An ADHD Morning Protocol That Actually Works for Waking Up

Am I the only one who feels like absolute crap for the first few hours of the day, no matter how much sleep I get? Like, it's not really even about being a night owl. Whether I wake up at 7:00 a.m., 10:00 a.m., or 2:00 p.m., for the first few hours of the day, I'm just not functioning. Mornings are consistently the hardest part of my day. If I stay in bed, do nothing, and then like lounge around for a couple of hours, I eventually start to feel okay, but then I'm super behind on everything and I feel this like guilt the whole day. And if I like force myself to get up immediately and then like get stuff done and be suddenly productive, then I just get like overwhelmed and burned out

after a few hours. It honestly feels like there's no winning. No matter what I do, the daytime feels absolutely out of my control. I lose hours without meaning to, and then something weird happens. As the day goes and other people start to slow down and wind down, I start to get more and more awake and more energized. And by the time everyone is sleeping, I'm finally calm and able to focus and get stuff done. But, it really sucks because not only I'm wasting majority of the day, but it also makes it incredibly difficult to plan anything that involves other people. The world expects you to function when your brain feels at its worst, and by the time your brain finally comes like online, everyone else

is literally logging off. So, after years of suffering because of this, I dig into the research and found that there actually three specific reasons why this happens. The first one is called sleep inertia. Like most people imagine waking up like a light switch. Like you go from sleep to wake immediately. But when you wake up, actually different parts of your brain come online at different speeds. And for most people, that whole like boot up process takes about like 15 to 30 minutes, maybe up to an hour or so. But for people with ADHD, it can take for hours. ADHD makes this worse as its core because ADHD is a disorder of regulating brain states. Switching from one state to another is exactly the thing that our

brain struggles with. So, instead of going like from a sleep to wake, we go from sleep to zombie, slightly less zombie, functional, and then 6 hours later, you're suddenly ready to reorganize your room at 11:00 p.m. And then, the second reason is melatonin, essentially the hormone that tells your body to power down. In ADHD brains, it release it's late, usually by around like 90 minutes and sometimes more. So, basically like your internal clock runs late and your body ends up on a different time zone than the clock on the wall. So, there's a mismatch between the actual clock and your internal clock. And then, there's this third thing that no one actually really talks about. Nighttime is the only time that

the world is suddenly quiet and no one expects you from anything. There's no request, there's nothing that I need to do at midnight. And it feels like it's like the only part of the day that truly feels like mine. And kind of like sleeping and giving it up to sleep feels like a loss. So, sort of like delaying sleep becomes a way to postpone that inevitable return of the morning, the thing that I hate the most. Both an act of rebellion against the lost daytime autonomy and an avoidance of the anxiety that tomorrow represents. When your daytime feels like out of your control, you take some back of it at night, even knowing that the next morning is going to make you pay for it. And these three

reasons create this like inevitable loop of always hating and wasting the majority of the day and then trying to protect night time and then sleeping later, getting less sleep, and then again, same things happening over and over again. And after years of grief and feeling like I'm wasting my majority of my days, I realized I couldn't break this loop with just willpower or fancy morning routines that everyone recommends. So, I needed to build a routine that actually adjusts my biology and addresses all these issues that I'm facing. I finally came up with a protocol that allows me to function like a normal human being in the mornings.

I'm not saying I'm extremely productive, I'm just saying that I'm actually awake and functioning in the mornings. So, here's what I do. So, the first step of my protocol is pre-dosing caffeine. You probably drink coffee or get caffeine after you wake up, but I realized that actually the order of these actions needs to be reversed. You first take the caffeine and then wake up. How does it even work? Let me explain. So, you basically set an alarm clock of 30 to 60 minutes before your actual wake up time, and then you take a caffeine pill or a pre-made cold brew when that alarm like rings. And then you go back to sleep, sleep for another 30 to 60 minutes, and by the time you wake up, caffeine

actually hits and it makes it way easier to wake up and start your day. This is a very big game-changer because most of the productivity advice or like morning routines assumes you can get out of bed, but for me personally, even like going to the kitchen and making coffee sometimes takes like an hour for no reason. I'm just like turning around bed, and I'm just wasting time because like switching from sleep to wake up is very hard. So, this caffeine hack works extremely well. But with most caffeine pills, sometimes the caffeine can be like unpredictable. Sometimes it hits, sometimes it doesn't. So, I'm like testing out different brands. I haven't really found a good one, but you can

