Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Systems for daily life
Guard sleep first, especially through any long stretch away from the usual routine. Once the nights slide, everything else you have set up starts giving way.
Holidays, illness and school closures are when bedtimes drift, and a fortnight of late nights undoes more than any homework plan can fix. Keep the getting-up time roughly steady even when the going-to-bed time slips, since that is the anchor. It is also one of the few things a family can put right without needing anybody else's cooperation.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Store all that you reap, left in the ear, apart from the little you eat (Quran 12:47). The store is protected first because everything through the hard stretch depends on it, and sleep is that kind of store.
قَالَ تَزۡرَعُونَ سَبۡعَ سِنِينَ دَأَبࣰ ا فَمَا حَصَدتُّمۡ فَذَرُوهُ فِي سُنۢبُلِهِۦٓ إِلَّا قَلِيلࣰ ا مِّمَّا تَأۡكُلُونَ
then I can return to the people to inform them.’ Joseph said, ‘You will sow for seven consecutive years as usual. Store all that you reap, left in the ear, apart from the little you eat
Qur’an 12:47read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
Work on measuring habit supports automaticity, meaning something running without a decision each time, as the ingredient that makes a routine hold, which is why a fixed hour is worth more than a nightly negotiation. Nothing in the studies gathered here tested sleep timing in ADHD directly. So treat this as sound general practice, and the clinical claim about sleep and daytime functioning as coming from the training rather than from a trial reported here.
Gardner B, Abraham C, Lally P, de Bruijn GJ. (2012). Towards parsimony in habit measurement: testing the convergent and predictive validity of an automaticity subscale of the Self-Report Habit Index.. The international journal of behavioral nutrition and physical activity doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Tiredness eats away at exactly the abilities that were already stretched, so a slipped sleep pattern makes everything else harder.
When not to
Long-running sleep problems, particularly not being able to fall asleep at all or heavy daytime sleepiness, are worth raising with a doctor rather than treating as a matter of routine.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
But what if I need it one day? The honest answer is that keeping it has a daily price. A list you cannot find anything in has stopped being a list.
Look in often, say the good bits out loud, and stop for a few minutes about every hour. Three small things that carry more than any talk about concentrating harder.
Every time your eye lands on the job you have never started, it takes a small toll. Ten of those on one list is a tax you pay all day without noticing.