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ADHD Brains Show Strange Sleep-Like Activity During Everyday Tasks
(scitechdaily.com)
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this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2026
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Medicine
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Interesting, now I wonder whether folks on the autism spectrum perhaps experience less sleep-like brain activity throughout the day. Might explain why meltdowns after stressful situations are a phenomenon, so in the sense that we can't process it as we go.
I don't have a diagnosis, I only score quite high on autism self-tests, but something I also experience is that the mental exhaustion seems to build up in the background over the course of an eventful day, and then in the evening when I'm home, it takes maybe half an hour before it feels like my brain is pushing against my skull in all directions and it becomes really difficult for me to take in new information.
I can also kind of work against those symptoms by meditating or perhaps rather not taking in new information for a few minutes. Naps don't work as well, because it seems like blood circulation is vital for fighting off those symptoms, but I'm also just likely to fall into a really intense, yet not very deep, sleep for a few hours.
It kind of feels my brain caches everything it wants to retain throughout the day and then starts processing it in the evening all at once. And then as it's processing it, it builds up something which needs to be transported off. The closest thing I've heard in that regard, is that mental exhaustion leads to a glutamate buildup: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2333230-why-thinking-hard-for-several-hours-can-leave-you-mentally-exhausted/
It does feel like an extreme version of mental exhaustion.
And yeah, long story short, maybe others' brains are able to start processing in the middle of the day, due to this sleep-like brain activity?
Could also be, though, that my social anxiety prevents me from doing this sleep-like brain activity.
I do also have a reputation for exceptionally good memory, so maybe my brain just caches the whole day, because it can. Or this intense post-processing is how it's able to achieve the exceptional memory in the first place, which also seems very likely.
This braindump brought to you in the middle of the night, after one of those multi-hour naps. My brain is still not done processing the day, but about 90% there. 🥴
I.....with AuDHD I really don't know if my experiences apply to this discussion but I wanna chime in anyway.
Since I was a kid other people had an issue with me for being "too serious" about everything I do, talk, and think about each day, and I had never been able to understand how someone can think about or do something without devoting their brain's energy to it.
Boredom is a suffering torture to me for if I cannot run my mind on something it slowly slogs and shuts down in a very "painful" manner as I drift off despite pushing my willpower to return whatever I am supposed to focus about but find intellectually unstimulating.
Ironically, an intellectually stimulating day is much less exhausting than one that is full of nothing to work on or think about.
Before getting ADHD meds my days ends with a terrible exhaustion that doesn't completely heal after sleeping, and with meds I feel my daily exhaustion reduced dramatically, to the point even some of the days which I forgot my meds I can "push through" because I don't have residue exhaustion from the previous day.
Maybe this is why I have a two phase sleep cycle. To much stuff? Just sleep more! Thanks brain. Thanks body.