also do it with a cold brew. You can prepare it in a tumbler or something. You can put it next to your bed, and right after the alarm clocks, you just drink it and then go back to sleep, which works magically. And after you actually wake up, now you open the curtains and you turn on the lights. This is very important because sunlight alerts our brain to you say like it's time, it's morning, and it resets your circadian rhythm. And light is one of the most powerful things to wake up your brain other than caffeine. But most of the time you might like feel lazy to go from bed and open the curtains and turn on the lights, right? And for those people, I actually recommend a curtain opener. They're like these like tiny

electronic things that you can put onto your curtains, and it opens the curtains for you, and you can schedule a specific time so that you get sunlight directly in at your desired time. And if you're not like getting naturally sunlight in, then you can also get these like Philips Hue lights, which you can schedule to turn on at certain times with certain like clarity. And you can also like schedule them to gradually lighten up your room, which makes it super easy to wake up. And once you get that like caffeine and get some light in, it makes it surprisingly easy to wake up. But, still the dread of starting the morning, right? Like all the tasks piling up and are waiting for you, just creates this

like overwhelm and makes me feel like, "Ugh, here we go again. Another freaking day that I have to do a bunch of stuff." So, what I actually started to do is after I open my curtains, I take immediately a warm shower. The act of getting a warm shower in the morning allows me to like process and slowly wake up my body, rather than this like rushing and immediately starting my day, which makes me burn out. The shower is almost like a my comfort task. It doesn't feel like a real task, but it's still productive. And after showers, I always feel way better, so it's a net positive. And also, it allows me to like stay vertical as much as possible, so that I don't like go back to bed again

and sleep in and waste hours lounging around. And I like to finish off my warm showers with a brief like cold shower to really wake myself up and remind myself that I'm ready to go. So, it's almost like a cushion action between starting my day and sort of like waking up. And in that like warm shower, I usually come up with my best ideas. So, it's one of the new habits that I'm actually implementing that I really love. And it also like this warm shower combination with the ending of like cold shower allows your parasympathetic system to go to a sympathetic system, which also wakes up your body and makes you way ready to tackle the day, which is not talked enough, in my opinion. And I like

to have my breakfast while doing some light therapy. I use this daylight light thing, which gives a 10,000 lux, essentially like strength of light. And I don't like looking to it directly but I just like put it and a while I eat my breakfast I get this daylight in. If you are able to get a lot of like sunlight into your room and if it's like sunny it's great but it's essentially extremely important especially in winters and also if your room doesn't get that much sunlight. The sunlight therapy is proven to also work for seasonal depression as well and it also wakes up your body and resets your circadian rhythm. Because our circadian rhythms tend to be weighed like the late than other people. It signals your brain

again that this is the morning time. And when I actually do daylight therapy I realize that my brain fog goes away way faster and I'm able to focus way more during mornings. So it's actually an essential part of my routine right now. While I'm doing this light therapy it is recommended to do a 10,000 light lux light therapy for 20 to 45 minutes. I usually do like for about 30 minutes. If you can go outside and get some sunlight usually like 5 to 10 minutes is enough because sunlight is extremely strong. But if you get like a 5,000 lux daylight for example you have to do it longer which makes the morning routine way long. So I prefer to do with a 10,000 lux daylight. So after I have my

breakfast the next step of the protocol is to do a brain dump. You can do this on a paper or you can do it on your phone like me by dictating your voice and getting your thoughts out. So the important thing is getting every single worry every single overthinking patterns or anything that's like catching your interest right now externally out so that you can visualize it and can actually look at it and almost like free up your brain power, right? So the brain dump practice is an essential thing. And I like to do this while getting some daylight in. And for that I prefer to use my Kaizen system. I designed this Kaizen system specifically for people with ADHD so that we get more things

done not necessarily productive but stop feeling always behind on everything and feel guilty all the time. So I designed the system and I like to do this brain dump in my notion system and I like to voice dictate. I like to get all of my thoughts out using a tool called Whisper flow. I'm not sponsored. And I like to see it visually in front of me like this. I basically have a table like this, right? With my foldable phone and I get things out and I can see everything like this in front of me. I found this is way easier than doing like a classical journaling, even though I think there's an immense benefit of having a physical journal and writing your thoughts out, but most of the time

in the mornings I'm not like that awake. So I like to stick it to voice version. And after like I have this thing in front of me, I look at my today's schedule and I like to pick one action that is going to make today a win. Most of the time I used to think like I need to get all of my to-do list out, right? I need to finish everything, but most of the days realistically I'm not going to finish like 90% of that because I know myself. So during this morning like the life therapy, I like to pick one thing that is going to move the needle and I like to focus on that. And literally forget the rest. So I like to only focus on that signal. So that I get out of this like overwhelm and I like to write

