ADHD sleep help might be critical if you find you can’t turn your mind off at night. ADHD brains run nonstop. If you have ADHD yourself or have a child with ADHD, you know the ADHD mind is always racing.

This makes it hard to stay focused on one topic. It also can make it difficult to get rest in any form. You can’t just sit and relax. Maybe, you can’t even sleep at night except for a few hours at a time. Oftentimes, not being able to sleep and adult ADHD go hand in hand.

How do you shut down when you need to? Where can you find the ADHD sleep help for yourself or your child?

As with many symptoms of ADHD, finding an quick easy answer often evades us. This doesn’t mean help isn’t available, though. In this post, we will look at a few particularly useful techniques for ADHD sleep help.

1. Learn to Detach and Find Rest in the Moment

ADHD sleep help begins long before you lay down at night. Good sleep habits at night start with good mental rest habits during the day.

Adults and children with ADHD can get so focused and begin to obsess about their passions. This is great, but can lead to burnout and exhaustion.

To avoid regular burnout and all out exhaustion, you need to learn to build in regular mental rest. Mental rest means taking care of your mind and giving it much needed breaks. Be mindful of when you feel mental exhaustion coming on, and detach yourself from whatever is consuming your mind.

To detach yourself, step away and do something that won’t consume so much mental energy. Go for a walk. Practice daily mindfulness. Change the scenery. Do something new. Take a needed vacation. Spend time with friends. All of these can rest the mind.

Practicing these techniques will help you detach during the day and help you better turn off at night.

2. Schedule Your Sleep Routine

ADHD sleep help, like managing many ADHD symptoms, depends on regular routines. For starters, physical rest means, you guessed it, getting enough sleep. Your body and brain needs sleep to recharge and repair.

This means don’t burn the candle on both sides, or you will pay for it sooner or later with a decrease in productivity, mood, and overall health. Instead of working late into the night, build a routine of getting the recommended 7-8 hours of sleep a night.

You won’t always be able to go to bed at 10 pm at night. If you make getting enough sleep a priority, though, you will hit it more often than not. Going to bed and getting up on a regular schedule teaches your mind when to shut off and turn back on. Not having a schedule will teach your mind that it should run on and on whenever it wants.

Build in a schedule to rest better. You will see this strategy of incorporating a sleep routine on many lists of tips on ADHD and sleep for both kids and adults.

3. Help Your Mind Turn Off By Turning Off Technology

You might be thinking that scheduling sleep sounds nice, but what if you still can’t go to sleep? Part of the problem might be that you are preparing wrong. Preparing? That’s right. In order to do anything right, you must prepare right, sleep included.

ADHD sleep help at night should begin with properly shutting down and preparing the mind and body for sleep. That means avoiding screens late at night. Screens can disrupt your natural melatonin cycle and decrease your quality of sleep. For children, that means no screen time 4 hours before bed. For adults, 2 hours.

Also make sure to take advantage of recent advancements in technology that can automatically shift the color temperature of your screens based on what time of day it is. This can be helpful when needing to look at your phone or work late. Many phones have this built in, and for computers you can download free programs like f.lux that can be customized to your schedule.

All these elements of turning off screens or using them less at night can be incorporated into a larger sleep intervention plan. Studies have shown such sleep interventions may improve ADHD symptoms in children.

4. Find Better Sleep in Eating Well

Like many things in life, sleeping well goes back to our eating and diet habits. ADHD sleep and finding physical rest also means watching what you put in your body. To find ADHD sleep help, start with understanding how your diet affects ADHD.

Junk food, caffeine, and sweets cause your body to have to work harder. They spike your stress hormone, cortisol, which literally puts your body under stress. That’s why you initially feel awake and alert, but then later comes the sugar/cortisol crash, leaving you exhausted and reaching for more sugar or caffeine.

This can be a vicious cycle and leave you beyond exhaustion.

Biologically there is nothing restful about this cycle. By decreasing sugars and other junk food we can bring a sense of rest to our physical body, which in turn will bring rest to our mental state. To detach better during the day and sleep better at night, be sure to watch what you eat.

ADHD Sleep Help to Get the Sleep You Need

Let’s face it: sleep is important. Our body needs sleep to function properly. For many children and adults with ADHD, though, they struggle to find the rest they need.

Whatever you do to address your or your child’s lack of sleep, don’t underestimate how important sleep is. Read here to find out more on how important your child’s sleep is.

Take sleep seriously. Use these techniques mentioned here to help you get the rest your body needs.