Hello and welcome to session seven Speaking about Sleeping with me Ellie Sturrock and this is another great session that we can make our own and it's about the things that we consume and its effect on us getting to sleep.

Caffeine I'm going to start right there. Most people know this nowadays. Caffeine is a stimulant, not for everybody actually if you've drunk a lot of caffeine, you might find that it's not a stimulant sometimes. And at other times it is. But if you have ADHD, it can be a particular trigger to stimulating the activity of the mind and when the mind is busy and the body is a bit fizzy then we're gonna find it less easy to get to sleep.

The other thing that's really worth mentioning now is ADHD medication. Some medication is long acting and some is shorter acting. Some medications are stimulants and some are non-stimulants. You might find that the time you take your meds and the type of meds you take will have an effect on your sleep and that's something to go through with your prescriber.

There are many medications that can help people to get to sleep that are not ADHD related but can be taken with ADHD medication. But again there can be interactions and you really want to go through that with a nurse prescriber or a GP, your prescriber. So by consuming, by taking things, we change the internal environment and we're looking at getting to sleep.

Previous sessions we've been talking more perhaps about getting to bed and the patterns in ADHD. Here we're talking about getting to sleep and the same in session eight. Okay. One time I did this session and I hadn't really gone into, hadn't really thought about it too much about fluids and a physio happened to pick me up on this and I'm thankful to her for that in saying, just watch out for the time of day that you drink fluids.

Sometimes when we're busy, when we've been putting things off, we're getting to the end of the day and we haven't drunk enough and then we start drinking at the end of the day. And if we then wake and it's hard to get back to sleep then waking to need to get up to go for a pee is not the most sensible thing to do. Spread your drinking out to earlier parts of the day. Get your fluids in. Try not to hunker them all up to the end of the day. While we're on fluids a couple of things here.

There are sleep teas and research says none of them are very useful, but from my experience of working with sleep some people find them useful they've got similar things in valerian and chamomile and it's worth trying them, or if you have one that you take and it does help sleep, then that's fine. But it's not going to be curative. If you need it and you keep taking it, then you haven't really nailed your sleep. So hold that one kind of loosely. Play with that one.

Alcohol. This is very variable. My friend Carol, red wine, it's like taking a shot of adrenaline. She cannot sleep. She makes her quite cross because if we go out for a meal in the winter, she wants to drink a glass of red wine. She can't sleep. So she's careful with red wine. Luckily we have white wine and it's not the end of the world. Beer, hop, some of those sleep medications that you can buy have hops in them. Beer's full of hops. If you aren't drinking loads and loads of beer, which will wake you up and you'll need to go for a pee and drinking loads and loads of beer is not good for your general weight management and your wallet. So treat this carefully, treat this with care as with all things and choose what you do, but for some people, having a beer could be having a whiskey. There are biological receptors in the brain that work with alcohol. If it makes you slightly soporific, you're not nailing your sleep because you're needing it and that won't do when whiskey solves all your night time problems. But it could be that you're having a particularly stressful day, or you were travelling, and you've got to the destination, and the, natural rhythms, circadian rhythms, are a bit all over the place. So you could try a small amount of alcohol, if you find that affects your sleep in a good way.

Similarly, with not similarly, but it's a fluid item. Warm milk and honey. Some people say, oh, warm milk and honey. There's a bit of a feeling, warm milk and honey, that has a kind of sleepy time. I don't know quite where it's come from. I suppose it's babies. Babies sleep a lot, and they're drinking a lot of milk. Honey is supposed to have a sedative quality to it. If you've been brought up and you've been given milk as a baby and you slept well and you had more milk and honey or anything else in actual fact and it promoted if you felt comfortable and you were safe at home and you went to bed as a cozy little child then milk and honey is likely to do the same thing again so you could use that.

There is another source of internal environment change that is a bit safer than booze. And that's a certain type of carbohydrate. It's a carbohydrate called amylose. And when we eat carbohydrates with amylosin, we produce amylase, and the combination of the two together can make us sleepy. You might notice this if you've had lunch and it's involved bread and a sandwich, and then you're giving a lecture or you're receiving something a bit boring online, it can be easy to fall asleep.

And so the carbohydrate could be causing that. Now you can use this to your advantage because on the market we have these drinks, Horlicks and Ovaltine, those kind of cereal based drinks and they're tapping into that. It won't be a massive cure all and won't be a cure but it might promote sleep. There's another possibility of something you can play with and try that might help you build up your recipe for getting to sleep.

Have fun, and I'll see you next time for session eight and working on the mind, Speaking about Sleeping.