I Think the Sleep Deprivation of Motherhood has Given Me Permanent Brain Damage
Just one of several reasons I can't find my garage door opener
I haven’t had an uninterrupted, 8-hour long night of sleep in over 9 years.
Everyone always talks about the newborn sleep deprivation. Ha ha, you won’t sleep for months. Newborns are so hard! But, it will get better.
But, what if it doesn’t get better? What if you don’t sleep well for almost a decade?
What happens - or at least, what has happened to me - is you get brain damage and you’re unable to consistently retain information. Or at least, it certainly feels that way.
ADHD Kids Don’t Like To Sleep (At Least Mine Don’t)
Apparently, some kids like to sleep. My neighbor’s son would tell her at ages 3 and 4, “mama I’m going to take a nap” and then grab his blanket and off he went to put himself down for a nap.
I cannot fathom that. My now 9-year-old didn’t sleep through the night until about 3, and then put up the strongest resistance you have ever seen to bedtime for the next 4 years or so. Screaming, fighting, anything to prevent her from having to go to bed. She fell asleep most commonly between 11PM and midnight. Didn’t take naps. Woke up at the crack of dawn, like most kids. Great!
Around the age of 7 she seemed to give up on fighting me so hard, just in time for me to have another baby. This baby actually seemed to sleep miraculously well for the first 2 months but due to breastfeeding - and the need to pump if the baby wasn’t waking up in the middle of the night - I had to set my alarm to wake up to pump. Then of course the miracle sleep baby became a regular baby and woke up every 3 hours. For going on 2 straight years. And the 9 year old still doesn’t fall asleep until around 10PM but though she sleep s a bit later, the 2 year old is, of course, up at the crack of dawn. COOL.
Where is my husband in all of this, you ask? Sleeping. He’s sleeping. He’s sleeping in until 8AM on my workdays, and as late as he wants on weekend days. I’m not going to get into why that is, or the years of arguments that have gone nowhere about it. The bottom line is that I’m on my own with this.
ADHD and neurodivergent kids often have trouble sleeping.1 For my 9-year-old, I think bedtime was a struggle mostly because bedtime is boring. Laying in a silent dark room was torture, but playing even the most relaxing music would keep her awake. Me not being in there left her mind spinning out of control, but me being in there meant it was time to ask me 400 questions until midnight. Her natural circadian rhythm made her sleep very late at night, but then she would wake up early naturally as well. I wonder sometimes if her behavioral issues were a result of what was clearly her not getting enough sleep, but despite having an iron-clad bedtime routine for YEARS like all the books say we needed, she just didn’t. want. to. sleep.
At this point, it’s hard for me to imagine that in other households, kids just go to bed. And stay there. For hours. So consistently that parents do things like watch TV after their kids go to bed, and then still get a nice full night’s sleep. What is that like?!
What Sleep Restriction Does to Your Brain
This will surprise no one, but chronic sleep restriction2 reduces:
Executive function
Sustained attention
Working and long-term memory3
One fun study that lives in my brain rent-free found that sleep deprivation increases proteins that are linked to Alzheimers Disease.4.
While sleep restriction is harmful to all populations, the effects on ADHD people, who already face challenges related to executive function, sustained attention, and working and long-term memory can, of course, be more soul-crushing.
Before kids, my normal ADHD self forgot things regularly. My chronically sleep-restricted ADHD self can’t remember anything.
My husband was annoyed with me recently because literally 5 minutes after opening the garage door from my car, I couldn’t find the garage door opener. I used the garage door opener to open the garage to grab the carseat out of the garage. While doing this, I was also trying to make sure my toddler wasn’t running out into the street.
Once everyone was safely in the car, I went to close the garage with the opener and… no clue where it is. Searched the car. I set it down somewhere (probably in a completely random spot within the garage while toddler-wrangling) and I have zero memory of doing so.
The Horrors Persist But So Do I
OK, So, I don’t have any evidence my brain is permanently damaged. But having not slept well for YEARS combined with ADHD and the overwhelming mental load of motherhood has truly broken me in ways I cannot even articulate.
I used to be a smart person. I used to be super on top of things. I used to remember conversations and tasks I needed to do. At least, I think I was that person.
I don’t remember.
I know my lack of sleep is, in the scheme of things, not the worst thing. Probably millions or billions of people experience the same and much worse, under much more terrible and stressful conditions. And of course, sacrificing sleep is the least of what I’m willing to sacrifice for my kids. I actually really enjoy the peaceful dark quiet of my toddler’s room while I hold him, when he will only sleep while being held. I love that my 9-year-old needs her bunny stuffy and her fan blasting to sleep.
I recently started taking Buproprion (Wellbutrin) along with my normal ADHD medication, and even though my sleep is still interrupted and broken, I can fall asleep more quickly and I do feel somehow like my quality of sleep is better. I have more consistent energy during the day, which I think helps me turn off my brain and fall back to sleep more quickly after being woken up.
Between my medication and coffee, I’m able to function during the day, but I have to constantly compensate for my lack of memory. At work, I take handwritten notes which seems to help me remember things better, and I ask ChatGPT to remember and remind me of tasks I need to do.5
I have Tiles on all of my frequently lost items (though I need to figure out how to attach a Tile to the TV remote, which to be fair I am never the one losing, but ends up in incredibly bizarre places due to the kids). I call my phone from my Apple Watch and ping my tiles multiple times every day. Because I don’t remember where I put them. When my Apple Watch runs out of battery, the panic gets REAL.
The only problems are the things I don’t plan to lose - like the garage door opener. I’ll probably find it shoved in a random corner of the garage years from now. But in the meantime, as per usual, I’ll just pay the ADHD tax and probably just buy another one. And put a Tile on it.
And tonight, I’ll be woken up a bunch of times. And I’ll kiss my sweet toddler’s forehead every time, and rock him back to sleep in his cool, dark room, while thinking about the 10 billion things I have to do tomorrow. And in the morning, I will drink several cups of strong coffee, and, like a certain forgetful fish, I’ll just keep swimming. I’ll keep swimming because if I don’t, I’ll drown. And that’s a sort of truth I know so deep down, I can’t ever forget it.
https://jcsm.aasm.org/doi/full/10.5664/jcsm.10662
Technically I’m not completely sleep-deprived (which would mean a total lack of sleep), but sleep-restricted, which means a shorter period of sleep and/or frequent interruptions that leads to less-than optimal (putting it mildly) sleep time.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2017.07.010
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/sleep-deprivation-increases-alzheimers-protein
I discovered that talking to ChatGPT is a much lower-barrier to quickly writing and later organizing tasks than opening my workplace’s project management software (Jira) and making tickets in the moment/during a meeting. It’s only like 2 more clicks in Jira but talking to ChatGPT like a personal assistant is so much easier for some reason.