Last night I was up over an hour past when I wanted to be in bed, sitting in the dark in my son’s room, waiting for him to settle down. Nothing worked. Not the galaxy projector. Not the rain sounds. Not the binaural beats on Alexa. Eventually I just turned everything off and sat there quietly until he stopped wiggling.
If that sounds familiar, you’re in the right place.
My wife Kay and I have been doing this for over 30 years. Our son Michael is 36. We have not found a magic formula. I want to be really upfront about that. But we have figured out eight things that help more often than not and I want to share all of them with you because I know how exhausting this is. When your kid doesn’t sleep, you don’t sleep. And that takes a toll on everything.
None of these work every single night. Some nights you try all of them and you still end up sitting in the dark. But here’s what we’ve got.
Key Points
- Exercise and mental activity help children with autism sleep better.
- Room comfort, timing of meals, and minimizing sugar/caffeine matter.
- Sound machines, projectors, and safe supplements can aid sleep.
- Patience, flexibility, and calming routines reduce bedtime stress.
1. Physical Exercise – this is the big one
If Michael has had a genuinely active day walking, jogging, playing basketball, just moving around steadily on his feet he is so much more likely to go to bed at a reasonable hour and stay there. This is probably the most reliable thing we’ve found in 30 years. Sometimes the best sleep aid really isn’t in a bottle. It’s just being worn out. If you can build real movement into your child’s day, do it. It makes a bigger difference than almost anything else on this list.
2. Mental Exercise – counts too
This one surprised me, honestly. After a solid 45-minute speech therapy session, Michael will go sit on the couch and just be quiet for a few minutes. You can see it on him. His brain is tired. Puzzles, matching games, learning tasks, therapy activities when he really has to focus for extended stretches throughout the day, it shows up at bedtime. He’s genuinely worn out. On days when the weather is bad and we can’t get outside, leaning into mental engagement has saved us more than once. Mixing physical and mental is probably the sweet spot.
3. Food and Timing matter more than you think
Right now Michael’s last food intake is around 8 PM, which is honestly probably too close to his 10 o’clock bedtime. Most of what I’ve read points to a three-hour gap between eating and sleep as the goal, and we’re not quite hitting it. What I know for sure is this: if he has anything sugary after 8, we’re going to have a long night. And caffeine in the afternoon is just off the table entirely if we want any shot at a reasonable bedtime.
4. Room Temperature and just being comfortable
We’ve been keeping his room around 70 degrees at night. After last night, I’m thinking about trying 68. But beyond temperature, there’s something to just being cozy in his blanket, on his pillow, all settled in. When he gets that big smile on his face right after lights out, you think, okay, maybe tonight’s the night. Sometimes it is. Last night it wasn’t, but you can kind of tell when the conditions are right.
5. Sound Machines, Projectors and Binaural Beats
We’ve tried a bunch of things here. The Planetarium Projector Pro you can find it on Amazon for around 30 bucks – it projects galaxies and moon visuals onto the ceiling and rotates slowly. Michael is fascinated by the motion. Sometimes that’s enough to calm him down and carry him off to sleep. We also use the Lulia sleep therapy sound machine, which runs for 30 or 60 minutes with ocean waves, rain, that kind of thing. And then there’s binaural beats, which you can find on YouTube or through Alexa at different frequencies. It’s worth trying a few to see what works for your kid.
Fair warning though sometimes all of this just becomes that evening’s entertainment. You’ll know pretty quickly which way it’s going.
6. Supplements, and when we really need it – Medication
Kay and I aren’t big on relying on either of these, but there are a few things we’ve used. Melatonin worked better for Michael when he was younger. Over time I think his body just got used to it and it stopped doing much. These days we use a Methyl Folate supplement 15 milligrams around 7:30 at night and it does seem to help settle him down and reduce some of the anxiety. I want to be clear: it’s not a cure for anything. But for us, in our situation, it helps.
