The Ultimate Sleep Hack for Boosting ADHD Entrepreneurial Success!

Oh my god I'm so excited about bringing this episode to you. It's a topic that touches every part of our lives as 'hustling' entrepreneurs - and I'm going to share with you the ADHD sleep hack I've discovered that ensures you get proper sleep and rest!

Hey, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach, and this is my podcast "The Weeniecast!"

Pssssst! Throughout May I'm running a one-month challenge to ramp up your social media client-attraction results. Don't miss out! Book in here - https://weeniecast.com/challenge

Now, back to the episode!

Yep, you read that right, that all-important rest we often shove aside for 'just one more email.'

This episode is all about unravelling the indispensable role that quality sleep and rest plays in our lives.

The importance of sleep

Whether you're running from meeting to meeting or brainstorming the next big thing, getting solid zzz's is like hitting the reset button for your brain.

It's fascinating to see how a good night's sleep rejuvenates us not just physically but mentally.

Imagine recharging all those creative and decision-making juices!

I'm also tackling some real-deal strategies to boost our sleep quality.

Trust me, I know our entrepreneurial schedules are anything but typical, but who says we need a full 8 hours uninterrupted?

Stuff to try, and stuff to avoid

We talked everything from diet tweaks - yeah, looking at you, midnight latte - to bedroom environment makeovers that encourage the sandman to visit sooner.

So after you finish listening to this episode, I hope you're feeling energized to follow my tips for prioritizing and improving your sleep.

And not just for health, but as a strategic asset in your business toolkit.

Have you registered for my May challenge yet?

You can sign up here - https://weeniecast.com/challenge

Stuff mentioned:

In the episode, I mention a few things for you to check out:

1. UC Davis (ucdavis.edu) - The university where I reads some sleep-related health benefits from.

2. Spotify and Audible - Platforms for listening to audio, such as Harry Potter books or sleep-supportive sounds.

3. Gaia and Calm apps - These are referenced in discussing meditation apps.

4. Gabby Bernstein - Author of the "Super Attractor" meditation app mentioned.

5. Jim Dale - Narrator of the Harry Potter audiobooks I recommend for soothing bedtime listening.

6. Jeff Bridges - He has an album called "Sleeping Tapes," which I played a clip from.

Timestamped Summary:

00:00 Sleep improves focus, memory, and accident prevention.

05:51 "Benefits of good sleep are endless, impactful."

07:18 Consistent sleep crucial for those with ADHD.

12:13 Brain replays embarrassing moments, advice not for you.

13:43 Audiobooks provide familiar and soothing escape.

19:25 Be mindful of the type of meditation.

20:25 Use specific meditation for sleep, not multitasking.

24:27 Businesses should support varied personal dream lifestyles.

Your next steps after listening

Realizing it's time to work with me? Book your free intial strategy call with me - weeniecast.com/strategycall

Get more support in your ADHD entrepreneur life by joining my hyperfocus community! - https://weeniecast.com/hyperfocus

Wanna get this content earlier, and totally unbleeped? Subscribe to the Apple Podcasts premium version of this show - https://weeniecast.com/winners

Want to just buy me a coffee in return for some helpful insight? Thank you! Here's where you can do that - https://www.buymeacoffee.com/katiethecoach

Mentioned in this episode:

Join the Hyperfocused Community

In this episode, I'm going to help you

sleep, but not before you finish listening. Hi, I'm

Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach, and welcome to the weenie

cast squirrel. I'm ridiculously

excited about the topic of this episode. It is one of my

absolute all time favorite activities and I love talking about it because

I think it is the most magical thing that any

human can devote time to. I'll give you a guess what it

is. No, you're wrong. It's sleep.

Get your mind out of the gutter.

And I say this having formerly been the type of person who

would always say, well, I'll sleep when I'm dead. I'll just sleep 4 hours

tonight and I'll catch up on sleep on the weekend. That's massively

unhealthy. And if you have ADHD like

we all do, it is really bad for your

ability to manage your ADHD symptoms.

