Are kids people getting ADHD because they didn’t sleep well? Or is poor sleep hygiene an early indicator of ADHD?

The research shows that poor sleep hygiene can be a trigger for ADHD related symptoms. Poor sleep hygiene is not the same as “didn’t sleep well”. Poor sleep hygiene is not going to bed at an appropriate time, going to bed at wildly different times each night, blue light exposure within 2 hours of bedtime, etc.

The ages of 0 - 4 years are the most crucial for brain development. It’s why newborns sleep several times a day. The brain hasn’t finished forming by the time they are born. Even at the age of 3, kids are still napping mid-day. And those naps are extremely critical for healthy brain development.

So without good sleep hygiene, it can stunt brain development in a way that results in ADHD, or ADHD like symptoms.

Lots of people with ADHD have poor sleep hygiene, even as adults. Many will struggle with things like Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome, because they get their biggest bursts of focus late at night when everyone else is asleep, the brain is releasing dopamine to keep them awake, and distractions are limited.

I have ADHD and DSPS. The reason people with DSPS feel awake at night is due to an issue with melatonin production. The brain doesn’t release melatonin normally (or at all) so the natural “feeling sleepy” signal never comes. I take prescription tryptophan and I’ve never slept better in my life. My “natural” sleep time in 2/3am and waking up is 10/11am. But with tryptophan I can have a “normal” sleep schedule.

And that’s another interesting thing. Kids diagnosed with ADHD can see improved outcomes when they are given tryptophan to help regulate sleep.

Btw, if you’re wondering. Tryptophan is an amino acid, and you can get it in pills that have medically measured doses. Why not just take melatonin? Well tryptophan metabolizes into melatonin and serotonin. It’s a guaranteed way to get melatonin.

Off the shelf melatonin pills aren’t regulated with dosages the same way. In fact, a pill in a 10mg melatonin bottle might only have 1mg of melatonin or even 15mg. They aren’t reliable, and the other issue is that melatonin tends to not be bioavailable enough to work reliably. Tryptophan is very bioavailable. It’s the stuff in turkey that makes people sleepy after eating it.

Edit: grammar

Like the rise in ADHD and Autism diagnosis… There isn’t more cases, just diagnosis got better or more available.

It’s both.

We’re finding that even things like microplastics are causing changes that’s not fully understood. There’s even a recent study that links an increase in histamine to worsened ADHD symptoms.

And then there are things like poor sleep hygiene when very young can trigger a development of ADHD later on.

I’ve been using (mostly) Claude to help me write an application in a language I’m not experienced with (Rust). Mostly with helping me see what I did wrong with syntax or with the borrow checker. Coming from Java, Python, and C/C++, it’s very easy to mismanage memory the exact way Rust requires it.

That being said, any new code that generates for me I end up having to fix 9 times out of 10. So in a weird way I’ve been learning more about Rust from having to correct code that’s been generated by an LLM.

I still think LLMs for the next while will be mostly useful as a hyper-spell checker for code, and not for generating new code. I often find that I would have saved time if I just tackled the problem myself and not tried to reply on an LLM. Although sometimes an LLM can give me an idea on how to solve a problem.

There’s also the tribal knowledge of people who’ve worked somewhere for a few years. There’s always a few people who just know where or how a particular thing works and why it works that way. AI simply cannot replace that.

I find it’s the most useful when asking it for small snippets of code or dealing with boilerplate stuff. Anything more complicated usually results in something broken.