Meditation and ADHD
Hi! This is my VERY FIRST blog post on my self-named domain! I’ve got so many feelings! I have so many ideas of what I want to do with this blog space. For example, my mind is constantly thinking of ideas and perspectives. I’ve tried to get better at writing them down, which I have; however, I never usually do anything with them. Just hoard my ideas and save them on my computer somewhere. This spring, I want to do a 30 day challenge to convert 1 idea a day into a blog post. I don’t want to care so much about the quality of the content but about practicing the conversion of idea to blog post. That said, that isn’t what this is.
What this is is… basically me studying what I read in a book last night. I recently bought “You Mean I’m Not Lazy, Stupid, or Crazy?!”, a self-help book for adults with ADHD. I did something I never do. I started at the index, browsed the topics, and picked the one that was most pressing to me: mental hygiene. But I didn’t get very far before the book was like, yo, you should read the chapter on meditation before you go any further. So off I went to that chapter.
Now, this book was originally copyrighted in 1993, so it’s a bit out of date… the way that sticks out to me the most is the weird slang that my teenage self laughs at. But I’ve grown enough to know that just because I’m alive and relevant now doesn’t mean that those who were alive before or who will be alive after me (or who are older or younger than me) don’t have something very important to share with me.
But anyways, I’m getting sidetracked. Point is, I read about meditation for the first time in a perspective pointed at ADHD’ers. FINALLY… someone who understands MY mind and doesn’t look at me like I’m crazy when I say meditation makes me feel crazy about bad about myself. I felt VERY seen and queued in to see what these folks suggested. So this is all to say that the rest of this post is basically me taking all the substantive pieces from the book and compressing it for my own mental consolidation and hopefully as something helpful for you, the reader, as your growth is my secondary passion to my own. Shall we?
Most ADHDer’s are allergic to meditation until self-care practices improve and (maybe) we are on meds. Brain noise and restlessness are several notches higher than those without ADHD so we need meditation even more. Additionally, we’ve likely picked up bad habits to compensate for ADHD that serve us poorly in the long run, such as running on adrenaline. Our lives are likely subconsciously organized to have drama and crisis on a regular basis, if not just in our own minds. We’ve learned to be stimuli junkies.
We can recover from these habits by recognizing the need to slow down, even if we don’t know how, moving towards de-adrenalizing our minds, bodies, and lives. Here are some context-less quotes that really spoke to me:
“She had no medication or information about how her brain worked when she was forming her life habits.”
”The only thing medicine does for you is to turn down the noise and thus help you become available for the learning.”
Much of the speed involved in an adrenalized lifestyle is self-induced. Mentally beating yourself up can give your brain a jump-start because it is stimulating. However, these methods to jump-start the brain have a crash which can often look like one’s body going through the motions of living but the mind being on another planet. Essential to recovery is meditation, medication, mental hygiene, and moving forward. Let’s briefly meet Dave, completely out of context. Don’t get too invested in Dave.
“Dave was not tuned in to himself enough to realize that he had an adrenaline addiction going. The stimulants did not cause his anxiety, he was just tuning in to his body’s sensations, perhaps for the first time in his life.”
If we don’t create pauses in our lives to check in with ourselves, we may end up using our meds as a tool to push ourselves even harder than we already do.
“We wonder what we are really capable of now that the ADD is under control. In truth, we have an infinity capacity to grow and change… []… We forget (or never knew) that it can’t all happen now. So without taking time to monitor the effects of small changes, we start piling more and more stuff on our plates. In short order, we are right back where we started. Remember, an overload of stress equals more ADD symptoms.”
They’ve convinced me. I need to slow down and I want to use meditation (manifested in the form best for me that only I can determine) to do so. Great news is, you don’t have to sit down or stop moving to meditate. As an aside, that isn’t the first time I’ve heard that… my brain has always just said, “they’re just saying that to the fragile people; I need to be bigger and better”. However, this book maintains that there is no true one path to calming the mind.
ADHD'ers experience a lot of failure (more specifically, failure to even launch) and we picture meditation as this big scary thing that no ordinary human can do. Put those two together and you have an ADHD’er who doesn’t have any hope they can do meditation right. But this book says that meditation isn’t all that. Like I said above, it doesn’t even require sitting down. Believe me, when I read that last night, I briefly imagined what if I released the expectation on myself to do seated meditation. What if I did things that easily brought me into a meditative state? That feels like cheating. Isn’t that weird? Like going on the bunny hill. Oof,… that’s some dysfunctional thinking there, Marie. But let’s move forward.
The book encourages us to allow ourselves to take baby steps and make room for fumbling around. But it reassures us that you can’t fail at meditation simply by having a lot of mental chatter. Everyone does. meditation just begins by observing. Then we can practice detaching from thoughts so the mind can function without interference.
Guidelines the book offers that I thought were neato:
Repeat to yourself as much as necessary: “Meditation is a practice. I intend to enjoy and learn from the experience. There are no wrong ways to do it and I will refrain from grading myself.”
Get comfortable. If you lay down and fall asleep, you probably needed it. You do not need the added body discomfort as distraction.
ADHD’ers may live an adrenalized lifestyle, so keep it mind it can take time to transition from a frantic space into a relaxed state. You can have rituals to transition into meditation like sensory cues.
Choose a single focus for meditation, like breathing, a mantra, sound/music, or a visual focus, so long as it works for you.
Don’t should yourself if you have a higher need for activity. Moving meditation is just as good as seated and often better for the ADHD’er. The goal is to calm the mind. Why make it harder by meditating in a way that keeps your mind busier? If you pick moving meditation, let it be something simply and repetitive on autopilot, like walking.
When meditating and thoughts start piling up, gentle disengage your attention. Then bring it back to your chosen focus. On same days, you may be repeating this a lot.
It will get easier as you practice and the key to success is very small bites, like starting with 5 minutes a few times a day. Once you become more comfortable, you may naturally increase the amount of time because it’s so enjoyable.
The purpose isn’t to actively clear the mind but to step back from the noise and put your attention on your chosen focus. This will help you chose your focus during the days.
Hope this was helpful for you. It was helpful for me. Oh, also, I’m working on getting a sign-up thing so that y’all can opt-in to get notified when there’s a new post. Otherwise, if you’re into RSS feeds, you can do that. Peace!