So some of the health benefits of sleep, and I'm reading this

literally off of the ucdavis.edu website, it

promotes growth, which, I mean, I think I'm done growing, but sure,

if I am going to grow a couple more inches, great.

I will let sleep do the heavy lifting there. It promotes heart health.

Okay. Having a healthy heart is a really good thing. It supports

weight management. And as a woman who grew up in the

United States and learned from a very young age to hate my

body, as most women do, can we please do

something about that? Can we please start doing some more body positivity stuff

for young girls and for women? Like, I like to approach that from a healthy

standpoint. There's no one number that you need to see on the scale

to be successful, to be hot, to be healthy.

But being a healthy weight really does support your health and your

ability to live longer. So sleep helps you get there.

It helps you combat germs and keep your immune system strong,

which after the last few years, I think is pretty important,

it helps you reduce the risk of injury. As an adhder

who's very clumsy, who has fallen down the stairs multiple times

and manages to injure herself at least once or twice a year,

I need this. I need to mitigate that risk some way.

And if sleep is one of the ways I can do it, then yes, please.

You know the next thing on this list, it literally says it helps you increase

your attention span, which we all need. It also boosts

your memory and your ability to learn. I know when I'm

tired, when I haven't slept well. There are so many more moments in

the day where I walk into a room and think, what the fuck did I

come in here for? And then I have to turn around and retrace my

steps and figure out what it was. And sometimes I remember

and sometimes I don't, and I'm just wandering around my house,

just not knowing what I'm doing. And I know you've been there,

too. In addition to that list, I'm going to add some things.

Okay, UC Davis, if you're listening, you can add this to your list as

well. When you're well rested, you're also way more

creative. You have ability to access parts of your

brain that makes connections between completely disparate

things and allows for you to come up with really innovative solutions

to big problems and a little problems. It makes you more

creative in your content creation. When you are well rested,

you're also in a better mood. I'm far more likely to be in a shitty

mood when I haven't had enough sleep, right. If I'm well rested, like that

is half the battle of being in a good mood. You just have to make

sure you don't spill your coffee and you have the most perfect day ahead of

you. In addition to being more creative, you are

also far more grounded in

the positive beliefs you have about yourself. In coach training,

one of the things that we learned about were saboteurs. And saboteurs are basically those

voices of doubt that play up and tell you that you suck and that

you fail at everything. You're not gonna finish this. Oh, you look

fat today. And this and that and the other thing, they tear you

down to keep you in your comfort zone. And

those voices like, yes, they're a part of you, but they're also not true.

Those voices, their only job is to keep you safe and to keep you in

your comfort zone, even if your comfort zone low key sucks.

Doing the scary, brave thing is outside that comfort zone. And

those voices don't want you doing that, even if it has the potential for

big payoff, like starting a business. So

when you are tired, those voices pretty much have an

open door policy because you're too tired to really tap into your positive

voices. You're too tired to tap into your intuition and

into your heart energy and into your inner leader. And I know those are

all really super coachy words, but it really does

make a difference when you're able to ground into that

power and into that knowledge of everything that you're capable of.

When you're too tired, you just can't do it effectively.

One of my favorite discoveries about starting a business is that

sometimes my work for the day

includes taking a nap. And I am all about the

naps. I used to be anti nap, if you can believe it, but then I

discovered this magical thing called the granny napkin. And it's not a long

nap, it's a 20 or 30 minutes er where you lay down, you set a

timer and you just kind of doze for 20 or 30 minutes. You don't go

into a deep sleep. And I think the reason I was anti nap is because

I was so sleep deprived that when I laid down for a nap I would

just literally sleep for like two full REM cycles and I would wake

up feeling like I was in a different universe, in a different like time zone.

