#2544S

Every time I have a session with my therapist or a checkin with my psychiatrist, they ask me if I sleep okay. It’s a reasonable question, many people with ADHD have trouble sleeping, more so when they are on ADHD medication. But I never had any sleep problems, so I always say no, I have trouble getting to bed, but once I’m in bed, I sleep like a log. I do have trouble getting to bed though. I haven’t considered that a “real” problem, until the past few weeks.

It’s not that I don’t want to go to bed, but there are always small steps and distractions standing in the way. It takes an hour to get from deciding to take the dog on his evening walk to actually putting on shoes. I am half asleep at this point, but there is always one more article to quickly finish reading, one more photo to quickly finish editing. Eventually that morphs into scrolling short videos on my phone and bamm! it’s almost midnight. When we get back from the walk, I sit down to take off my shoes and semi-consciously take my phone out to quickly check *something*. Then I notice it’s past 1 am and I’m still sitting on the stool by the door, one shoe still on, scrolling away. So I rush to brush my teeth and go to bed but now I’m angry with myself, frustrated and I go to bed feeling like a failure. Getting up at 6 in the morning to get to work is torture, I spend the day on autopilot just trying to survive, and when I get home I feel like I could fall asleep immediately. And yet, the same cycle repeats in the evening again. Why is this happening?

I think the source of the problem is that my dopamine-seeking brain doesn’t feel satisfied at the end of the day. When I spend a day doing things (and more importantly completing things) that feel important, valuable, that feel like I *did something*, I have an easier time winding down. But most days aren’t like this. My dayjob doesn’t involve many tangible outcomes, I think and I write endless documents but it doesn’t feel like I have made something. My meds get me through the day, making it easier to focus on these mushy, intangible tasks, but by the evening the effects wear off and I’m left feeling unsatisfied, empty. Frustration kicks in, about the lack of personal work, the lack of progress on the stuff I really care about, the lack of making photography, the lack of progress on my “real career” as an artist. What would be different if I hadn’t gotten out of bed that morning? The answer, most days, is “probably nothing”. On a conscious level I try to be okay with that, but under the surface my brain is unsatisfied. It craves that sweet dopamine burst of accomplishing something that matters, but at 11 pm, after a sleep deprived, exhausting day, it doesn’t have the capacity to do something about it. So I fall back on the adult equivalent of a pacifier: the intermittent reward of scrolling social media. Maybe the next scroll will surface something engaging? It never does, but it gets close so I keep scrolling, hoping subconsciously that the next screen, the next 30 second clip of a standup comedian will provide that hit of interest and engagement, and after that I’ll feel satisfied and be able to relax.

I’m dealing with a weaponized level of “almost interesting” that social media these days is fine tuned to provide. Just enough to keep trying, never enough to feel “done”. I don’t consider myself a social media junkie, but if I’m honest with myself, I am. I am like the smoker that denies being one, saying things like “I only smoke socially” and that still takes every opportunity to “talk stuff through” with a quick cigarette. I’m not sure where my situation sits in terms of “real” addiction, but I see a similar compulsive, self deluding behavior here. I am conditioned on something designed to keep me hooked and consider every instance of giving in to the temptation is just a single time, not part of a larger pattern. It’s not that I have sleep problems, or a social media problem. It’s just that tonight, specifically, I got a bit distracted. Except this keeps happening, day after day, and being sleep deprived and angry with myself about it keeps compounding.

So what to do about it? I don’t really know, that’s going to need some more thinking.

Well, anyways.