No-fail meditation for ADHDers

I had a drinking problem. Well, to be specific, I had the problem of unintentionally getting black-out drunk, out of the blue. I also didn’t know that I had undiagnosed ADHD.

One morning, in the letterbox, there was a little slip of paper, with words printed on it. It read: “Try sitting quietly with with your eyes closed for one minute. Pay attention to your breath. You can do this once a day and see if it makes a difference.”

Never one to ignore a sign from the universe, I sat down, closed my eyes, and breathed in and out for a minute. I was surprised by how much was going on in here! And afterwards, I felt a little bit better. So I did it the next day, too.

Pretty soon, I was meditating for five minutes, one time each day. I was intrigued by the subtle yet deep shifts it seemed to allow in me. (The intrigue is what let me keep going with a daily habit.) But there was another effect too.

It helped me to not accidentally get blind drunk as often. How did it work this magic? Eventually I realised that it was because it let me notice how massively overwhelmed and anxious I was, almost all the time. And it gave me a moment in which I could experience something different from that.

I came to imagine that I was a seal swimming under ice, and the five minutes of sitting with my eyes closed was a hole in the ice that I could steal a breath of air through. This gave me a little more space inside myself, and a glimpse into exactly how wound up I was on that day.

This was my first taste of meditating. If you want to give yourself a chance to pause, and to break the frantic fall through your day, here are some ADHD-friendly versions of meditating that may help. Over weeks and months, that little bit of daily meditating increases your ability to notice your thoughts and feelings. And this helps you choose to do what you want to do.

Why is meditating often hard for ADHDers?

If you’re reading this, I think you can probably answer this question for yourself. Here are some possible reasons or beliefs:

• Horror at the idea of it

• Can’t remember to do it

• Feel like a failure when your thoughts go everywhere

• Seems too boring

• Don’t want to know what’s going on in your mind

• Don’t believe you have time

• Waiting to do a ten-day silent retreat to get started

• Can’t stick to a routine or habit

• Meditating is for those calm good people, not me

To which I say: open your mind, daddio! To the variety of ways a person can meditate, I mean.

Meditating with ADHD is something YOU CAN DO. Like movement, eating, and sleeping enough, it’s about finding a version that works for you, exactly as you are.

This means:

• Throwing out your ideas of what ‘proper meditation’ is

• Choosing your own definition of meditation (and an alternative word for it, if that helps)

• Accepting that one minute of meditating can be called a success (trust me on this)

• Looking at your life to see where a little meditating can fit

• Understanding what you already do to motivate yourself

• Finding ways to get interested in what makes meditation possible for you

• Trying things out and keeping what works

• Treating yourself like your favourite four-year-old

(And remember: if you want help with habits, you’re welcome to book a coaching session with me.)

Why is meditating useful for ADHDers?

Let’s bounce back to my starting story. You could say that I didn’t have a drinking problem - I had a sobriety problem. It was overwhelming to be me. I felt like there was no escape.

Mediating gave me a little escape, not from myself, but from the chaotic intense blur of my daily existence. This is why I kept coming back to it, day after day. I started to look forward to it!

Meditation is similar to movement (my euphemism for exercise) in that there are immediate benefits, and there are benefits that build up if you do a little every day. (It’s also similar in that there are lots of good ways to do it, and if you’re sticking to a vision of a perfect version, you may never get round to doing it much.)

The immediate benefit of some kind of meditation is that it cools you down, settles your nervous system, and grounds you. The benefit of even five minutes a day over a few weeks can include better emotional regulation, more self-awareness, and more ability to make intentional choices (not to mention a glowing feeling of smugness that you’re actually meditating, OMG, who knew that was possible?!?)

And, like movement, meditation can feel good WHILE YOU’RE DOING IT. I like my rewards to be immediate - as in, where possible, I want the activities themselves to be rewarding! If this sounds like how you work too, here are some tips:

• As you’re motivating yourself, visualise the benefits

• Choose kinds of meditation that you like, or find interesting or meaningful

• Train yourself to notice any and all good feelings

• Take a mental snapshot of the good feeling

• At the end, have a little chat to yourself about the good feeliing, to make it memorable

If there isn’t a good feeling when you meditate one day, remind yourself that you have to be in to win, and it will probably feel good next time! (And you’ll still get the benefits of today’s efforts.)

Speaking of winning, part of the no-fail meditation for ADHDers strategy is being vigilant about the definition of what you declare to be a fail. Did you take three deep breaths before you turned the key in the car ignition? Success! Did you lie on your back for a minute and feel your mind boil? Success! Did you put on a guided meditation and then fall asleep? Success!