And that can fuck with you. But the reason I that

happened was because I was so sleep deprived. So the benefits to

sleeping well, to getting enough sleep, are

just never ending. It can make you live longer, it can make you

happier, it can make you healthier and it's going to make you more

creative and effective in this business you're working on. I think those are all good

things. I will also add that when you're sleep deprived, your

cortisol also shoots up, so you have higher anxiety when you're tired,

which is probably why those saboteur voices come in and we don't want

that. But we're still humans living in a very busy world

where we're expected to spend time with our friends, have a

meditation practice, work out every day, cook three really healthy

meals, call our moms, you know, text our dads

because our dads really don't like talking on the phone. Let's be real. We have

to shower, we have to do our hair, we have to do our makeup. If

you're a makeup wearer, we have to pick out a nice

outfit. We have to wear that outfit. We have to manage not to spill anything

on that outfit so that we don't have to change another time in the day.

We have to spend time with our kids or for babies. We have to make

sure that they get enough food and attention and exercise.

We have to volunteer so that we can be morally superior to everyone

else and, you know, also give back to the community

and good things like that. And we have to do

everything to be successful in our businesses or our work. It's hard

to fit in a good 8 hours of sleep with all that shit on your

plate. We're going to talk about sleep with the best intention of

you getting more of it. I want to name that. I

consistently get eight to 9 hours of sleep a night. As I'm

talking about this, I only got six last night, and I'm paying for it.

When you train your body to get eight to 9 hours of sleep, it's

really hard for your body to get less than that because

it gets spoiled and it doesn't want to give up what it actually needs. So

how to do you set yourself up to actually be able to sleep enough?

And it's so important for those of us with

ADHD to get enough sleep because our brains work so

hard throughout the day. Neurotypicals are lucky. They

wake up and they just go into their automatic routine. They

don't have to make all the decisions that we have to make, you know, for

us. We wake up and we're like, okay, cool. I need to shower, I need

to brush my teeth, I need to eat breakfast, and I need to work out

what order should I do it in. And you have to decide it every single

day. There's no automatic routine. There might be for a few months,

but then you fall out of it and you have to find a new one.

You don't realize it, but making even those most simple decisions

throughout the day, it's taxing on your brain. It requires your

brain to need more rest. And that's just the

basic human requirement stuff. It's not even the business ownership.

When you add the business owner stuff, the decision fatigue just goes through

the roof. Okay, so it is really important that we get enough sleep, and I'm

going to talk through a couple ways that you give yourself enough sleep.

All right, I'm going to talk through a couple things. And full

permission here to, as you're listening to this

episode, to just say, fuck off, Katie. No, that's not

happening. It's fine. These are just best practices. You don't have to do all of

them. You don't have to do any of them. But if you want to get

better sleep, these are things that are going to help you. Squirrel. Squirrel. For those

of you who get defiance around someone telling you what to do,

take a deep breath. This is not that episode. Squirrel. Okay, so the things

that will get in the way of you getting good sleep. First and

foremost, one of my favorite things in the world next to sleep is

caffeine. You should not be having caffeine

less than 10 hours before you plan on sleeping. I used

to be that person who could drink a cup of coffee at 09:00 p.m.. And

be able to fall asleep. I don't know what happened to my

body chemistry as I've gotten older, but now I can't have a

cup of coffee later than 1130 in the morning. It's really depressing. I

love coffee. I think it's one of the most delicious things ever discovered. And I

wish I could drink it all afternoon, but I can't because I won't be able

to sleep. When you have adrenaline in your system, it actually counteracts the

melatonin, which is another hormone that basically tells your body it's time

to sleep. So you wanna be very careful about caffeine consumption.

Light can mess with your circadian rhythms. The

thing that made me realize just how brutal light can be

to your circadian rhythm was when I was going live

during the pandemic later in the evening. Cause when I go

live in the evening, there's not a whole lot of natural light in my office.

And so I was using a very powerful ring light.

And so this ring light was just blasting my face

and my eyes. And what I found is if I went live

at, like, 07:00 p.m. With the ring light, normally I'd be able

to work, you know, 07:00 p.m. To like, 08:00 p.m. And get some projects done.

