The Night the Clock Falls Back

[MUSIC PLAYING] This is deaf audit. Who murdered your potential? The podcast for women in medicine and health care, who got the diagnosis late? ADHD, ADHD. This is a light-hearted dissection. I'm Dr. Sabine Oloffman, board certified pathologist, functional wellness coach, and my own best client. I got the answer late, too. Everything I'm about to describe, I lived first. So let's open the file. You've done the interventions, cut the hours, take the leave, come back to the same deficit. I did all of it. In pathology, when the treatment fails, you don't push harder on the treatment, you question the diagnosis. Because what you are carrying isn't a character flaw, and it isn't situational, it is the metabolic cost of 30 years of running executive function manually. Because nobody, including you, saw the deficit. That's masking. Unpaid cognitive labor, compounding daily. Nobody ever sent you the invoice. And it doesn't arrive as tiredness. It arrives as skill loss. The words don't come. You forget things you never used to forget. Sticky notes on the monitor on the desk. On the sticky notes, a chart that you once closed in four minutes, and you can't close it at all. And quietly, you start wondering about your brain. I did. Competence was never the question. Until suddenly it looked like it was. There's a lot of good material out there on burnout and medicine. And almost none of it accounts for what ADHD does to the math. So the advice lands raw. More tools, another weekend off, more water. You don't need a better way to tolerate the load. You need a system reset. I study death to teach people how to live. So pull up a chair. Let's find out who killed your potential. Welcome back to death audit. This one is a timely one, and it's about a combination of multiple scenarios all in one day. October 31st, Halloween, and the night the clock falls back. So today's case is not a person. It's a weekend. 72 hours, three exposures, one body. Exposure one, Halloween. Exposure two, sugar season, which opens tonight and doesn't close until somewhere after no years. Exposure three, the clock. Tonight at 2 a.m. it falls back an hour. The pesky daylight savings time. This year, all three land on the same night. If you have ADHD or ADHD, especially if you found out late, you have already paid a tax most people never see. The forgotten form, the late fee, the second trip to the store, the expedited shipping on the thing you knew about four or three weeks ago, and the energy it costs to look like you have it all together. Yeah, you know that, you know that tax. So you've been paying it your whole life. What I want to show you today is what happens when three ordinary stressors hit an all ready loaded system in the same window. They don't add, they compound. One plus one does not equal three in a body that already is not running at capacity or below. So, let's open the case, three exhibits, then the findings, then one thing you can do before Monday. Exhibit a Halloween. On paper, Halloween is one evening. And the ADHD body, it's a three week event with a single deadline. Look at the specimen. The costume, decided, undecided, re-decided, and then you ordered it late, shipped fast at a premium, long size. The school parade on a weekday morning, which means rearranging a clinic or a shift, the sign-up sheet for the class party that you saw meant to answer and didn't. And then the candy, bought early, eaten, bought again. First, you only buy the stuff that you actually like, but the problem is you like it and slowly eat it. Then you think, oh, I get smart, I only buy the stuff, I don't like. You still eat it, but you then complain about it. The result is always it's being eaten. And that's not a character flaw, that's a mechanism. An ADHD brain doesn't run on importance. It runs on interest, novelty, and urgency. So a deadline that's three weeks away isn't real yet. That's a thing in the future. A deadline that's tomorrow morning is suddenly completely real. So the work happens late under pressure, at a higher price, and that's the tax. Now, look at the evening itself. If you're at home, the doorbell rings every few minutes for three hours or so. Every ring is an interruption. And you think it's funny, yes, it's a but it's an interruption. Every interruption is a task switch. And task switching is precisely the thing your executive function pays for. Each restart costs something. Three hours of restarts is an expensive night. No wonder he eating all the candy. If you're at work, it's the hospital version. The unit gets louder, the break room fills with candy. Someone's in a costume. The emergency department gets it's halloween traffic, more noise, more motion, more stimulus, same workload, or worse. So, your attention system doesn't get a night off just because everyone else is having fun. And here is the part nobody names. The masking, they don't really like that work, but it's something to it. You're performing calm and fun and participation and maybe there's also some fun in it, but it costs a lot