Giving it a go is a success. Even if your mind drifts. Even if you forget you’re meditating…Over time, you’ll get into your groove, and feel the benefits.

Finally, here’s something good to know. Meditating isn’t like going to the gym, because if you stop, you don’t go back to where you started. The benefits linger. They accumulate. They build into new skills, greater self-awareness, and more noticing. Even if you meditate daily for a couple of months and then lose the habit, it will have reshaped your brain in a useful way. Isn’t that cool??

Right, let’s get to some examples of ADHD-friendly meditation techniques…

Types of meditation that can work for adult ADHD

Counting breaths

Settle down. Close your eyes, if you’re okay with that. Take a couple of slow breaths while you sink into the internal world. Now, breathing slowly from your chest, count your breaths. Each pair of in and out breaths counts as one. Say the number in your head, either on the in or the out breath or both. Count from one up to ten.

Guess what?

That’s about two minutes of meditation! Isn’t that amazing?

If you want to, you can do three rounds - that means counting one to ten (pairs of) breaths, three times. That’s about six minutes. That’s plenty.

The great thing about this technique is that your mind has a very simple clear instruction - count the breaths. This gives you an anchor point to come back to.

Your mind is probably going to go all sorts of places. When you notice that it has, mentally let go - I imagine pulling my hands up like they do in rugby when they want to show they’re not touching the ball - and then return to whatever number you think you’re up to.

Finally, when you finish the tenth breath, start wrigglng your fingers and toes, and open your eyes. How are you feeling now?

Guided meditations

Lots of adult ADHDers swear by guided meditations. They give the mind something to hold onto.

The first step is finding guided medtiations that you like. There’s the length of it, the person’s voice, and the content. If you like novelty, you may want to have a few options. This could mean finding a Youtube channel that you like, or collecting the links of suitable guided meditations and keeping them somewhere easy to find.

Free flow meditation

This is where you close your eyes and just hang out. You might explore your sensations. You let things come and go, not following them, but not trying to get rid of them either. You might invite parts of yourself to turn up and tell you how they’re doing.

When you feel like you’re done, you stop.

Mantra or nonsense word meditation

This meditation gives you something to hang onto, to keep your mind from wandering into the kitchen drawers. You can choose a word or phrase, and say it to yourself in your head, in time with your breaths. You can even have a different one for when you breathe in and when you breathe out.

This type of meditation is sometimes used to comedic effect in movies or TV shows: “I breathe in cosmic light…I breathe out negativity…” It’s a cliche because it works. You could use the words ‘Energy’ and ‘Relax’. Or love and peace. Try it and see what you like!

The nonsense word meditation is where you choose a word-like sound that has no meaning, and use that instead. Like ‘oo-bar’ or ‘‘koh-ren’. This means that you don’t get drawn into the associations that a word might have, but you’re still saying something loudly enough inside your head that the thoughts can’t compete.

Walking meditation

This is where you walk in a circle reeeeeeeeaaaaaaallllly slowly, while breathing slowly, and noticing that you’re doing it. It sounds odd but is actually very interesting. I used to do this while waiting for the coffee to brew, which took two minutes, so I got two minutes of Moving Slowly Round The Kitchen While Being Extremely Present. I find walking meditation intrinsically funny, and humour is motivating for me. And it’s good for those of us with ants in our pants.

Micromeditation

This is a form of mindful pause. For some reason the words ‘mindful pause’ make me mad, so I’ve given it a new name here.

It’s about choosing an action that you do regularly, and choosing to do a tiny bit of meditating in the same timeframe. It could take this format:

When I…(choose something you do every day)...I’ll take three deep breaths.

An example is that when you arrive home from work, you aim to take three deep breaths before getting out of the car.

Then you train yourself to actually do this. (If you’ve trained yourself in this way before with something else, this technique is likely to work well for you.) In our example, a little toy blutacked to the dashboard might serve as a private symbol and reminder.

It helps if you have a bit of mental space at the time you’re asking yourself to do this. A good time might be after dropping the kids at school, when you’re washing your hands after using the loo, while you’re waiting for your tea to steep, or after brushing your teeth.

Active meditation

You know the repetitive physical tasks that you hate to do? The ones that are so boring you think you’ll turn to glass and then smash? Well, guess what? That feeling isn’t PART of doing that task. It’s an association that has built up. And you can sometimes transform the experience by meditating at the same time.

Imagine you want to meditate, and you decide to do this while folding the laundry. Now, your mission is to take a breath or two to settle, and then move slowly through the task, paying as much attention as you can to what is actually happening. Feel the sensations of the cloth, experience your hands moving, let go of the thoughts that try to take your mind away from what you’re doing, and keep noticing the current reality.