And that's fine, just working on my computer. And afterwards I'd be able

to, like, go to bed around nine and fall asleep around ten. But if I

have that ring light on, there's no way in hell I'm falling asleep before

00 a.m. It's one of the reasons I haven't really been going live a lot

lately, because I've become so conscious of it, it can mess with

you. And it's so funny because you can be absolutely exhausted. But if

your circadian rhythm is off and your brain thinks it's time to be awake

because there are bright lights around, or there have been, your brain just

will not shut down. And we all know what

is impossible when your brain can't shut down. It's impossible to

see. Of course, we've all seen the, like, random

studies about, like, looking at your phone and looking at the tv

and looking at any kind of screen. The blue light can

actually impact you as well. I'm a realist, and I'm also

someone who really enjoys sending senseless reels to my friends late

at night. Like, yes, absolutely. If you have the willpower

to not look at your phone for an hour or two before bed.

Dude, you are doing better than I am. It's possible for some.

I'm not in my era of being good with my

phone,

so that's kind of how we want to set ourselves up for

proper sleep. Those are the things that are really going to get in the way.

Like, what about when it comes to falling asleep, though, right? Because

you can be exhausted. You can be so

worn out from physical activities, from a

really long work day. But if something's going on,

if there's something stressful happening, or maybe your brain just

decides to, like, go through the memory file of all of your embarrassing moments

and make you replay them over and over and over again one night. That happens

a lot, doesn't it? You know, my brain really loves replaying this

moment where I slipped and ate shit in the hallway

in high school and everyone laughed at me and, like, my brain, like,

wants to come up with the mean comeback that I could have had. But what

mean comeback could I have had against, like, 17

kids laughing at me for falling on my ass? If you

were in that hallway, then stop listening to this podcast. You're not

allowed to get any of the advice that I give. Take it back. I'm doing

take backs. Any advice you've gotten from me now, stop

using it. Go and be really uncomfortable with your

adhd and your business. Squirrel, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel.

So anyway, when you have those moments and your brain is just trotting out all

the embarrassing things and all the things you should be stressed out about, how do

you turn that off? There are a few ways that I do

this, and you're gonna laugh. The number one way that I turn off this

voice is I play like any of the seven Harry Potter

books on audible. Ex speliarmus. Jim Dale has one of the most

soothing voices I've ever heard in my life. I

could fall asleep to that man talking all day long. I think the other thing

that helps here is I have read these books countless times. I

can't even keep track of how many times I've read them. I've also listened to

the audible books so many times.

So the sounds, the storyline, the characters

are all super familiar to me. There are only a few

chapters in a few books that if I'm listening to at bedtime, like, have to

listen, like, what's going to happen? It's like, I know what's going to happen. I

probably could say word for word each line about what's going

to happen. But here's what works about it is a. It's a

voice. It's something for you to listen to and focus in on and kind of

like distance yourself from your own inner voices. B,

it's a storyline, but it's a familiar storyline, right?

So you get sucked into the story but you're not hung up on like, what's

going to happen next and what's going to happen next, you know, are Ron and

Hermione going to end up together? If you haven't read the books, I will

not ruin that for you. But they do.

Just kidding. I had to ruin it. I'm sorry, Dumbledore. No, I'm

not going to say that something

happens with Dumbledore. That's all I will say.

Although while we're on the topic, I really think the biggest villain

in the whole series is Aunt Petunia.

That bitch. Like, she knew that

Snape and Lily were friends.

She knew. I mean, just imagine

if she had even in like a really bitchy, mean way

been like, oh, my God, your mother was friends with this

awful boy, Severus Snape. He was terrible, you know, but they were

best friends. They were inseparable. And they ended up going to that terrible

school together. Harry. And then Harry goes to

Hogwarts and sure, he looks like his dad and that like, is

a, gives Snape like a bad reaction, right? Cause he hated James

Potter. But what if he just went up to

Severus Snape, Professor Snape in the very beginning and was like,

hi, Professor Snape, someone told me that you were really good friends with my

mom. Imagine what could have happened with that relationship.