of energy and you're performing calm for the kids. Being cheer for the neighbors, performing competence for the team, all while your filter is getting hammered by sound, light, interruption. That performance has a cost and you will pay it later, usually Sunday, or when you're too young for it later in life, but you will pay. Exhibit B. First season, now the sugar. And I'm going to start by clearing a suspect. Sugar does not make children per se hyperactive, that's been studied for decades. Control, trials, blinded with placebo, pooled together, they show no meaningful effect of sugar on children's behavior per se. There's one study I love. Parents were told their child had just been given a big dose of sugar. And the child had actually been given a placebo. Those parents rated their kids as more hyperactive, they watched more closely, they criticized more. Interesting. The sugar wasn't in the child, it was in the expectation. So if sugar isn't actually the cause, why does this season feel so bad? Because we have been looking at the wrong level, cause versus mechanism. Sugar is not the cause, it's the delivery system, and here is how it works. And an adult ADHD blog. Mist meals, hyperfocus at work, impact clinic, a long case, and the lunch simply doesn't happen. You notice hunger at 4 o'clock when it's kind of already urgent, and the nearest food is the candy bowl. at the nurse's station. Past sugar on an empty system for many people that means a quick rise, then a dip in our two later or earlier, foggy, irritable, flat. Second, the dopamine loop. It brings us chronically steeping stimulation when you're at ADHD. And sugar is a reliable needle. It's synthet. It's often a self-regulation and not a weakness. And Halloween puts that head in a bowl by the door on every counter and every break room for weeks. Third, the cue load. Every bowl of candy is a decision. Take one or don't. That's a small decision made dozens of times a day by the same executive system you need for everything else. Well, power isn't the problem, the environment is. The fourth, the timing. Candy eaten late, standing up in the kitchen after the kids are asleep, then a restless night, bad sleep. So the sugar, per se, doesn't make you hyper. It makes you unstable. And the instability is expensive for a brain that already struggles to hold steady. The clock, the third exposure, the one everyone calls harmless. You had an extra hour of sleep, yay! Well, that's the label on the specimen jar. But let's look at what's actually inside. The time change isn't a sleep event. It's a whole body event. Every organ you have keeps time. You'll live what you've got. You're adrenal glands, your immune cells. You're coordinated by a master clock in the brain in that clock sets itself by light and cortisol. When the wall clock moves an hour overnight, the master clock doesn't. It takes days to catch up. Some research actually suggests about a day per hour of a shift for many people, it's even longer. I know, for me, it's about a week. It takes a week every time. And the organ clocks resync at the own pace. For a stretch of days, your systems are out of phase with each other. Picture and orchestra, where half the players got the new tempo and half, didn't. Yeah, now, now, add ADHD. A large share of adults with ADHD have a delayed body clock. In some studies, it's roughly three and four. Melatonin rises later in the evening, sleep comes later, mornings are harder. And many of you have been running on a mild, permanent jet lag your entire adult life and calling it personality. So you are starting from a body that's already out of sync with the world, then the world moves to clock. And the extra hour, it often doesn't arrive because you wake up according to your cortisol and not according to a clock that somebody arbitrarily sets. You can't actually sleep in as an ADHD. It doesn't happen. Nor typically it's maybe. ADHD is usually not. And then the extra hour, if it doesn't arrive, if the kids stay a while still awake on the old time, your cat, for sure, my cat does not go with the time change. Just like, all right, we don't participate. And the dog wants breakfast at the old time. Your shift starts when it starts. And you lie awake at the new bedtime because your body says it's an hour too early. So then there's the light. From Monday, darkness arrives five and the afternoon much of the country. Super early. You drive home in the dark. Less daylight in the second half of the day means less signal to the clock, lower mood, lower drive. And researchers have found a measurable rise in depression-related hospital contacts in the weeks after the switch to the standard time. The clock change doesn't hit everybody equally. It hits hardest in the bodies with the least margin. So just one of these things can just kind of put you into a margin call situation. Imagine when all three happen at the same time. Like it is now. So let's write the report. If you looked at this weekend, October 31, 2026, one exposure at a time, you'd sign it out as benign. A holiday, some