At some point in the last few years, ADHD escaped the therapist’s office and moved onto your phone. It has shown up in short videos and carousel posts, where clinical language is flattened and packaged into something more immediate: “Five Things You Thought Were Normal, But Are Actually ADHD.”
Suddenly, forgetting your keys, struggling to text friends back, leaving cabinet doors open, clicking out of that 10-minute long YouTube video, or feeling overwhelmed by a simple task all seemed to have one possible explanation: 314.01 Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder.
To be clear, much of this increased awareness and democratization of information has been genuinely helpful. For many people, it has led to greater understanding, validation, and access to support. Adults who’ve spent years feeling confused, misunderstood, or inept have found language for experiences
they’ve carried their entire lives.
At the same time, there’s another possibility that often gets left out of the conversation: sometimes the symptoms that look like ADHD are actually symptoms of chronic sleep deprivation.
The overlap is surprisingly significant.
When people aren’t sleeping well, they often report difficulty concentrating, forgetfulness, trouble starting tasks, emotional reactivity, procrastination, and feeling mentally scattered. In other words, many of the same struggles that send people down an ADHD rabbit hole in the first place.
This doesn’t mean that ADHD isn’t real or that people are exaggerating their symptoms. However, it does mean that sleep deserves a place in the conversation.
When Poor Sleep Starts Looking Like Something Else
One of the worst things about poor sleep is that its effects seldom stay contained to the nighttime.
The popular image of insomnia is cinematic: a person awake at 3 a.m., staring at the ceiling, bathed in blue darkness. But insomnia’s real damage is usually less dramatic. It shows up the next day, when your brain feels foggy, your patience is thin, and even routine tasks seem oddly difficult.
That’s because sleep deprivation affects many of the cognitive skills we rely on throughout the day. When in a sleep deficit, attention becomes harder to sustain, working memory becomes less reliable, decision-making requires more effort, and emotional reactions become more difficult to regulate.
Suddenly, you’re rereading the opening line of an email three times. You’ve forgotten what you walked into the room to do. You’re overwhelmed by a short to-do list.
Consider, for a moment, your relationship to this very blog post. Have you read it in a single uninterrupted sitting? Or has it become one browser tab among many, patiently waiting while you check a text, scroll a feed, answer an email, and remember what you came here to read in the first place? Attention is harder to come by than it used to be, and sleep is only one reason why.
Naturally, people start searching for explanations.
In a culture that increasingly encourages us to diagnose ourselves through short-form content, it can be easy to miss the most obvious question:
How have I actually been sleeping?
The Modern Attention Crisis
Part of the confusion is that many of us are living in conditions that challenge attention regardless of whether we have ADHD.
When are we not interrupted? We switch between tabs, apps, notifications, texts, podcasts, and emails. We carry our work in our pockets. Oftentimes, we consume information until the moment we close our eyes. Then we have the audacity to wonder why our brains feel fragmented.
Many people enter a cycle that might look something like this:
They feel overwhelmed during the day →
They spend more time trying to catch up →
They stay up later to reclaim personal time or finish tasks →
Sleep suffers →
Attention worsens the next day →
They become more concerned about their inability to focus →
…And the cycle repeats.
Whether or not ADHD is present, poor sleep almost always makes concentration problems worse.
A Question Worth Asking
When someone comes to therapy concerned about focus or productivity, one of the first things I want to understand is their sleep.
Not because sleep explains everything.
But because it’s difficult to evaluate attention when the brain is running on inadequate rest.
Someone once explained it to me this way: Imagine trying to determine whether a car has an engine problem when the fuel tank is nearly empty.
The diagnosis might still be correct, but you’d want to add gas first before drawing conclusions.
Similarly, if someone is sleeping four or five fragmented hours per night, their daytime symptoms may look very different than they would after several weeks of consistent, restorative sleep.
A CBT-Inspired Experiment
One of the core ideas of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is testing assumptions instead of immediately accepting them as facts.
Therefore, instead of asking: “What’s wrong with me?”
Try asking: “What happens to my concentration when my sleep improves?”
For one week, treat sleep as an experiment:
● Keep a consistent wake time.
● Reduce late-night scrolling.
● Create a brief wind-down routine.
● Notice how your focus, memory, motivation, and emotional resilience change.
In this experiment, you don’t need a perfect sleep schedule or eight flawless hours every night. You’resimply gathering data. Sometimes people discover that their concentration improves dramatically when sleep becomes more regular. Other times, they find that attention difficulties persist despite adequate sleep—which may provide useful information worth discussing with a healthcare professional.
Either outcome is valuable.
Understanding Before Labeling
One of the unintended consequences of online mental health discourse is that it can make diagnosis feel like the ultimate finish line. However, the real goal isn’t necessarily to determine which label fits best. The goal is understanding what’s happening and finding effective solutions.
Maybe ADHD is part of the picture. Maybe insomnia is. Maybe both are.
In fact, ADHD and insomnia frequently coexist, with each exacerbating the other.
The important thing is resisting the temptation to skip over sleep when evaluating attention problems.
Sleep is often treated as a lifestyle issue—as if it’s something separate from mental health. In reality, sleep is one of the foundations upon which attention, memory, mood, and emotional regulation are built.
Sleep may not explain every attention problem, but it’s often one of the first places worth looking.
If you’d like support with this, I can be reached at victoria@chaminajjan.com or 917.476.938.