Imagine like they could have gone on picnics. They could have been like, you know,

the second godfather. Who knows? She didn't. She is the

villain in that story. I will never forgive her for it.

Moving on, if Harry Potter doesn't do it for you, pick a

book that you've listened to a bunch of times that has a

storyline and doesn't get your creativity running. I know

some people are like, cool, I'll listen to self help. I'll listen to

management books. I'll listen to creativity books. No, don't do it.

Because you and I both know you're going to hear something and it's going to

spark an idea for you and you'll be like, I have to get up and

journal right now. I have to get up and I have to make an Instagram

reel right now. Oh, my God. I have an idea for a blog post. I

have to do it right now. And then it's going to be 03:00 a.m. In

the morning and you're going to have 4 hours left to get a good night's

sleep and you're going to be so annoyed that you tried

to listen to this book. We both know that you'll be tired and grouchy and

you'll probably blame me, and I don't like that. So don't try

it. Sometimes we really just need like some kind of

sound to drown out the voice. What I find incredibly

helpful here is like on Spotify

or on audible, you can find a playlist of like,

thunderstorms with rain. You can listen

to rainforests, you can listen to babbling

brooks. The only thing with this, like, sometimes like the sound of running water can

make you want to pee. So be careful with your water consumption.

I've also discovered brown noise and it's

just kind of like, like this static

noise. It's amazing. It like, doesn't have

a storyline, obviously. It's not. There's no melody to it. It

doesn't sound like anything that happens in the natural world, but it just has this

way of turning off your brain and allowing your brain just

to kind of go blank. And sometimes that's all you need. You just need like

three minutes of that to drift off to sleep. And if you want to try

out the brown noise thing and you want some real top

quality vetted brown noise, then go to

weeniecast.com brownnoise and you can check

out one of our favorite tracks. I was talking with my producer as we

were talking through what this episode would be about, and we were talking about different,

like, like sleep meditations. And we were

joking about the weird, different storytelling recordings that

you can listen to. Like Jeff Bridges actually has a

whole album of storytelling that you can listen to as you

fall asleep. It's called dreamingwithjeff.com

Sleeping

tapes. I love

that idea and all that it

implies, you know,

sleeping tapes.

Sleep, of course, implies waking up.

Tapes imply

recording. Yeah.

Sharing things. I will never use it.

It's weird. It's Jeff Bridges. But if you want to laugh, you should go check

it out. We will put it in the show notes. So just go to

dreamingwithjeff.com or click on it in the show notes. But here's what

I want to say about guided meditation and using them for

sleep. If you are trying to maintain a meditative

practice and you're using a

specific method of meditation, so say you're doing transcendental

meditation or you are doing specific

meditations on the Gaia app or on the calm app.

You want to be very conscious of the types of meditation that you're

doing to do meditation for and the types that you're

using to fall asleep to. The reason

being your brain will learn very

quickly when a meditation comes on or when you go

into a meditation, if you're doing something that's more free form, if you're

using that to fall asleep, when you start meditating, your body, like,

cool, time to sleep now. And instead of having a meditation,

you will have a little nap when you're not expecting it. And

naps don't have the same impact as meditation. So if you

want to meditate, you have to really keep your meditation practice separate

from the sleep meditations that you follow. I

downloaded the app by Gabby Bernstein, the super attractor lady,

and I really like her app. I think it's really fun. I love

some of the manifestation work that she does on there, but I really, I

really love her guided meditations, but I actually don't use

them the way they're supposed to. I use them as sleep meditations

because I don't want to use any of the other meditations that I use

to fall asleep because I don't want to train myself to fall asleep. But

I find the music is really soothing. I really like that I'm falling asleep

to stuff that is all about manifesting and, like, getting in touch with my, my

inner self and, and so on and so forth. So whatever this is

for you, whatever is going to help you turn your brain off, find a

practice that you can stick to, but you want to be

deliberate about using that practice only for sleep and not trying to use it for

other stuff as well.

