The ADHD sleep hack nobody talks about!

Hey, new listener. Thanks so much for checking us out. And there's a good chance you have adhd, so I quickly wanted to ask you to please follow this podcast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or whichever app you're listening to this on. Don't leave it until later because you will forget. Thank you. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. In this episode, I'm going to help you sleep, but not before you finish listening. Hi, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach. And welcome to the Weeniecast. Squirrel. I'm ridiculously excited about the topic of this episode. It is one of my absolute all time favorite activities and I love talking about it because I think it is the most magical thing that any human can devote time to. I'll give you a guess what it is. No, you're wrong. It's sleep. Get your mind out of the gutter. And I say this having formerly been the type of person who would always say, well, I'll sleep when I'm dead. I'll just sleep four hours tonight and I'll catch up on sleep on the weekend. That's massively unhealthy. And if you have adhd, like we all do, it is really bad for your ability to manage your ADHD symptoms. So some of the health benefits of, of sleep. And I'm gonna. I'm reading this literally off of the UC Davis Edu website. It promotes growth, which, I mean, I think I'm done growing, but sure, if I am going to grow a couple more inches, great. I will let sleep do the heavy lifting there. It promotes heart health. Okay. Having a healthy heart is a really good thing. It supports weight management. And as a woman who grew up in the United States and learned from a very young age to hate my body, as most women do, can we please do something about that? Can we please start doing some more body positivity stuff for young girls and for women like. I like to approach that from a healthy standpoint. There's no one number that you need to see on the scale to be successful, to be hot, to be healthy. But being a healthy weight really does support your health and your ability to live longer. So sleep helps you get there. It helps you combat germs and keep your immune system strong, which after the last few years, I think is pretty important. It helps you reduce the risk of injury. As an ADHDer who's very clumsy, who has fallen down the stairs multiple times and manages to injure herself at least once or twice a year, I need this. I need to mitigate that risk some way. And if sleep is one of the ways I can do it, then yes, please. You know, the next thing on this list, it literally says it helps you increase your attention. Spanish, which we all need. It also boosts your memory and your ability to learn. I know when I'm tired, when I haven't slept well. There are so many more moments in the day where I walk into a room and think, what the fuck did I come in here for? And then I have to turn around and retrace my steps and figure out what it was. And sometimes I remember and sometimes I don't. And I'm just wandering around my house, just not knowing what I'm doing. And I know you've been there too. In addition to that list, I'm going to add some things. Okay, UC Davis, if you're listening, you can add this to your list as well. When you're well rested, you're also way more creative. You have ability to access parts of your brain that makes connections between completely disparate things and allows for you to come up with really innovative solutions to big problems and a little problems. It makes you more creative in your content creation. When you are well rested, you're also in a better mood. I'm far more likely to be in a shitty mood when I haven't had enough sleep, right? If I'm well rested. Like that is half the battle of being in a good mood. You just have to make sure you don't spill your coffee and you have the most perfect day ahead of you. In addition to being more creative, you are also far more grounded in the positive beliefs you have about yourself. In coach training, one of the things that we learned about were saboteurs. And saboteurs are basically those voices of doubt that play up and tell you that you suck and that you fail at everything. You're not going to finish this and oh, you look fat today and this and that and the other thing, they tear you down to keep you in your comfort zone. And those voices, like, yes, they're a part of you, but they're also not true. Those voices, their only job is to keep you safe and to keep you in your comfort zone. Even if your comfort zone low key sucks. Doing the scary brave thing is outside that comfort zone. And those voices don't want you doing that even if it has the potential for big payoff like starting a business. So when you are tired, those voices pretty much have an open door policy because you're too tired to really tap into your Positive voices. You're too tired to tap into your intuition and into your heart energy and into your inner leader. And I know those are all really super coachy words, but it really does make a difference when you're able to ground into that power and into that knowledge of everything that you're capable of. When you're too tired, you just can't do it effectively. One of my favorite discoveries about starting a business is that some sometimes my work for the day includes taking a nap. And I am all about the naps. I used to be anti nap, if you can believe it. But then I discovered this magical thing called the granny nap. And it's not a long nap. It's a 20 or 30 minute ER where you lay down, you set a timer and you just kind of doze for 20 or 30 minutes. You don't go