You lie down exhausted, and the moment your head hits the pillow, your brain throws open every file cabinet. The thing you forgot to do today, the thing you need to do tomorrow, and a random song from 2007 are now competing for your attention.
Conditions We Treat
Sleep & Insomnia
It’s 1:47am. Your partner has been asleep for hours, and your brain has just decided that now is the right time to replay a conversation from 2014 and outline tomorrow’s grocery list. Racing thoughts at night aren’t a sleep hygiene problem — they’re what an ADHD brain does the moment the daytime noise drops away.
Our Los Angeles insomnia therapy uses CBT-I — the gold-standard treatment — adapted for delayed chronotypes, revenge bedtime procrastination, and stimulant timing. Pasadena office, serving adults across the LA metro.
The reality
Sleep and ADHD have a complicated relationship that goes far beyond “just go to bed earlier.” Many adults with ADHD have a naturally delayed circadian rhythm — your body clock genuinely runs later than the world expects it to. Add to that a brain that finally stops being bombarded by daytime demands and suddenly lights up with creative energy, anxiety, or both, and you have a recipe for years of accumulated sleep debt. The irony is brutal: poor sleep makes ADHD symptoms worse, and ADHD makes it harder to get good sleep. Breaking this cycle requires more than sleep hygiene tips. It requires understanding how your specific brain interacts with rest.
Recognize the pattern
What this can feel like
You finally fall asleep at 2am, wake up at 7am feeling like you’ve been hit by a truck, and spend the day in a fog that makes your ADHD symptoms twice as loud and your coping skills half as effective.
Revenge bedtime procrastination has become a personality trait. You know you should sleep, but these late-night hours are the only time nobody needs anything from you, and giving them up feels like giving up your only freedom.
You’ve tried melatonin, white noise, weighted blankets, sleep apps, and every “sleep hygiene” suggestion on the internet. Some helped briefly. None helped reliably. You’re starting to wonder if anything will.
Your partner falls asleep in seven minutes and you resent them for it. Not in a genuine way — but in the way that happens at 1:30am when you’re the only one awake and the world feels unfair.
Your stimulant medication helps during the day but sometimes lingers into the evening, and figuring out the timing feels like a chemistry experiment you never signed up for.
The cumulative effect of poor sleep has made you someone you don’t recognize — irritable, forgetful, emotional, checked out. You’re not okay, and you’re too tired to explain why.
Our approach
How group therapy can help
CBT-I, ADHD-adapted
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia, or CBT-I, is the gold-standard treatment for chronic sleep difficulties — and it works differently for ADHD brains. Standard CBT-I assumes you can maintain a consistent sleep schedule, which is exactly the kind of thing executive dysfunction makes difficult. Our approach adapts the evidence base: we help you build sleep routines that can survive the weeks when your executive function is unreliable, using external cues, accountability frameworks, and strategies for the nights when the standard advice (“get out of bed if you can’t sleep”) conflicts with your ADHD brain’s difficulty with task transitions.
Racing thoughts, sorted
In group, you’ll learn to distinguish between the kinds of racing thoughts that respond to cognitive techniques (challenging catastrophic beliefs about sleep) and the kinds that respond to behavioral shifts (creating a wind-down routine that actually interests your brain enough to keep it off the anxiety channel). You’ll also address the emotional layer: the dread of bedtime that builds up after months or years of failed sleep, the frustration of watching the clock, the shame of being exhausted in a world that treats tiredness as a personal failing. Other group members will share what’s working for them, and you’ll build a personalized toolkit from strategies tested by people whose brains share your wiring.
Accountability your brain responds to
The group format also provides an unexpected benefit: a reason to practice sleep hygiene that isn’t just for yourself. Knowing that the group will ask how your sleep experiment went this week creates a gentle accountability that ADHD brains respond to. You’re not doing this alone in the dark at 2am anymore. Our Los Angeles sleep therapy group gives you a weekly checkpoint to track progress, troubleshoot setbacks, and remember that your sleep struggles are not a character flaw — they’re a predictable outcome of a brain that was never designed for the 9-to-5 world, and there are real strategies for changing the equation.
Ready when you are
You don’t have to figure this out alone
If you’ve been running on empty, surviving on caffeine and adrenaline, and you can’t remember the last time you woke up feeling rested, there is a way through. You don’t need to have sleep figured out before you walk in the door. You just need to be tired enough to try something different.
Common questions
Frequently asked questions
Is this just sleep hygiene advice?
No. Sleep hygiene (avoid screens before bed, keep the room dark, etc.) is the starting point, not the treatment. Our approach uses CBT-I, which addresses the cognitive and behavioral patterns that maintain insomnia. We work on the thoughts that keep you awake, the behaviors that disrupt your sleep drive, and the emotional relationship you have with your bed — all adapted for ADHD brains.
What if my sleep schedule is genuinely different from most people’s?
We work with your natural chronotype, not against it. If your body clock runs later, we focus on optimizing the sleep you can get within a realistic window rather than forcing you into a schedule your biology resists. The goal is better sleep, not perfect conformity to a 10pm bedtime.
Will this help with the racing thoughts?
Yes. Addressing the mental chatter that keeps you awake is a core component of our approach. You’ll learn specific techniques to quiet the “brain radio” at night, including cognitive restructuring for sleep-related worries, scheduled worry time earlier in the day, and mindfulness practices adapted for shorter attention spans.
How long does it take to see results?
Some people notice improvements within the first two to three weeks of implementing CBT-I strategies. More significant changes usually develop over six to eight weeks of consistent practice. For adults with ADHD, the timeline can vary because consistency itself is part of what we’re working on. We measure progress by trends, not by perfect adherence.
Can I attend if I take sleep medication?
Yes. Many of our members use sleep medication and attend group therapy concurrently. CBT-I can complement medication by addressing the behavioral and cognitive patterns that medication alone cannot fix. We do not prescribe or manage medication, but we are happy to coordinate with your prescribing provider.
