I was diagnosed with ADHD in adolescence. Since then it has always taken an enormous amount of pressure and energy for me to perform tasks that require focused attention. However, recently I was diagnosed with sleep apnea and started CPAP treatment. To my surprise, my ADHD symptoms greatly improved. I wish I had gotten a sleep study decades ago.
I’m sure the causes of ADHD are varied and complex so this won’t work for everyone, but just in case, you might want to get a sleep study.
Edit: I originally wrote that I “developed ADHD in adolescence”. I changed it because I had not intended to comment on whether ADHD is innate or acquired. I also changed “my ADHD went away” to “my ADHD symptoms greatly improved” for the same reason.
Note: Maybe it will be helpful if I give some context about what “ADHD” means to me. I’ve always thought of it as my brain working differently than most people. The most obvious characteristic has been that things most people consider “easy” like doing the dishes were entirely impossible for me to do in a timely fashion. I also struggled in school because I couldn’t get my homework done and I couldn’t study.
People, including my parents and teachers would all say things like “you’re not trying hard enough” or “you’re not applying yourself”. I tried, and failed, to explain that there was no amount of effort I could summon that could switch my brain into this steady productivity mode that other people could seemingly just turn on at will.
When I was a little kid, no one outside of maybe some academics had ever heard of ADHD, so my struggles were misunderstood and “my fault”. In my case, the hyperactivity symptoms were less prevalent, but I sometimes did annoying, obnoxious things.
I first heard of ADHD (just called ADD at the time) when I was a teenager. But there was still a big stigma around it and most people didn’t think it was a real condition, so I didn’t get treatment.
When I was a young adult, I finally got treated and prescribed stimulant medication. The medication made it possible for me to switch my brain into that steady productive mode, but it also had a lot of side effects.
Now, in middle age, my doctor suggested I have a sleep study due to some other symptoms I was having. So I did and they diagnosed me with sleep apnea with hypoxemia and prescribed CPAP treatment. After starting treatment I began to notice that I was able to switch my brain into that steady productive state even without medication. I began to wonder if sleep apnea (or perhaps more precisely nocturnal hypoxemia) had been the underlying cause of my symptoms all along.
Today, I saw an ADHD meme from another community and that prompted me to look up this community and share in case someone else could benefit from similar treatment. It had never occurred to me that there could be a connection between sleep apnea and ADHD symptoms until I tried the CPAP.
Like I said, I don’t suspect this will help everyone, but if there’s one person like me out there who it does help, I think it’s worth sharing.
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I think obviously, bad sleep can exacerbate ADHD issues but good sleep doesn’t make it go away
Also, I think it’s probably more the oxygen deprivation that is relevant in my case. Sleep apnea refers to just stopping breathing while sleeping, which may or may not result in a significant decrease in blood oxygen saturation. In my case, it was causing a big drop in blood oxygen saturation and I suspect this was the case for decades. Once that was corrected, I found it much easier to be “productive” in the narrow sense that normies use that word.
I’m not suggesting that the CPAP cured me, just that I’ve found it to be a more effective treatment than medications, in my case.
Correlation ≠ causation. Exactly. But it is an interesting connection. It won’t make me better but I’ll take less worse!
PSA: Some insurances only allow one sleep study per lifetime. If you’re going to get a sleep study done now, you might not be approved for it later if you really need it.
It took a year to get the insurance to approve mine. Then all they did was send a wearable pulse oximeter to my house for one night. The really crazy thing was the oximeter could only be used once and then thrown away, I think entirely just to boost the device manufacurer’s revenue. So it’s totally an outrageous racket, but it happened to help in my case.
Someday might never come and you really need it when you’re in your peak earning years and getting your life stabillized/adulted
You don’t “Develop ADHD”, you’re born with it.
People can develop similar symptoms for other reasons.
If your theory of the disease is such that it has a singular cause, then I suppose this may be true and we could conclude that I was misdiagnosed. But if you view it as a set of symptoms that may have multiple causes, then we could conclude that I had a different form of ADHD than the one you describe. Regardless, I had the lived experience of someone with ADHD for a very long time. I’ll also note that ADHD was not a diagnosis that existed yet when I was a child.
That’s a great point. I know I need a sleep study, I just have to get to it… Eventually.
It’s the same way for me as getting a new pair of glasses, improving my diet, or using a planner. It doesn’t make the ADHD go away, but it makes it easier to manage.
Book an appointment with your doctor letting the secretary know you’d like the referral to be made. Set it in motion today 😅
They take a really long time to get to you sometimes so you can still delay action besides simply getting the ball rolling. If you’re apnea or any other weird thing, its fucking you over somehow.
You have made some positive improvements, and that’s great! But I guess that if you have ADHD then after some homeostasis has taken place, you will notice some symptoms creeping back in.
Only time will tell. It has been about 10 monthe so far.
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Let’s not ADGatekeep.
