Have you just tried going to bed earlier?
People love to say, “why don’t you just go to bed earlier?”
They have no idea how complicated sleep can be when your brain fights with itself constantly.
Sleep has always been forced for me. Either staying up reading, or scrolling until I crashed, or drinking wine to quiet my brain enough to let sleep overwhelm me.
As a teenager I would get lost in science fiction and fantasy, disappearing into 800-page books that I would read in a single sitting. It felt like I was in suspended animation, living life through another lens, not aware of the passing of time. I would read until it started getting light, then grab a few hours in a panic before school.
At the time I thought I was fine. I was young. I didn’t realise I was burning the candle at both ends before life had even started.
At university, night became my favourite time. I was a night owl and a DJ, working five or six nights a week in Edinburgh clubs. I would finish at three in the morning, walk forty minutes back to my flat, then head straight into the computer labs to work on coding assignments until nine. I slept in short bursts, occasionally caught lectures in the afternoon, and repeated it all again. I loved the stimulation, the chaos, the pace. I never questioned what it was doing to me.
After university I moved to London and joined an IT consultancy. The relentless pace was perfect for someone like me. The city drinking culture was strong, and work and life blurred together. We worked together, drank together, got together. Sleep was something other people did. I remember bouncing off the last stop of the last night bus in North London when I lived in the south. That was a normal night.
There was one time I was expected at a new client where I slept in after a bonus night out. I woke to twenty-eight missed calls and panicked, thinking I had ruined everything. I rushed into the city only to be told the whole project team and my new manager were in the pub. I joined them and became a legend on that project. I lucked out that time. The culture rewarded excess and punished rest.
Later I moved to Barclays Global Investors, which had the same city energy but with more routine. We had an unspoken rule that if you were not back from the pub by 2:30pm, do not come back. A pint on the way home was the bridge between work and sleep. I started drinking at home more, a bottle of wine most nights. It was consistent, familiar, and numbing.
I would wake in a panic, certain I had forgotten something important. We had to be in the office before 7:30am to make sure systems were running before market open. I frequently woke after only a few hours of sleep, often still drunk, showered, put on a suit, grabbed a coffee, and went straight in. By lunchtime I would head to the pub again. It was a loop I could not see. Fear of failure kept me running. Many people in the city never escaped it. It seemed every week someone in the city would take their life by jumping from a building or under a train. The crash of 2008 was too much for many. Mental health issues were a serious stigma those days. The culture was to push, push, push.
After ten years I left the centre of London and moved to a small village in Kent. I thought it would bring peace, but exhaustion came instead. I had to get up at 5:30am to catch a train for an 8:30 start, and if I left at 6:30pm I felt guilty for leaving work before others. I got home around nine after working on the train, ate dinner, drank enough wine to fall asleep, and repeated the same thing the next day. By the weekend I was done, but people pleasing had led me to get a horse that I rode early on Saturdays and Sundays. There was no time to rest.
When that horse died, my ex-wife told me that if I didn’t get another, we would never see each other. That was the moment I started doing what I needed instead of what others wanted.
I realised I had always lived life for other people. Every decision I had made was about being who someone else needed me to be. I didn’t know what I wanted or even how to behave without someone else to mirror. That realisation felt like hitting pause for the first time in my life. It wasn’t freedom yet, but it was the beginning of it.
I left. I packed my life into my Land Rover and drove to Edinburgh. It was like a switch was flipped and I couldn’t un-flip it..
I had never lived alone before. I watched the movies I wanted to watch. I cooked elaborate meals for myself and ate them alone. I drank more and stayed up later at first. But replacing five hours of commuting every day with a twelve-minute walk gave me time that I had never had. I didn’t know what to do with all this time, so I gave it to work. I was usually the last to leave the office after the lights had been turned off. I remember one time I was still in the office when the cleaners started at 5am. I am not sure who was more surprised.
On weekends I slept half the day. My body was paying off years of debt. I did not realise then how close I was to burnout.
Years later, after settling into this new rhythm, I was finally diagnosed with ADHD and later autism. Even then, I did not see sleep as part of the story. I stopped drinking because the medication made that possible, and that is when everything shifted. Without the alcohol, the dopamine that had once knocked me out was gone. I lay awake until two or three every morning, doom-scrolling Instagram, exhausted before the day began.
