sleep problems | ADHD Information

Diet I feel is the biggest difference of all. No sugar foods exspecially at night. (Background: on 4/8 my son started Adderall XR. The teacher saw
immediate hugely positive effects. At his IEP meeting on 5/9, she
mentioned that it was starting to wear off before the end of school,
and that Friday she said it was wearing off earlier and earlier the
previous couple days.)
Last Monday, the doctor increased the dosage to 20 mg. She said
(through the nurse) that one could go up by 5 mg, but
she prefered to go up 10 at this point.
Tues and Wed nights (especially) he could not get to sleep until 11
pm or later, when he used to be asleep by 9:15. He would just lay in
bed awake. (I don't remember what happened the next two nights,
and we decided to give him only 10 mg on the weekend.) The
teacher said he didn't seem overly tired or affect by lack of sleep, but
also that he did look a little tired.

Anyway, it seems to me that he could do this for awhile but then it
would really take a toll on him, and that the behavior improvement
has to be balanced with him getting enough sleep. So tomorrow I'm
going to ask to go down to 15 mg (which means we'll need a new
prescription because we'll need 5 mg capsules).

Some of the people from the school at his IEP meeting even seemed
to think that some kids have better luck with spreading the IR pills
throughout the day rather than taking the whole dose via XRs at the
beginning of the day.

Have others had luck finding a good balance between
the kid getting enough sleep and still having the meds last long
enough in the day? Or do we have to give up one or the other? Or is
this one of the things that different meds do differently for different
people and we should consider something other than Adderall if we
can't get both enough sleep and a long enough effective time? For
that matter, have people found that the IRs act differently wrt sleep
than the XRs?

And of course, with school ending in 1 1/2 weeks it's going to be
even harder to figure out (will probably keep him on meds over the
summer while he is in his summer camp program so that he doesn't
run wild on them...)

Thanks for any insight,
CJ Hi. My son has been taking adderall xr for over a year now. He started on 10mg and it's gone up from there to 30mg. Last week we stopped giving him ther adderall(against our pediatricians advice) because basically he was a mess.  Couldn't get to sleep, even with the clonidine his doc prescribed, very jittery, grinding his teeth and picking at his arms.  We started about 6 months ago with 25mg dose of strattera in the evening in addition to the adderall in the am, per our pediatrician. It got to the point where he was sleeping for only 6 hrs, after lengthy battles to get him to stay in his room.  He would not go to sleep.  If he got up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, forget it,. he was up the rest of the night.  And yes, for us it seemed the higher the dose of adderall xr the harder it was for him to go to sleep.  Since last week his sleeping habits are so much better. He's getting 9-10 hrs a night and it's not a battle to make him go to bed.  We've moved the stattera to the am and so far so good.  I'm going to talk to his teachers today to see if they've noticed a difference.  My son will be 8 in July, he's in 2nd grade.  It's so hard to figure out what helps and what doesn't,  but this last week my wife and I were so relieved that he actually responded so well to be taken off the adderall.  I hoped this helped you. I love this site knowing that we're not alone.  Thanks.