Don Romano 🍹
Even with all the stuff I placed over and around the windows, the small amount of daylight that leaks in at the break of dawn (currently 4 AM) is enough to wake me up.
Because I can't do any more to block it and still let in some air, I'm trying something new: Instead of using the red Nightlight preset on Philips Hue, I have made a Moonlight preset, which is just the Energize preset (cold white) on minimum brightness. It seems to mask daylight better.
Don Romano 🍹
I don't know when I started becoming sensitive to daylight at dawn. It started sometime in my early thirties.
I've always been very sensitive to seasonal variations in daylight in general, but I didn't really become aware of it until adulthood, when I noticed that I would always have less trouble getting up for work in the summer.
I didn't notice that I was a summertime early riser as a child. There was no school to get up early for then, and I was bad at keeping track of the time.
Don Romano 🍹
Issues with getting out of bed in the wintertime weren't the first thing that clued me on to my sensitivity to the seasons.
Rather, it was depression. My mood would always be much lower during the winter months, especially up north, where you barely get any daylight during those months.
It could be seasonal affective disorder, but I could also chalk it up to the ADHD. When your dopamine and noradrenaline levels are low, they are also more sensitive to little things.
Don Romano 🍹
I don't have any research to back up my claim that low dopamine/noradrenaline in ADHD makes you more sensitive to your environment, but casual observation and common sense tells me that this is true.
If you have low amounts of the chemicals that power your brain, small changes in their levels will feel bigger, because they are bigger in terms of the percentage.
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