Work was stressful and uncertain. The lack of sleep pulled me into depression. Every day I caught myself thinking the world might be better off without me. It was not a dramatic thought. It felt calm, almost comforting, the idea of things simply stopping. No more anxiety, no more worrying about the things I couldn’t do. Learning that ADHD and autistic people are at much higher risk of suicide than neurotypicals helped me take it seriously. I phoned the Bupa GP service and said I was worried, that I wanted to explore help before the thoughts turned suicidal.
They referred me back to the psychiatrist who had diagnosed my ADHD and still managed my medication. He also specialises in sleep and depression. We talked, and he quickly picked up on the sleep issue. With my agreement, he suggested we focus on that first and prescribed melatonin.
It was a wonder drug for me. I slept. For the first time in my life, I slept through the night without knocking myself out. An hour after taking it, I felt like a tired child must feel, floppy and ready to sleep sitting up. The sleep made everything easier. I quit doom-scrolling because I no longer needed it. I now get to sleep by 11:30, almost three hours earlier than before. I wake feeling fresh. I can get up earlier.
That change created space. I began walking three kilometres each morning before work and eating breakfast at home instead of at my desk. Getting enough sleep gave me time, but more than that it gave me calm.
I have also learned how sensory my relationship with sleep is. I have slept with a fan on every night for thirty years. The quiet without it is deafening. The white noise masks tinnitus and helps me focus on a single thing. My sheets have to feel right, though I couldn’t tell you what “right” is. The temperature has to be perfect too, not too hot, not too cold, and the duvet matters more than I ever knew. These details sound small, but they are what make my body feel safe enough to rest.
I have always had restless leg syndrome without knowing what it was. I flex my toes when I am anxious and trying to sleep, it’s automatic, a hidden “stim” that helps regulate anxiety. It is a signal now, something that tells me when I am stressed. I used to snore heavily, but that stopped when I stopped drinking. My body has become quieter, inside and out.
What I’ve come to understand is that many of the things I once saw as personal failings - restlessness, snoring, exhaustion that sleep didn’t fix, are actually common in ADHD and autism. I have learned that sleep itself is rarely simple for neurodivergent people. Delayed sleep cycles, insomnia, restless leg syndrome, and even sleep apnoea are all more common in ADHD and autism. Many of us also live with chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, or connective-tissue conditions that leave the body tired but the brain wired. Knowing this helped me stop blaming myself and start paying attention to what my body was really asking for.
I am now more aware now of what I eat and drink before bed. Reducing water intake means I no longer wake multiple times in the night. If I do wake, I have stopped looking at my phone when I get up to go to the bathroom. It sounds trivial, but avoiding that blast of light and dopamine means I can go straight back to sleep instead of starting the day at three in the morning.
I now get up at the same time on weekends, with more time for the things I enjoy. I look forward to bedtime. I do not wake with the panic that once defined my life. I wake knowing I have time for my morning routine, time to sit with my coffee and yoghurt with fruit, or the occasional pain au raisin or cinnamon pastry. I have time for a walk before the office, and the day begins in peace.
The moment I wake up is now a moment of warm calm instead of panic. Sleep has become a quiet kind of freedom.
As I have started to figure it all out, sleep feels different. I no longer see it as a requirement but as rest, something to look forward to. I put my phone on the side and leave it there. The night no longer feels like a fight; it feels like permission to stop.
What I have learned is that dopamine was always at the centre of it. Alcohol had been my way to find it, to make my brain stop long enough to rest. I was never addicted to the drink. I was addicted to the silence it gave me. Melatonin, structure, and care now do that job instead.
Sleep does not fix everything, but it makes everything else possible. It is the foundation for the calm I have spent my whole life chasing.
If you struggle with sleep, try noticing the patterns before you try fixing them.
Take a blank page and draw two columns. At the top, write:
What helps me rest | What keeps me wired
Then spend a few minutes jotting small things from the past week - food, sounds, thoughts, habits, times of day, or even people.
Be curious, not critical.
When you’re done, circle one thing from each side.
Keep the “rest” one, and gently experiment with reducing the “wired” one over the next few nights.
That’s all. The goal isn’t perfection. It’s awareness. The first step toward rest that feels like care, not control.
National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. (2018). Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: Diagnosis and management (NG87). https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/ng87
Yoon, S. Y. R., Jain, U., & Shapiro, C. M. (2012). Sleep in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder in children and adults: Past, present, and future. Sleep Medicine Reviews, 16(4), 371-388. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.smrv.2011.07.001
Singh, K., & Zimmerman, A. W. (2015). Sleep in autism spectrum disorder and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.Sleep Medicine Clinics, 10(4), 479–488. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.spen.2015.03.006
