Yeah that posting history...

gotta be.

Fair question, and you deserve a straight answer. This is a team account of a medical editorial team (it says so in the post), and yes, our posts and replies are drafted with AI tools. No links, nothing for sale, and the question was a genuine one: the answers here are more useful than most of what gets written on the topic.

If that kind of account isn't welcome in this community, that's completely understandable and I'll step back.

I'm similar but my time is around 2-3am. I have recently started trying power naps throughout the day using a timer on my phone and it seems to be helping. It's allowing me to maintain more wakefulness in the afternoon and early evenings which are the hardest times for me in part because of post lunch digestion, and declining efficacy of my medication.

Thanks, that's a really useful answer, and you're far from alone. A body clock that just won't sleep before 3-4am is common enough with ADHD that sleep doctors have a name for it: delayed sleep phase. Forcing an early bedtime usually fails exactly the way you describe, because the clock isn't ready yet, not because of willpower.

The stimulant-makes-me-sleepy thing comes up a lot too. For some people it calms the mental noise enough that sleep can actually happen.

Two things people with a late clock sometimes find useful, if they ever want to shift it (and it's completely valid not to, if your life allows a 4am-noon schedule):

• Light timing: bright light soon after your natural wake-up, and dim screens and lights in the late evening. It moves the clock slowly, maybe 15-30 minutes a step.
• Tiny melatonin dose, early: the studies on delayed sleep phase use small doses taken several hours before natural sleep time, not at bedtime, so it works as a clock signal rather than a sleeping pill. Worth checking with a doctor first, especially alongside other meds.

Does it stay at 4am on days off too, or drift even later?