Hello and welcome to session four of Speaking about Sleeping and this is a great session to do two things. One is to work out how much sleep do you need at this time. You can do this anytime you like. Our sleep needs change throughout our life cycle as we talked about last time. It also helps to consolidate broken sleep and maybe to re-establish a patterning around when we sleep and when we're awake.

And this can be particularly useful, or can be a problem, depending on which way you look at it. For us with an ADHD kind of mind and behaviours that go with that. So we can get into patterns where, because we've become distracted, we've put off doing things and then we end up working later at night.

That can be a pattern, not always. This strategy is called sleep restriction and it's quite hardcore. It is used by virtually every sleep clinic in the world and is widely acknowledged as being one of the most helpful things you can do. It's a bit... AAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!! But it's also very, ooooh, because it will give you much better understanding about what you need and it gives fairly quick resolution to patterns of sleeping that can be really unhelpful.

Here we are really getting into the detail of making sleep better. There's a little bit of calculation that needs to be done. It's not complicated, but just, you might need to play this back and hear it a few times if you're anything like me. The mind travels on to something else and the details, just, you just need to know the detail.

So what we do first is we chart the sleep that we do  in a regular two weeks, if possible. That is a big ask. Ten days, yeah, okay. Try and do it for two weeks. The broader, set of nights, days you can get, the better your average will be. Don't worry too much about that. What you do is you chart how much sleep you're getting across a 24 hour period.

So if you're dozing in the day, write down roughly how much sleep you're doing in the day. If you're up late at night, chart. So the way I would do this is every hour that you're asleep, fine, you're asleep. For every hour that you're awake. And for every hour that you're dozing or sleeping for a slot of time, in that hour I would calculate that you've slept for 15 minutes.

So you add up your minutes and hours of sleep. So let's say that over a 24 hour period, and you've done this for 10 days, you have calculated, so you do your adding up. And then you divide it by the number of days, so let's say it was 10 days, you calculated that you were getting 55 hours over that period, so divide that by 10 and you get 5.5 hours.

Work out how much sleep you're getting, even if it's broken, you can work out cumulatively how much sleep you're getting. And then, you set your alarm for the time you want to get up. Because of delayed sleep patterns in ADHD, you might want to set your alarm for a later time. So that might be, I don't know, 8?

And you chart your hours backwards. This seems really quite mad. You chart your hours backwards and you go to bed at half 2. Seems late. You do that. Ideally you do that for two weeks. So going to bed at half two, getting up at eight. Make your day busy. Fill your day.  Have a busy day in terms of mind and body and being out in the light. We're going to talk about this in the next session.

Fill your evening time with things to do. So that could be useful in itself. You could start to be allowing yourself to finish projects or get started on projects that it's been difficult to get to. And you're going to be probably at home. You might be living the high life and going out and clubbing.

That's fine. But you want to be sticking to doing this patterning. Off to bed. In the morning, getting up at eight or whatever it is. If you get up at, you want to get up at six, go to bed at half one, half twelve. Maths is terrible. And then stick to doing that. Now, if you get to the end of the period and you find you're falling asleep way before that time, that's good.

It means you actually need a bit more than five and a half hours sleep. If you find that you're sleeping during that period and you're not having a broken night's sleep, then you've worked out you need five and a half hours sleep. That would be such a joy to me. I'd have so much more to do and so much more time to do things in.

So you will be working out your whether you're falling asleep or not and if you are then you need more sleep. So you put the time that you go to bed back a little bit. So instead of half to you go to bed at quarter past to do it for a week. See how it goes if you still need more sleep your night after that is not broken or uncontrollably broken. Then put it back again put it back by 15 minutes. Go to bed at 2, 2 till 8 that means you'll be getting 6 hours in bed. If your night starts getting broken, you don't need any more than six hours.

You might want to be putting your hour of getting up later. You might want to put it earlier. So work it out for yourself. This is one of the areas where you can play about and make it your own. Set this up. Chart what your sleep is like now. Take the average number of hours over a period of time. Then set a wake up time and stick to the wake up time and set a going to bed time that is in accordance with how much sleep you're getting at the moment.

Then you can work out how much sleep you need, you can adjust and it consolidates broken sleep.

Have fun!