Overview

“Meditation is not a way of making your mind quiet. It’s a way of entering into the quiet that’s already there – buried under the 50,000 thoughts the average person thinks every day.” – Deepak Chopra

Try to think of a time that you felt calm, focused and peaceful. Maybe for you that was doing some high level of physical activity. Maybe it was while knitting. Reading. Perhaps on a hike. The main point is that you achieved a balanced brain state inside of you. You found something that worked to calm your busy brain. The good news is that with a willingness to try and the patience to work through some different approaches, you can strengthen your ability to call upon better brain states on your very own, more quickly than you might think, in a variety of settings.

Why meditation helps

The latest studies on ADHD suggest that many of the symptoms have to do with varying degrees of balanced brain chemistry, even brain development. People generally know and accept that meditation can help calm you down, but some recent research also suggests that meditation can help change your brain.

If you need to focus on the moment, regulate your brain chemistry, and have a tool available to you to use in most any situation, meditation can be a crucial part of addressing ADHD symptoms for fairly obvious reasons. And it may have potential to actually help your brain overcome some of the developmental issues associated with ADHD.

How meditation works

When you meditate, the simplest way to put it is that you train your Ferrari engine to be attuned to a wider set of inputs. You can actually see the results visually on an MRI. All those chemicals floating around in your brain settle, and you are literally and figuratively more present in the moment, in your own body. For people with ADHD, meditation can be an amazing part of your healing and growth.

What to do

Believe it or not, there is already some valuable research specific to ADHD and meditation. Researchers used an eight step process to help people with ADHD get started, and saw amazing results in just three months of regular practice. If that’s too much for you to research and get into right now, try two minutes a day. There are also apps, such as Headspace, that can help walk you through the process. I found binaural meditation particularly helpful for me.