some of the doctors are beginning to prescribe tiny amounts of medication at night to calm the brain so that some kids can actually go to sleep. The reason I was bringing it up is not to talk about the medication, but because sometimes, with adults, with couples, what we'll see is one person in the couple may start picking a fight, right?

Diane Dempster
Yeah, I was gonna tell that story about someone I know specifically. It's like this sort of, the one partner would pick a fight at bedtime, they're getting enough dopamine, and it would put their brain right to sleep, and the other one would be laying there going, ‘What just happened?’ 

Elaine Taylor
All night long, this used to happen to my husband and me, and we would both end up going to sleep, but I've seen it happen with clients a lot where they take a fight. The ADD person goes right to sleep, sleeps like a baby, forgets anything that happened, wakes up in the morning all happy and joyful, and the partner wakes up. They've been up all night stewing, seething angry, and they wake up still in that agitated state because they're not letting it go in the same way that their partner. 

Diane Dempster
And I'm guessing if those of you who are in relationships, one of you who's ADHD or neurodivergent, and one of you is not, the same thing probably happens with sex, right? It's just sort of like one of you, your drive escalates your brain, and the other one is like, ‘Yep, I'm going to sleep.’ 

Elaine Taylor
That's a good point. Yep. I might have some awareness of that. Thank you for that notice. Okay. And so we've talked about the challenges that happen with transitioning to sleep and the challenges that happen with transitioning to wake. What about that waking and going back to sleep in the middle of the night? What do we want to say about that? It's kind of both. 

Diane Dempster
Yeah, no, I think it is both. And I think as a human who struggles with this, it's that there's a layer to it, I think. And I don't want to discount because the layers are there in the other time periods. But I think that when we wake up in the middle of the night, there ends up being This fear and panic, and yeah, there's often an anxiety. And I think that I'm sure I'm not an adult that has a hard time falling asleep at night. But I do sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and I'm up for hours. I imagine it's the same sort of thing where it's like this sort of, Oh my gosh, am I never going to fall asleep? And then the worry cycle hits in. Yeah. That creates a whole chemical reaction in our body as well, which makes it worry. It makes us even more. 

Elaine Taylor
Now they got cortisol. Yeah, it's streaming through your body. You're not likely to be able to fall asleep. 

 Diane Dempster
And so I think that's the piece that I would say happens, and it probably does at a different level in the middle of the night or more consistent level in the middle of the night because nobody wants to really be awake in them. Although, I do have someone in my life who decided that they were just going to wake up when they woke up and sleep when they were going to sleep. And so they wake up at one o'clock in the morning, they go back to bed at four o'clock in the morning, and they sleep until eight. And they just, the way they live their life.

Elaine Taylor
Well, farming hours, I think there are cultures where that is perceived as a healthy approach. And I'm not judging it as not. I just like to me, I don't want to get up. I will do anything I can not to have to wake up and go to the bathroom because I know once I do, it's harder to go back to sleep. But there is something here about. Have you ever heard that term that sleep has been referred to as ‘the little death’? Have you ever heard that term? Oh yeah. I have. So, there's some way in which we have this kind of weird human relationship with sleep. We need it. We love it. And we fight it all at the same time. 

Diane Dempster
I never thought about that as being ‘the little death.’ It is this sort of we've shut down, and I will tell you, I just, I'm in physical therapy right now. And the first question of physical therapy asked me was, how are you sleeping? Yeah. I'm like, wow, that's a really interesting question to start with from a physical therapist. But he's like, that's going to mean everything in terms of how well you heal. I've got a broken ankle. Those of you who don't know. And. It's going to mean everything, right? And so, and I think that's one of the places that trips us up as parents is that we get scared, right? We watch our kids. We watch our kids have a hard time getting up in the morning. We watch them not sleeping enough. We read the statistics. The pediatrician says they're supposed to only have this much. Of this and this much of that and this many hours of sleep and we get scared, and then we get scared we go into fix-it mode, and we're in fix-it mode we're less collaborative, we're less experimenting, we're less like we're saying like all of the things, and so I think that might be a great way to transition off, Elaine is like if we want to, we weren't in fix-it mode, what would we do is what we're going to talk about next time. Take care everybody.