ADHD stuff: ambient noise is draining and sleep is VITAL
icon: "overwhelmed (the character Keenan from "Playing By Heart," with hands over their face covering their eyes and head tilted back)"
I ordered some noise-protection earmuffs so that on ADHD overload days I can at least block out the worst of stimuli. With my CAPD, sound always takes effort to process, even passively hearing it if there are any words in the sound or any chance that someone might talk to me (so whenever there are people around, especially at work). The earmuffs will also be a cue that I can't hear people, so a person looking at me will hopefully be more likely to try to get my attention in a non-verbal way rather than just assuming I am ignoring them. I will be carrying these with me in my ever-present backpack, so I can use them for protection from bus noise too.
Last week I was in ADHD overwhelm all day Thursday and Friday, and on Thursday it was bad enough that I lost speech for a while. Then on Monday I called in to work because I woke up feeling just incapable of functioning. I went back to bed and slept for another 7 hours. After that, Monday night I went to bed a little closer to on-time than usual, and when I woke up for work Tuesday I didn't feel groggy or terrible.
Suddenly I realized that last week was a whole string of "just this once" 4 and 5 hour nights. My ADHD is super affected by sleep and I know better, but I can get away with missing 2 hours once a week so I do it sometimes. Apparently I let that "sometimes" turn into "constantly" without realizing.
It's a terrible cycle: lack of sleep makes everything take twice as long, including winding down after work, so when I didn't get enough sleep the night before I am way more likely to fail at getting enough sleep next time. So I really need to be very strict about bedtimes at LEAST every time I sleep at home.
After realizing this I re-activated my browser blocks on netflix, hulu, and facebook after 8:30pm. That should hopefully give me enough time to do some productive stuff and get to bed on time. (I get up at 5:30am most days so I need to be in bed by 10:30)
And after one day of doing pretty good with going to bed on time I started trying to talk myself out of my bedtime. Why are you like this, brain?? it makes everything worse and you know this!!!