Dr. William (Bill) Dodson

When the sun goes down and it gets really dark, everybody's getting ready for bed, I get a burst of energy.

And it's the best time of the day.

My mood's best.

My energy's best.

My attention's best.

And everybody else is gone, so I'm not being distracted.

I can do what I want.

And I know that if I get into bed at a reasonable hour, I can't turn my brain and body off to go to sleep.

Plus, I turn my mind, jumps from one thing to another.

I replay all of the humiliations of my life in technicolor.

And that goes on until somewhere between 2 and 4 in the morning.

When they finally do go to sleep and when they try to wake up in the morning, it's out of the sleep of the dead.

It's really hard for people with ADHD to wake up, be fully alert and engaged with things until about noon.

So the technical term for that is chronic delayed sleep phase syndrome.

Anything that takes a whole breath to say is usually a fairly simple concept.

And that is people with ADHD want to sleep a nice normal eight-hour sleep phase, and so they want to do it from 4 a.m.

until noon.

The trouble is there are very few school jobs or relationships that tolerate that.

And again, the paradoxical thing is it goes away when you treat the ADHD.

And it also prevents people from going to other things to treat their insomnia, marijuana, alcohol, barbiturates, that sort of thing.