candy, one hour on a clock, nothing to see. That's how it gets missed. And that's how you get missed. Because the finding is in the interaction. Halloween drains your executive function, interruptions, decisions, masking, lower executive function means you skip the meal, reach for the candy. The candy destabilizes your energy and keeps you up late. Late nights push an already delay clock further back. Then the walk-lock moves. And your body is now two problems behind instead of one. Then the light goes and with it, some of your drives. Each exposure lowers your defenses against the next. That's compounding. Not addition, compounding. And here's the report line I want you to hear. The cause of Monday's collapse is not that you're weak. It's not that you lack discipline. It's not that you can't handle a holiday that five-year-old's hair law. The mechanism is load. Stack load on a system that was already compensating. And you have been compensated for years. Running the clinic, the household, the kids, the charting all on a brain that works differently than the one the system was designed for. And compensated means it works. But it doesn't mean it's free. We guess like this are when compensated systems start to show the strain. The irritability, the forgotten appointments on Tuesday, the 3 p.m. wall, the sense that everyone else just adjusted, but you didn't fail to adjust. You were carrying more than the others were, the Nord-typicals. So what to do with this? Not 10 things, one, my ADHD mantra is always optimized for simplicity above all, optimized for simplicity. Optimized for simplicity. Anchor the morning. For the next seven days, get up at the same time on the new clock. But every day, including next weekend, then within half an hour of waking, get daylight into your eyes, outside, if you can. But chances are, if you're up really early, that won't get one of those lamps. Sit in front of it. Do your thing, but have the 30-minute exposure. 10 to 15 minutes is also very doable, but 30 is better. I walk to the car, coffee on the step, the dog around the block, overcast still counts too. If you want to go outside, that's great too. Outdoor light is far stronger than anything in your kitchen. So if you can't get outside, better get one of those specific lamps. And that's it. Here's why that's the one thing. Morning light is the strongest signal your master clock receives. A fixed wake time, plus morning light, pulls a day late clock earlier. And it helps every downstream organ basically resync. So it's the single lever that touches all three exposures. Better times sleep means steady executive function. Steady executive function means fewer skipped meals or improper meals, and fewer candy decisions, and fewer in and out decision making about the candy, it works upstream. And it requires no well power. In the evening, when you have the least of it, it's smoother. You make the decision once in the morning when the tank is fullest. And two small supports, if you have room for them, you know, eat a real meal with protein before their trick of treating starts, not after, and move the candy out of sight. And you're covered, not on the counter. You're not removing the option. You're just removing the cue. So it helps me. Take advantage of the out of sight, out of mind, situation that we have. going on. Change the environment, spare the brain. Now, the proposal. So, if this weekend made you recognize yourself and if you've always felt like you were working harder than everybody else for the same results, that's worth looking at properly. Not as failing as data. That's the work I do. Mapping where your energy actually goes and what it's been compensating for you. Find the starting point of your own energy leagues and if you didn't know you have ADHD but you're considering or you're wondering about it, it can really save your life. So, I have a free test that you can take on my website and you can see where you fall into this. Go to sabin-ulaflan.com/start. This isn't a weekend to fix your life. It's a weekend to stop blaming yourself for the bill. So, here's what I'm asking. Another plan, a single commitment to more morning before you look at your phone, go outside 10 minutes or get a light. That's all. Notice the light. Notice that you choose it and see what happens. Do that for the first week after this trifecta and see what happens. This was another death audit episode dedicated to Halloween, daylight saving time, and the sugar monster. I will see you next week. This was death audit who murdered your potential. If this episode resonated or if you know someone who'd benefit from hearing it, please subscribe, like, and forward it to them. As a renegade pathologist and functional wellness coach for late diagnosed women with ADHD or Audi HD, in medicine and health care, I studied death to teach you how to live. If you don't know what your next best step is, take the free inventory questionnaire on my website. My health matrix audit. You will find it at sabin-o-lawflon.com/start. Until then, I will see you next week.