Hello and welcome to this Stimuli program called Speaking About Sleeping. It's run by me, Ellie Sturrock, and I'm a specialist in psychological therapies. I largely work in the NHS and I've worked around various different sleep disorders including insomnia and all sorts of other sleep problems.

I'm particularly interested in sleep and ADHD, and that's what this program is about. I'll begin with a quote. It's by C. S. Lewis. C. S. Lewis is the chap who wrote the Narnia stories. Many things, like loving and going to sleep, are done worst when we try hardest to do them. And I hope that this programme will help us to realise that we don't need to work that hard to do them.

So sleep problems and ADHD are often close companions. There are names like delayed sleep phases. There are problems with revenge sleep procrastination and actually in their simplest form there are two major problems that are particularly linked to ADHD. One is around patterns of getting to bed which can be altered by all sorts of ADHD behaviours.

And the other problem is getting to sleep. Getting to bed is one thing, getting to sleep is another. One is quite behavioural, environmental, and the other might be more cognitive. And as we know, fast thinking and racing minds, procrastination, all very familiar features of ADHD.

There's no clear evidence that there's any particular disorder firmly related to ADHD. And the very good news is that the Sleep Foundation in America promotes behavioral interventions for sleep and says that by using these types of therapy and improving sleep, we can also improve and reduce ADHD symptoms. And this makes sense because sleep, good sleep, is a huge benefit to general well being.

It, we'll talk about this in I think the second or third session sleep is needed by both body and mind. And the mind part is the bit that we of course recognise in ADHD. So if we're looking after body and mind, then we will, by virtue of that, be helping the ADHD, which comes largely from the mind, affects the body, affects life, and caused in the mind.

There are some specific issues to ADHD around meds, worth mentioning that. Some meds, are really useful at slowing some people down and some meds, the same meds, can speed some people up. It's very individual. And this program is created in a way that you can make it work for you. That you can individualize this, play about with all these strategies and make it so that you can be your own sleep therapist.

Sessions include beliefs about sleep, myth busting ideas about sleep, we talk about the external environment, the bedroom patterns of behaviour, we talk about the internal environment, the temperature of the body, the climate of the mind, if you like. We talk about circadian rhythms, naturally occurring rhythms of light and dark.

How we can use these to our advantage. The possible interruption of that by using backlit screens and lights. We do cover revenge procrastination and other cognitive strategies actually, treatments. We talk about biology. And we have a strategy to help consolidate broken sleep and work out how much sleep we do actually need.

There isn't one golden answer, and the bonus of this is that there are multiple ways that we can work using a range of interventions, a range of understandings, in order to make sleep better. To put you in charge and for you to be able to be confident about what sleep you need and ways that you can aid it.

So welcome to the program and join me next time and our session will be next time where we need perhaps to seek the intervention of a GP and some other diagnoses that get affected by sleep.

See you next time, when we'll be speaking about sleeping.