into a deep sleep. And I think the reason I was anti nap is because I was so sleep deprived that when I laid down for a nap, I would just literally sleep for like two full REM cycles and I would wake up feeling like I was in a different universe, in a different like time zone. And that can fuck with you. But the reason I that happened was because I was so sleep deprived. So the benefits to sleeping well, to getting enough sleep, are just never ending. It can make you live longer, it can make you happier, it can make you healthier, and it's gonna make you more creative and effective in this business you're working on. I think those are all good things. I will also add that when you're sleep deprived, your cortisol also shoots up so you have higher anxiety when you're tired, which is probably why those saboteur voices come in. And we don't want that. But we're still humans living in a very busy world where we're expected to spend time with our friends, have a meditation practice, work out every day, cook three really healthy meals, call our moms, you know, text our dads. Cause our dads really don't like talking on the phone. Let's be real. We have to shower, we have to do our hair, we have to do our makeup. If you're a makeup wearer. We have to pick out a nice outfit, we have to wear that outfit. We have to manage not to spill anything on that outfit so that we don't have to change another time in the day. We have to spend time with our kids or fur babies. We have to make sure that they get enough food and attention and exercise. We have to volunteer so that we can be morally superior to everyone else and, you know, also give back to the community and good things like that. And we have to do everything to be successful in our businesses or our work. It's hard to fit in a good eight hours of sleep with all that on your plate. We're going to talk about sleep with the best intention of you getting more of it. I want to name that. I consistently get eight to nine hours of sleep a night. As I'm talking about this, I only got six last night and I'm paying for it. When you train your body to get eight to nine hours of sleep, it's really hard for your body to get less than that because it gets spoiled and it doesn't wanna give up what it actually needs. So how do you set yourself up to actually be able to sleep enough? And it's so important for those of us with ADHD to get enough sleep because our brains work so hard throughout the day. Neurotypicals are lucky. They wake up and they just go into their automatic routine. They don't have to make all the decisions that we have to make. You know, for us, we wake up and we're like, okay, cool, I need to shower, I need to brush my teeth, I need to eat breakfast, and I need to work out what order should I do it in. And you have to decide it every single day. There's no automatic routine. Well, there might be for a few months, but then you fall out of it and you have to find a new one. You don't realize it, but making even those most simple decisions throughout the day, it's taxing on your brain. It requires your brain to need more rest. And that's just the basic human requirement stuff. It's not even the business ownership. When you add the business owner stuff, the decision fatigue just goes through the roof. Okay, so it is really important that we get enough sleep. And I'm going to talk through a couple ways that you give yourself enough sleep. All right, I'm going to talk through a couple things and full permission here to, as you're listening to this episode, to just say, fuck off, Katie. No, that's not happening. It's fine. These are just best practices. You don't have to do all of them. You don't have to do any of them. But if you want to get better sleep, these are things that are going to help you. For those of you who get defiance around someone telling you what to do, take a deep breath. This is not that episode. Okay? So the things that will get in the way of you getting good sleep. First and foremost, my. One of my favorite things in the world next to sleep is caffeine. You should not be having caffeine less than 10 hours before you plan on sleeping. I used to be that person who could drink a cup of coffee at 9pm and be able to fall asleep. I don't know what happened to my body chemistry as I've gotten older, but now I can't have a cup of coffee later than 11:30 in the morning. It's really depressing. I love coffee. I think it's one of the most delicious things ever discovered. And I wish I could drink it all afternoon, but I can't because I won't be able to sleep. When you have adrenaline in your system, it actually counteracts the melatonin, which is another hormone that basically tells your body it's time to sleep. So you want to be very careful about caffeine consumption. Light can mess with your circadian rhythms. The thing that made me realize just how brutal light can be to your circadian rhythm was when I was going live during the pandemic later in the evening. Because when I go live in the evening, there's not a whole lot of natural light in my office. And so I was using a very powerful ring light. And so this ring light was just blasting my face and my eyes. And what I found is if I went live at like 7pm with the ring light, normally I'd be able to work, you know, 7pm to like 8pm and get some projects done. And that's fine, just working on my computer. And afterwards I'd be able to fall, like, go to bed around 9 and fall asleep around 10. But if I have that ring light on, there's no way in hell I'm falling asleep before 1am it's one of the reasons I haven't really been going live a lot lately, because