ADHD and Meditation
ADHD and Mindfulness Meditation
You mentioned meditation could help ADHD?
Not just any meditation, but mindfulness meditation using breathing. Many meditative techniques use concentrative means and use breathing, but mindfulness added to this mixture is what makes this form more useful and powerful, especially for use in helping general mental health, for use in diagnosis and treatment, and specifically for ADHD.
Can you explain more and how it could help?
Mindful awareness is the first moment of any experience that occurs before the thinking mode of the mind gets involved. Mindfulness is an example of the experiencing mode of the mind the part involved with intuition and creativity that by definition is pre conceptual, that is before we use thinking. Mindfulness is hard to define but can be described and must be experienced to be really understood. It is awareness that comes out of only present moment paying attention on purpose, that uses experience by sensing-feeling and accepts reality for what it is , and as it happening. This has many possible uses in mental health and is discussed elsewhere, but for our purposes for ADHD its power using breathing is in staying aware in the present and working together with thinking mode usual concentration to help us function better in daily living.
How would this work and why does it work?
People having trouble paying attention especially to less interesting stimuli, thus the child who can focus on TV or play Video Games, because of amount of stimulation, yet can’t do school work because it is less interesting. We are all like this but for ADHD people it is much worse, and they need some less interesting stimuli to use as a training ground to help develop their concentration or focus powers. Also they need to “know” that what they are doing as they are doing it, and have some sort of feedback that they are paying attention and getting better at it. Mindfulness using breathing is ideal for this because mindfulness is all about “knowing” what is happening as it is happening, thus provides the feed back needed, and the breath is a readily available neutral stimulus that can be used as a train ground anywhere and anytime.
How do you do it, can you describe it?
It is easy to describe , but can be very hard to do without practice, and for people with problems with concentration whatever the cause it may be next to impossible without using medication management to treat the cause of their concentration problem, for the ADHD person that would be some stimulant medication at least to get started, which can be stopped once the meditative method has helped. The process is paying attention to ones breathing only in the present moment, not use thinking at all, accepting each breath for what it is, and when distracted from the exclusive focus on the breathing, to notice what the distraction is, and then to return back to the breathing. Simply the formula applying mindfulness at each step and breathing, breathing, distracted, and return back to the breathing, over and over, again and again.
How and why does this help?
The present moment awareness of the breathing increases concentration the “focus factor”, and the noticing of the distraction whatever it is increases the” knowing factor” giving the needed feedback, that in fact you are continuing to pay attention, which further re-enforces the “focus factor”, even more so as on return back to the breathing. The knowing factor improves the focus factor and vice versa, a fantastically simple yet super effective feedback loop, increasing concentration with each cycle of breathing.
It does sound simple, what makes it so hard?
Even if you don’t have a deficit in concentration what makes this so difficult it the very nature of the thinking mode of the mind which causes our mind to wander based on three features. The first being that it our mind works so much of the time out of our awareness, on auto pilot, second it reacts to the emotions of the moment, and which in turn three pulls us out of the present moment, bringing in past experience and future wishes and fears.
How can one over come these difficulties?
I could explain it to you, but like learning to ride a bike, or dance or play a musical instrument or a sport, all the thinking and logical instruction in the world, in no substitute for practice, practice, practice and more practice. The simple explanation is to shift into the feeling-sensing-experiencing mode of the mind more and more, by excluding all thinking from the present, the past and the future.
How does one do this practically?
One does this by using what I call the 4 F’s, first Find your breath, and then Feel the breath only, don’t use thinking activities like thinking about it, or trying control it, or expecting anything special, or judging what your doing good or bad, and then Following your breathing, like in dancing you follow its lead, as it goes in and out, over and over, and the last F, stay exclusively Focused only in the present moment, no thinking from the past or future.
This is getting complex, can you summarize the process or make it more simple?
Like a said you have to practice it to understand it and once you get the hang of it isn’t that hard to start doing it, it is just hard to keep doing it, without practice ,practice and more practice. Simply is focusing on feeling the breathing only in the present moment and when distracted by thinking about anything, just notice it , and come back to thebreathing over and over, and again and again. Doing this will develop both concentration and give you the knowing feedback you need to keep doing it do develop increasing levels of concentration.
Do you have some more specific instructions?
Follow the instruction I have written elsewhere for children and adults, Child Mindful Breathing to help anything and BareBonesMeditation and modify them for ADHD by using mindful breathing to develop exclusively concentration by feeling and accepting your breathing only in the present moment, and when you notice yourself thinking about the past or the future or about the breathing itself in the present, just go back to only feeling-sensing-experiencing the breathing, and do this over and over.
Start with a simple goal just following one in breath, and then one out breath, then one cycle of in breath and out breath, without being distracted by thinking and staying only in the present moment. Set some simple goal like being able to do it so many times , say 10 or 20 without distraction. Keep track, make a game out of it, see how many breath cycles you can do without distraction, and when you are distracted just go back to the beginning and start counting over. Start low and go slow. The regular practice is the most important thing.
What if you can’t do sitting breathing meditation no matter how hard you try?
If one cannot use sitting breathing meditation, for whatever reason, like you just can’t stand or sit still long enough, then there are other modification of using mindfulness like combining the breathing while walking. The issue is to be mindfully aware in the present moment of something over and over to increase concentration, and when pulled of focus by thinking from the past or future, to return to the thing your are focused on in the present moment, which one could easily apply to walking. Applying mindfulness to walking would turn it into a moving meditation which may be easier for the overly active person who has deficits in concentration.
How would one do this moving mindfulness meditation using walking?
One would pay attention to feeling the movement of walking one step at a time, only in the present moment, when distracted by thinking, one would return again and again to feeling the movements of your walking. One could also combine the feeling of the walking with the feeling of the breathing. It is the exclusive focus on the sensations of walking or breathing, and doing it over and over, that develops concentration, and then dealing with the thinking distractions, by noticing it, and returning back to the walking or breathing that further increases the knowing and the focus, if done over and over.
Any other suggestions about this?
Learn as much as you can about mindfulness , apply it in daily living, and do mindfulness meditation. If need be, get a mindfulness meditation coach or teacher , for more information and guidance, and of course practice, practice and more practice.