Our actual last resort is a low-dose prescription called Doxepin. It’s the generic for Sinequan. We give him one 10 mg tablet, which is half the recommended dose. When it works, it really works. The downside is he can be pretty groggy the next morning, which isn’t ideal. So we save it for the nights where nothing else is getting us there. And obviously, talk to your doctor before going near any of this. What works for Michael may not be right for your child and you need to factor in whatever else they’re already taking.
7. Sometimes, let them stay up and figure it out
I know this sounds backwards. But some nights the most sensible thing we do is dim the lights, let Michael have his puzzles or the TV on with something calming, and just back off. We watch him on camera. And sometimes, not always, but sometimes he’ll just crawl into bed on his own. That feels like winning the lottery when it happens.
Other nights we’ll check the camera at 1 AM and there he is, half-asleep on the couch, head nodding, but absolutely not going to take himself to bed. So one of us goes down and walks him to his room. Either way, there’s something to be said for not turning every single bedtime into a battle if he’s safe and you can keep an eye on him.
8. Prayer
I know this isn’t for everyone, but I’ll just say after enough sleepless nights, a lot of parents find religion real fast. I personally believe prayer helps, and I start early on the nights when I can already tell it’s going to be a rough one.
Our BCBA Glenn Carter who was on the last episode had a great idea. We ordered a big rosary with beads this morning. His thought was that the repetitive, tactile nature of moving through the beads could be genuinely calming for Michael. It doesn’t have to be a rosary. Whatever fits your faith or your family. The idea is the rhythm, the touch, the sense of moving through something. We haven’t tried it yet but I thought it was a really thoughtful suggestion, and I’m looking forward to seeing how he responds to it.
We’re still figuring it out and that’s okay
Thirty years in and some nights we still sit in the dark waiting. I don’t say that to discourage you. I say it because I want you to know you’re not failing when nothing works. This is just hard. It’s hard for a lot of families dealing with IDD and the sleep piece is one of the hardest parts of all of it.
My hope is that one or two of these eight things gives you something new to try. And if you’ve found something that works for your kid that I haven’t mentioned here, I genuinely want to hear about it. Every family is different. The more we share, the better we all do.
Found something that works for your family? Send it my way. I’ll share it with the whole community.
Reach me at mike@autismlabs.com. Here’s to more sleep and fewer midnight standoffs. Have a good one.
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Transcription:
Mike Carr (00:04):
Welcome back to this week’s episode of Autism Labs. We’re going to talk about something that I think is probably relevant to everybody. And that’s how to improve sleep, both your own sleep and your child’s sleep too. So when was the last time you didn’t go to bed when you really wanted to because your special needs son or daughter kept you up? Well, for me, it was last night. I was up for more than an hour later than normal, trying to help my son settle down. Now I had the moon and the stars up on his ceiling with his galaxy projector and he thought that was pretty cool, but it wasn’t going to cause him to go to sleep. And I had his wave music playing, his rain sounds and wave sounds playing in the background, and that didn’t do it either. So I switched to binaural beats on Alexa.
(00:47):
And binaural beats is sort of interesting. That’s spelled B-I-N-A-U-R-A-L. It’s on YouTube and it’s on Alexa and it’s got all kinds of different videos and sounds at different frequencies. So you can try different ones to see if there’s a particular frequency that really works well for your kiddo. And it’s soothing and it’s all about helping them go to sleep. Sometimes it works. Last night, nothing worked. So eventually I did what a lot of you guys probably do. I just ended up turning everything off and sitting in the dark quietly in his room, waiting for him to stop wiggling around and stay in bed. And we’ve been on this journey, my wife and I for a while. Our son’s 36, and so it’s been 30 years probably we’ve been fiddling with this. We haven’t found a magic formula yet, but we have found some things that work, at least sometimes more often than others.