I've become so conscious of it. It can mess with you. And it's so funny because you can be absolutely exhausted. But if your circadian rhythm is off and your brain thinks it's time to be awake because there are bright lights around or there have been, your brain just will not shut down. And we all know what is impossible. When your brain can't shut down, it's impossible to sleep. Of course, we've all seen the, like, random studies about, like, looking at your phone and looking at the TV and looking at any kind of screen. The blue light can actually impact you as well. I'm a realist and I'M also someone who really enjoys sending senseless reels to my friends late at night. Like, yes, absolutely. If you have the willpower to not look at your phone for an hour or two before bed, dude, you are doing better than I am. It's possible for some. I'm not in my era of being good with my phone, so that's kind of how we want to set ourselves up for proper sleep. Those are the things that are really going to get in the way. Like, what about when it comes to falling asleep, though? All right, because you can be exhausted, you can be so worn out from physical activities, from a really long workday, but if something's going on, if there's something stressful happening, or maybe your brain just decides to, like, go through the memory file of all of your embarrassing moments and make you replay them over and over and over again one night. That happens a lot, doesn't it? You know, my brain really loves replaying this moment where I slipped and ate in the hallway in high school and everyone laughed at me. And, like, my brain, like, wants to come up with the mean comeback that I could have had. But what mean comeback could I have had against, like, 17 kids laughing at me for falling on my ass? Like, if you're in that hallway, then stop listening to this podcast. You're not allowed to get any of the advice that I give. Take it back. I'm doing take backs. Any advice you've gotten from me, now stop using it. Go and be really uncomfortable with your ADHD in your business. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. So anyway, when you have those moments and your brain is just trotting out all the embarrassing things and all the things you should be stressed out about, how do you turn that off? There are a few ways that I do this and you're gonna laugh. The number one way that I turn off this voice is I play like any of the seven Harry Potter books on Audible. Ex speliarmas. Jim Dale has one of the most soothing voices I've ever heard in my life. I could fall asleep to that man talking all day long. I think the other thing that helps here is I have read the these books countless times. I. I can't even keep track of how many times I've read them. I've also listened to the Audible books so many times. So the sounds, the storyline, the characters are all super familiar to me. There are only a few chapters in a few books that if I'm listening to at bedtime, like, have to listen, like, what's gonna happen? It's like, I know what's gonna happen. I probably could say word for word each line about what's gonna happen. But here's what works about it is A, it's a voice. It's something for you to listen to and focus in on and kind of like distance yourself from your own inner voices. B, it's a storyline. But it's a familiar storyline, right? So you get sucked into the story but you're not hung up on like what's going to happen next? And what's going to happen next? You know, are Ron and Hermione going to end up together? If you haven't read the books, I will not ruin that for you. But they do. Just kidding. I had to ruin it. I'm sorry, Dumbledore. No, I'm not gonna say that. Something happens with Dumbledore. That's all I will say. Although while we're on the topic, I really think the biggest villain in the whole series is Aunt Petunia. That like she knew that Snape and Lily were friends. She knew. I mean just imagine if she had even in like a really bitchy, mean way been like, oh my God, your, your mother was friends with this awful boy, Severus Snape. He was terrible, you know, but they were best friends. They were inseparable. And they ended up going to that terrible school together. Harry. And then Harry goes to, to Hogwarts and sure he looks like his dad and that like is a, gives Snape like a bad reaction, right? Because he hated James Potter. But what if he just went up to Severus Snape, Professor Snape, in the very beginning and it's like, hi, Professor Snape. Someone told me that you were really good friends with my mom. Imagine what could have happened with that relationship. Imagine like they could have gone on picnics. They could have been like, you know, the second Godfather. Who knows? She didn't. She is the villain in that story. Story. I will never forgive her for it. Moving on. If Harry Potter doesn't do it for you, pick a book that you've listened to a bunch of times that has a storyline and doesn't get your creativity running. I know some people are like, cool, I'll listen to self help. I'll listen to like management books. I'll listen to creativity books. No, don't do it. Because you and I both know you're going to hear something and it's going to spark an idea for you and you'll be like, I have to get up and journal right now. I have to get up And I have to make an Instagram reel right now. Oh, my God. I have an idea for a blog post. I have to do it right now. And then it's going to be 3am in the morning and you're going to have four hours left to get a good night's sleep. And you're going to be so annoyed that you tried to listen to this book. We both