And I know I've touched on this already in this episode, but I

cannot stress it more that sometimes your job in your

business is to take a nap

genuinely. If you're a business

owner who's providing services or any kind of

solution to your clients, you need to think about what your

responsibility is to your clients, right. If they're paying

you money for your brain to be able to think things

through, you owe them a brain that is

able to think things through when

you're too tired, you can't do that.

Sometimes instead of, you know, blasting through emails

and, you know, going live and creating more content before your

next client call, sometimes you have to put all that stuff aside and

just lay down and get an hour's sleep. You owe it to your

clients who are paying you a buttload of money to be well rested and

at the top of your game. As I talk through this. I'm just

imagining, you know, someday I'm gonna have, like, a

whole retreat conference kind of thing, and smack dab in the middle

of the day, we're gonna have nap time. And you know what? Like,

underneath all the conference tables and everything, they're gonna be like those

mats that we had in kindergarten, you know, that you

unfold, and then everyone gets, like, their own little blank in their own little pillow,

and you just, like, go to sleep on the floor of the conference and just,

like, have a little, you know, 20 minutes granny nap. And then you, like, get

up, and then you get back to the conference, and you get to, like, be

in a good mood and, you know, almost like a midday sleepover. Wouldn't

that be fun if you would come to that conference

with that nap in the middle? Let me know. I'll put you on the list

to get a special rate. If you are really struggling with

sleep because you're experiencing too much stress,

that is not the point of starting a business. That is how a lot of

people start and run their businesses is from a place of fear

and just constant stress. That is not healthy.

If you're running a business and you feel like the stress of it is

running your life, you need a better way to run that

business. There are so many bad models

of what it looks like to run a successful business. I can't tell you how

many people I've spoken to who really want to start a business, but they're

terrified because their parents owned a business and their parents

had to work 13 hours a day, seven days a week, and they never got

any time off. And usually one of them

at least died early from heart

problems, a stroke, something that was stress related.

And while this person I'm talking to is like, I really want to start a

business, but, like, I can't do that. I can't do that to myself. I want

to see my kids. I want to live past 60. I want to

be able to do all that life gives me. But that's the only model I've

had for what running a business looks like. You need a better

model if that's where you're at. If you're running a business like

that, you need a better strategy.

You need a better action plan.

One of the things that I constantly bang on about with my clients

is, we're not designing a business that is going to be

successful but also run your life. We're not

designing businesses that require you to basically be a robot and be

110% every single day. We're designing

businesses that can be successful in the right way to

support you living whatever dream life you have. You know, maybe it's

working 20 hours a week and getting to coach the softball

team for your kids middle school. Maybe you want to have the nomad

life. You want to work 30 hours a week, but you want to be able

to do it from anywhere in the world. Maybe you want

to work 40 hours a week and you want to be able to get

hired to speak on stages, being the keynote and getting

paid really well for it. All those things are possible, but you need to do

it in a way that if you get sick or if something happens, heaven

forbid, you lose someone you love, something really inconvenient happens.

Like you're in a car accident and you have to take a day off. For

you to have a sustainably successful business, your business

has to be able to withstand that. And if you don't have a model for

how to do that, you need to learn how to do that.

Because when you have a successful business that doesn't require

you to kill yourself to run it, that's when you actually

get to live life. That's when you actually can feel

happy about this business. Sleepless nights

of your business are the first sign that

things need to change. So if you're listening to this and you're

currently sleep deprived because you're stressing out about stuff, then your first

assignment is to go and take a granny nap.

Because they're amazing and I love them. I know you will, too, if that helps.

And that's your new practice. That's what you're going to do every day. You're just

going to have a granny nap. If that's what helps you reduce your stress and

sleep better at night and do better work, great. That is your fix it.

But if the granny nap does not help,

then you, my friend, need to start changing some stuff in

your business and in your sleep routines.