![]() Maybe I need to flash back to my childhood self to explain why this amuses me so much. Hence, boredom.) It wasn’t because I wasn’t getting enough sleep, or was out of shape (although that’s true on its own), or was still depressed (although that has definitely taken a toll on me at other times over my life)-I was just bored. (Note: dishes may be a challenge, but they are neither new nor interesting. I’m tired all the time because I’m BORED? And I know it’s true, because most of those times when I felt like drifting off at my computer or during a meeting or sitting at home trying to decide what to do because I had to do the dishes but didn’t feel like it, all it would take was a new and interesting task or challenge to wake me right up. (Or even to death, if it happens while driving). Or in other words, I can literally get bored to sleep. But the theory is: an ADHD brain is constantly seeking stimulation, and if it can’t get that stimulation, it simply shuts down. “ it may seem like narcolepsy but all our tests say it isn’t“), is a phenomenon that’s almost impossible to study clinically,* so most of what you find on it is based on anecdotal evidence and conjecture. The reason it took so long to find the answer is probably because this “intrusive sleep,” sometimes diagnosed as “EEG negative narcolepsy” (i.e. ![]() ![]() It turned out this-the overwhelming compulsion to sleep while driving a long, boring road- was a thing that happened to other people (see number 4 in that link), and it was caused, as so many of my lifelong quirks have turned out to be lately, by ADHD. Just recently I stumbled upon the answer while looking up something I thought was unrelated ( trying to help my kids with their mild insomnia). I tried to research a solution, but nothing I read about drowsy driving or narcolepsy seemed to apply to the situation, or to me. It doesn’t matter how much sleep I had the night before, how alert I’m feeling before I set out, how much caffeine I’ve had or what the temperature is inside the car: after a while on the interstate, my eyes start to close against my will. There’s nothing wrong with falling asleep while my husband’s driving-it’s like going into hypersleep, makes the light-years fly by. Easy! Straightaway! Can’t get lost! Except that inevitably, when I spend that long on the interstate, I start to fall asleep. My parents are an hour-and-fifteen-minutes-if-there’s-no-traffic drive away if you go through the city, an hour-and-a-half if you go the southern way to avoid the city if there is traffic, and either way you go, you hit nearly an hour of interstate driving. This notebook full of doodles also contains notes about the Children’s Department meeting, which was apparently what the open notebook was supposed to be for.
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