know that you'll be tired and grouchy and you'll probably blame me. And I don't like that. So don't try it. Sometimes we really just need like some kind of sound to drown out the voice. What I find incredibly helpful here is, like, on Spotify or on Audible, you can find a playlist of like, thunderstorms with rain. You can listen to rainforests, you can listen to, you know, babbling brooks. The only thing with this, like, sometimes, like, the sound of running water can make you want to pee. So be careful with your water consumption. I've also discovered brown noise. And it's just kind of like, like this static noise. It's amazing. It, like doesn't have a storyline, obviously. It's not. There's no melody to it. It doesn't sound like anything that happens in the natural world, but it just has this way of turning off your brain and allowing your brain just to kind of go blank. And sometimes that's all you need. You just need like three minutes of that, that to drift off to sleep. And if you want to try out the brown noise thing and you want some real top quality, vetted brown noise, then go to weeniecast.com brownnoise and you can check out one of our favorite tracks. I was talking with my producer as we were talking through what this episode would be about, and we were talking about different like, like sleep meditations and we were joking about the weird, different storytelling record that you can listen to. Like, Jeff Bridges actually has a whole album of storytelling that you can listen to as you fall asleep. It's called dreamingwithjeff.com.

Sleeping tapes. I love that idea and all that it implies, you know, sleeping tapes. Sleep, of course, implies waking up. Tapes imply recording. Yeah, sharing things.

I will never use it. It's weird. It's Jeff Bridges. But if you want to laugh, you should go check it out. We will put it in the show notes. So just go to dreamingwithjeff.com or click on it in the show notes. But here's what I want to say about guided meditation and using them for sleep. If you are trying to maintain a Meditative practice and you're using a specific method of meditation. So say you're doing transcendental meditation or you are doing specific meditations on the Gaia app or on the Calm app. You want to be very conscious of the types of meditation that you're doing to do meditation for and the types that you're using to fall asleep to. The reason being your brain will learn very quickly when a meditation comes on or when you go into a meditation if you're doing something that's more free form, if you're using that to fall asleep. When you start meditating, your body like, cool, slow time to sleep now. And instead of having a meditation, you will have a little nap when you're not expecting it. And naps don't have the same impact as meditation. So if you want to meditate, you have to really keep your meditation practice separate from the sleep meditations that you follow. I downloaded the app by Gabby Bernstein, the super attractor lady. And I, I really like her app. I think it's really fun. I love some of the manifestation work that she does on there, but I really, I really love her guided meditations, but I actually don't use them the way they're supposed to. I use them as sleep meditations because I don't want to use any of the other meditations that I use to fall asleep, because I don't want to train myself to fall asleep. But I find the music is really soothing. I really like that I'm falling asleep to stuff that is all about manifesting and like getting in touch with my, my inner self and, and so on and so forth. So whatever, this is for you, whatever is going to help you turn your brain off, find a practice that you can stick to, but you want to be deliberate about using that practice only for sleep and not trying to use it for other stuff as well. And I know I've touched on this already in this episode, but I cannot stress it more that sometimes your job and your business. Ooh, what am I going to say next? Well, you'll have to keep listening to find out, but first. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. The Hyper Focus community is the inner sanctum of the Weeniecast. It's a club that's designed just for you, where you'll learn how to leverage your ADHD to grow your business. In the hyperfocus community, we are realistic about the challenges that face ADHD business owners. And we don't believe in one size fits all solutions. We believe in creating strategies that fit you on day one. Of signing up, you'll experience that deep sigh of relief that comes from walking into a room full of people like you, who you do not need to mask your quirks in front of in order to fit in because they get you in the membership Every single month. You'll get two group calls. One is an ADHD group coaching call and the other is a networking call with fellow ADHD business owners. We will also have coworking sessions designed for the ADHD mind. Monday Get Organized Sprint calls to keep you out of overwhelm. Access to weekly Brave BizLab calls where I will give you practical advice to grow your business. We'll also have the occasional expert training which are absolutely ADHD vetted, and of course, community support by folks like you. And those who pay for the year up front get a surprise bonus. Visit weeniecast.com hyperfocused and stop procrastinating the things that will grow your business. That's weeniecast.com hyperfocus or click the link in the episode description and I know I've touched on this already in this episode, but I cannot stress it more that sometimes your job and your business is to take a nap. Genuinely, if you're a