(01:35):
So I’m going to take you through eight things that have helped us and maybe some of those will help you get your kiddo to sleep and hopefully then you can get some sleep as well. So I’ve talked about this first one before, and that’s physical exercise. And this is probably the most reliable one. If Michael’s out and he has a very active day, lots of walking or jogging or basketball, just steady movement, right? When he’s up on his feet, moving around, he seems to be much more likely to go to bed at the right time, which is around 10:00 PM for us and stay in bed. So sometimes the best sleep aid is not in a bottle. It’s just being worn out. Number two is mental exercise instead of physical exercise. And this one sort of surprised me. But after a really intense speech therapy session, which is maybe 45 minutes, Michael is visibly worn out.
(02:19):
He’ll go sit on the couch for five minutes and just be quiet because the brain uses a lot of energy to process. And when he really focuses and really concentrates and he does it for an extended period of time, he does it several times during the day. That’s not a bad way to wear him out, especially if the weather doesn’t cooperate. So puzzles, matching games, therapy activities, learning tasks, all that mental engagement really seems to work. When his brain works hard, he’s tired at the end of the day. Now mixing the two is I think probably the best. Number three is nutrition, food, and when. Now this one’s a little bit less consistent for us. Right now, Michael’s last food item is about eight o’clock at night, which is a piece of sugar-free cake, and that’s probably too late because he tried to go to bed by 10:00.
(03:01):
And then we limit his amount of water after that. I think most experts that you’ve probably read about and I’ve read about two say three hours, right? Three hours between your last meal and your bedtime is probably ideal. And we haven’t tried the 7:00 PM gap yet, but I think it’s probably a pretty good idea. Certainly we know that if he has sugar after 8:00, he’s going to be jacked up and it’s going to be really hard to get him to bed. And of course he doesn’t get much caffeine at all and certainly no caffeine afternoon if we want to have a shot at getting him to get to bed the right time. Number four is room temperature and comfort. And this one’s probably pretty obvious to you, but we’ve been typically setting his thermostat to about 70 at night. I may try 68 tonight, especially after his annex last night, but he does enjoy, just like we all do, getting in his blanket, underneath his blanket and his sheet and he’s on his pillow and he’s all cozy.
(03:45):
He’s got that big smile on his face and he seems happy. And so you can just sort of tell that, oh, he might have a good night’s sleep. And he did that last night. He seemed very happy. I turned the lights off and he had his star thing going up above his head and he popped out about five minutes later. So it doesn’t always work, but I do think comfort matters. So let’s talk about music and let’s talk about sound and let’s talk about visuals. Sometimes they help and sometimes they actually become that evening’s entertainment, which is of course not what you want. We have a couple different things we try. This is something you can buy on Amazon. It’s called the Plantarium Projector Pro. It’s about 30 bucks. What’s cool about it is that these little carbs that have different galaxies and moonshots and whatnot, and you project this thing up on the ceiling when you turn all the lights out and it slowly rotates.
(04:32):
And I think that slight motion really fascinates him because you can be looking at the moon and all of a sudden the moon’s at a slightly different spot. And so sometimes that sort of calms him down, it distracts him and he’ll go to sleep. As I mentioned other times, we have to turn the thing off because it just isn’t going to work. Another thing that you can also get, I think on Amazon, I think we got this at Walmart for like 20 bucks or $22 is this Lulia, L-U-L-I-A, Leah sleep therapy sound machine. And you can set this for 30 or 60 minutes. You can set the projector for like an hour or more. This is 30 or 60 minutes and has all kinds of sounds. So water lapping up on a beach, so waves or rain or all kinds of other things that seem to be soothing.
(05:13):
And we did try recently the binaural beats. That’s what I was trying last night. And again, the different frequencies can be helpful. Nothing worked last night, but sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. Supplements and medication. Now we’re not huge fans of relying on neither one of those, but there are some things that are pretty benign in terms of side effects. It’s not going to cause any harm. Melatonin is one of those things that a lot of physicians will recommend. It worked better for us when Michael was little. I also think your body sort of gets used to some of this stuff. So if you start giving him melatonin and it works, but you do it consistently, then over time, I think he builds up a resistance or your child might and it just isn’t going to work anymore. And I think that maybe happened to us with melatonin.