down the first action step to do that signal. So for example, if it's maybe I don't know, like read this book and research about it. Rather than writing it down like finish reading this book, I like to write open the page 108 and read for 5 minutes. That is my first action. By lowering the starting action and making it extremely super clear, now I have a crystal clear vision of what I need to do next finish my morning routine. And this has been a game-changer. And for the remaining tasks and schedules of my day, I like to plan it the day before as much as I can. But depending on my mood and depending on my energy, I adjust it during the day. But usually this act of picking just one thing that I'm going to focus

and writing down the first action of that thing during my morning and having a crystal clear clarity has changed a lot because usually I used to like procrastinate maybe an hour or more just to transition from my morning routine to starting work, but after I started to do this, it become way more easier. And throughout my day, I use my Kaizen system to plan out my day, and sort out my tasks, and match tasks accordingly to my energy. But they're more like hacks and tweaks that I do with my Kaizen system to adjust my day so that I am a bit more productive. If you're interested, check out my Kaizen system in my website rudyahuang.com. Or you can also watch this video to learn more

about it. After I figure out the signal of the day, then the next step is having like some green tea or coffee with L-theanine. So you might be thinking like, "Fei, again? I need a lot of caffeine to function." I'm not quite resistant to caffeine, but one thing that I don't like about caffeine, it gives us like afternoon crash. If you don't drink like another cup around like 3:00 4:00 p.m. or so, you suddenly feel way more tired because of how caffeine works. Caffeine essentially works by blocking adenosine-like channels. So you're essentially actually building up like tiredness. And once the caffeine's effect goes away, that channel opens up, and suddenly you're feeling way more

tired. And I don't like that about caffeine. I like to combine actually L-theanine supplement with my morning coffee, or I just like drink straight up green tea, which has naturally L-theanine in it, which allows me to have a way more sustained focus throughout the day, and I feel awake. And after I have my coffee, I give myself about like 30 minutes to transition from morning routine to actually sitting down and starting my work. And I like to use a visual timer like this. This is a Amazon knockoff that I got, which is super loud, which basically shows the time visually, which allows me to understand the perception of time and time passing, and also reminds me that I have 30 minutes to transition to work. And once it finishes,

it basically beeps like that, which signals me that I actually need to sit down and get some work done. But as you assume, most of the day, I do not sit down and get some work done. So in that case, I have a rule that if I find myself procrastinating more than 30 minutes, I get out of the house and walk to a cafe and get the first task of the day done. Like the first action of my signal, which I already identified during my morning the daylight therapy, and I do that in a cafe so that I get into this motion. Because once I get into motion, it's way easier to like keep continuing, but the act of getting into motion is extremely difficult compared to other people. And one part

that a lot of people are forgetting about is that actually morning routines are tied to night time routines, right? And one hack that I've been experimenting recently and was kind of like thinking whether I should share it or not is microdosing melatonin about like 3.3 mg 5 to 6 hours before desired bedtime. There's some like interesting researches that shows that the classical way of taking melatonin, like the supplement an hour before bed, like 5 mg or 10 mg that some people do, can actually make you feel more groggy in the morning and makes waking up way difficult. But when you microdose melatonin, like 0.3 mg 5 to 6 hours before bed, it actually mimics like a natural melatonin production of normal people. So, you get sleepy at a normal

time like normal people do instead of getting suddenly these energy bursts at 2:00 a.m. So, it slowly like naturally allows you to reset your circadian rhythm and it makes it harder to have this like revenge bedtime procrastination because you're so sleepy and it makes it easier to stick to a fixed sleep schedule. So, it's a new thing that I've been trying out and I feel like it's actually starts to work because I'm literally sleeping at like 12 or 11:30 p.m., which I never done in the past. So, it is clearly working. It's not that tested, so I wanted to give a disclaimer, but maybe you should give it a try because it really works for me. Now, obviously, there might be other reasons why you're experiencing

these sleep issues. That might not be just ADHD, it might be iron deficiency or it might be other sleep disorders. So, I always recommend you to go to a doctor and get a proper diagnosis and treatment done. But, I also want you to give a try to this protocol because it has been a game-changer for me. I'm finally awake in the mornings for the first time of my life. I'm obviously not like very functioning, like high-functioning, but at least I can have a conversation, I can get some work done in the mornings, which has been a game-changer for my productivity. So, I'm really curious whether I'm the only one that struggles in the mornings or do you also struggle this much? Because I need a freaking protocol

just to wake up, which is crazy. So, if you want to join like a community of chaotic minds like me, check out my Kaizen System because when you get my Kaizen System, you also get an invite to our Discord community where I'm also in and there are almost a thousand members right now. So, check out my website rudyahuang.com because I know you're going to enjoy Kaizen System if you enjoyed this video because I created it for people like you. Because you're probably me. See you.