business owner who's providing services or any kind of solution to your clients, you need to think about what your responsibility is to your clients, right? If they're paying you money for your brain to be able to think things through, you owe them a brain that is able to think things through when you're too tired. You can't do that sometimes instead of, you know, blasting through emails and, you know, going live and creating more content before your next client call. Sometimes you have to put all that stuff aside and just lay down and get an hour's sleep. You owe it to your clients who are paying you a buttload of money to be well rested and at the top of your game. As I talk through this, I'm just imagining, you know, someday I'm gonna have like a whole retreat conference kind of thing and smack dab in the middle of the day we're gonna have nap time. And you know what, like underneath all the conference tables and everything, they're gonna be like those mats that we had in kindergarten, you know, that you unfold. And then everyone gets like their own little blank and their own little pillow and you just like go to sleep on the floor of the conference and just like have a little, you know, 20 minute granny nap. And then you like get up and then you get back to the conference and you get to like, be in a good mood and, you know, almost like a midday sleepover. Wouldn't that be fun? If you would come to that conference with that nap in the middle, let me know, I'll put you on the list to get a special rate. If you are really struggling with sleep because you're experiencing too much stress, that is not the point of starting a business. That is how a lot of people start and run their businesses is from a place of fear and just constant stress. That is not healthy. If you're running a business and you feel like the stress of it is running your life, you need a better life, better way to run that business. There's so many bad models of what it looks like to run a successful business. I can't tell you how many people I've spoken to who really want to start a business. But they're terrified because their parents owned a business and their parents had to work 13 hours a day, seven days a week, and they never got any time off. And usually one one of them at least died early from heart problems, a stroke, something that was stress related. And while this person I'm talking to is like, I really want to start a business, but like, I can't do that. I can't do that to myself. I want to see my kids. I want to live past 60. I want to be able to do all that life gives me. But that's the only model I've had for what running a business looks like. You need a better model if that's where you're at. If you're running a business like that, you need a better strategy. You need a better action plan. One of the things that I constantly bang on about with my clients is we're not designing a business that is going to be successful, but also run your life. We're not designing businesses that require you to basically be a robot and be 110% every single day. We're designing businesses that can be successful in the right way to support you living whatever dream life you have. You know, Maybe it's working 20 hours a week and getting to coach the softball team for your kids, middle school. Maybe you want to have the nomad life. You want to work 30 hours a week, but you want to be able to do it from anywhere in the world. You know, maybe you want to work 40 hours a week and you want to be able to get hired to speak on stages, being the keynote and getting paid really well for it. All those things are possible, but you need to do it in a way that if you get sick or if something happens, heaven forbid, you lose someone you love, something really inconvenient happens, like you're in a car accident and you have to take a day off. For you to have a sustainably successful business, your business has to be able to withstand that. And if you don't have a model for how to do that, you need to learn how to how to do that. Because when you have a successful business that doesn't require you to kill yourself to run it, that's when you actually get to live life. That's when you actually can feel happy about this business. Sleepless nights over your business are the first sign that things need to change. So if you're listening to this and you're currently sleep deprived because you're stressing out about stuff, then your first assignment is to go and take a granny nap. Because they're amazing and I love them and I know you will too. If that helps, then that's your new practice. That's what you're going to do every day. You're just going to have a granny nap. If that's what helps you reduce your stress and sleep better at night and do better work, great. That is your fix it. But if the granny nap does not help, then you, my friend, need to start changing some stuff in your business and in your sleep routines.

Top quality, vetted brown noise instead of.

That cheap knockoff, you know. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. Join the weeniecast hyper focused community and unlock a whole world of support. Get direct access to me in exclusive calls. Turbocharge your network with unlimited referrals and boost your productivity with Sprint calls and accountability sessions. But that's not all. We're talking expert talks, masterclasses and more. Register now to get in front of the line for this at the introductory price of just $77 per month, it's time to elevate your entrepreneurial game. Let's do this together. Go to weeniecast.com hyperfocus all one word. That's weeniecast. Com Hyperfocus.