(05:53):
Another thing that we use is a supplement called methylfolate. And we use this particular brand. I don’t think it makes a whole lot of difference what brand you’re using. This one’s 15 milligram dosage. We give him one pill about 7:30 at night and it will often calm him down. This is one of the active ingredients in what RFK Jr. Touted a couple months ago as a cure for autism. And I don’t think it’s a cure, but this particular supplement does help with some behavior and anxiety and whatnot. And the last resort is a mild sleep medication. We are not interested in sleeping pills per se. This is Doxepin. It’s 10 milligrams. So it’s these 10 milligram tablets. This is the generic for the Sinequan caps, S-I-N-E-Q-U-A-N. So Doxepin is much cheaper for these itty bitty, small, yellow things, and we give them just one. The actual dosage is supposed to be two.
(06:51):
So we may try to, if we really have a tough night, but we’ve typically given him one. Doesn’t always work, but when it works, it works well. And it will tend though to slow him down the next morning. So that’s the problem. He’ll look groggy in the morning when he gets up and that’s not ideal. So I would say for any supplement or for any kind of prescription med, of course, go to the doctor, talk about other meds, supplements your kiddos on, and then try to figure out, is this really, really worth it? Number seven, this seems counterintuitive. Just let him stay up and put himself to bed. And you say, “Well, okay, is that really going to work?” Sometimes it actually does. We’ll dim the lights, we’ll let him have his puzzles out, have the computer game on. He might have the binaural video on the screen, on the TV set, and he can just mess around for himself for an hour or two.
(07:31):
We’ll have him on camera and then he’ll sometimes crawl into bed, which is great on his own. However, sometimes as sleepy as he is, he will not go into bed. He’ll just sit there on that silly couch and you can see him nodding off, but he will not take himself to bed. And so Kay and I both falling asleep, one of us will wake up at one in the morning and there he is sitting on the couch and we have to go down and escort him into the bedroom. So I do think though there’s something to be said for if nothing else works and they’re going to be safe and you can watch him sort of on stealth mode with a camera, let him sort of mess around at night has worked well for us. And last but by no means least is prayer. Now, some of you may not be especially religious, but after enough sleep deprived nights, we have found that a lot of parents suddenly find religion.
(08:15):
And I personally believe that prayer helps. And I often start praying early when it’s obvious we’re going to be having a rough night. Now, Glenn, one of our BCBAs, and he was on the last episode, so if Glenn Carter’s the guy, he had a great suggestion this week and we’ve ordered this morning a rosary, a big bead rosary. And what he thought about it was he can teach Michael how to pray the rosary. It doesn’t have to be the rosary. If you’re Jewish or if you’re different faith, whatever is appropriate, but this idea that it’s repetitive, it’s calming. You can do it with him. There’s something tactile that that rosary bead or the beat of whatever the prayer beat is, he can make progress. And if he does enough of that, it sort of calms him down and gets into the room. So we’re going to try that.
(08:53):
I can’t say this is going to work, but I thought it was an interesting idea. So those are the eight things that have helped us at different times. Now, again, none of them work every single night and sometimes you have to be creative on how you mix them all together. But I do think for any parent out there, there’s probably a couple of these that might work for you. And if you found something that you think really works for your child, please let us know. I mean, either make a comment or send me an email note and I’ll be sure and post it. You can reach me at just mike@autismlabs.com. So Autism Labs is all one word, just mike@autismlabs.com. And I’d love to learn anything else that works for you guys and your kiddos that is different than what I’ve said or just totally missed.
(09:36):
So here is to more rest, fewer midnight standoffs and our better week ahead for you and your family. Have a great one. See you.