It helps if you’re not asking yourself to do this for too long at a time - maybe just start with folding socks. And please, please, don’t do this with any activity that involves driving or knives! I mean it.

Body scan
This is great for if you want to relax and get more aware of how you are in the present moment. You get comfy, close your eyes, and take a slow breath or two to settle down. Then you move your attention through your body, bit by bit, and ask yourself what you feel or notice for each bit. You can gently move the part of your body that you’re focusing on if you want.

We know that ten slow breaths takes about two minutes. So you could do one in-breath and one out-breath per body section, and do ten body areas, and be confident that the whole process will take under three minutes from go to whoa. The ten areas might be: face, neck, shoulders, arms, hands, stomach, hips, thighs, calves, feet.

This meditation is good for if you want to get more aware of your feelings. One great way to work out your current emotion is to start by asking what you notice is happening in your body sensations. Over time, this meditation can help you be aware of this more quickly and easily.

Group meditation

You may be able to find a meditation group that you can join. It could be in-person or online. This is great for people who find that having other people involved, having set appointment times, and doing things in a hardcore way are motivators.

How to get meditation into the ADHD day

Blog posts are hard because my urge now is to tell you everything I can think of about how to set up and stick to a habit, with instructions on how to tailor this to your version of ADHD. I really, really, really want to do this. But this creates blog posts of infinite length, which makes them impossible to finish and publish. That’s just maths. So I’m resisting that temptation!

Different types of meditation have different outcomes or purposes, when you’re a Meditator with a capital M. That’s fine for them, but I want to steer us away from thinking about that for now, because ADHDers are at risk of perfectionist freeze. For us, the intention is simply to meditate a little, daily if we can, to experience it and get some of the joys and benefits. If you get really into it, you can explore more later!

Your mind will wander. You may even get up in the middle of it and do something else. That’s okay.

Here are some reasons that I’ve made these meditation techniques as small as possible:

• It makes it easier to get started

• It makes it easier to find the time

• If you think meditating is boring, a shorter time makes it more bearable to do

• You can do whichever of the techniques you feel like, which makes it interesting

It’s usually important not to be disturbed. Ask for privacy if needed. Put a sign on the door with a skull and crossbones on it. Tell loved ones the time limit, because people can wait more easily if they have certainty about how long they’ll be waiting.

You can meditate sitting up, lying down, or even sprawling if that makes it more appealing. It’s totally fine to have a piece of paper to scribble down an incredibly bright idea you might have while meditating, if this helps you to get into the zone. 

Please, please, silence your phone notifications. You may want to use your phone to set an alarm for when to come out of meditation, or to play a creative visualisation. 

If you consider yourself to have a phone use problem, it may be better to put the phone in another room, to help your mind fully relax into meditating. (It seems like this shouldn’t make a difference, but it often does.) In this case, you could use another form of alarm like the oven timer, or use a laptop to play the visualisation on.

Note: there are some mental health challenges that may make some kinds of meditation feel unsafe. Please trust yourself. If a meditation activity makes you feel worse afterwards, it’s a good idea to think about stopping doing that one. You may prefer a trauma-informed yoga class, for example.

You can use your ADHD gifts of problem-solving, analysis, and idea creation to help you get interested in what will make regular meditation possible for you. Here are some questions that can help you to work out how to get meditation into your day as an ADHDer…

Where can you feel most safe and unlikely to be disturbed?

What do you already do every day - can you connect that habit with meditating?

What time of day are you most likely to be able to get yourself to meditate?

How can you remind yourself to meditate?

If you like novelty, which meditation ideas will you note down to select from?

How can you make the meditation time seem small and easy for your brain?

How can you make the meditation time seem fun and meaningful for your brain?

Can you include something else that you enjoy - social connection, music, being outside?

What will you do to lead into your meditation, to make it easier to get started?

What will you do with your phone (or dogs or kids)?

Is there such a thing as no-fail meditation for ADHDers?

Well, yes. You can’t fail at any of these meditation tips. You simply give it a go, and do what you do. Then you try again another day. If one meditation technique doesn’t work, next time you can try something else.

Of course, you might not actually do any of them, ever. So how about this: if you genuinely want to try these techniques, and you are completely unable to get yourself to do any of them, I invite you to book a free introductory chat with me, and we can sit together on the call and have a go at one or two. I defy you to resist how entertaining I can make it!

Meditation practices are nearly as varied as we are. Start small, link it to an existing habit, make it interesting, and invite yourself to pay attention to your experiences, at the time and throughout the remaining day. Meditation is one of the (many) ‘most effective’ things we can do to help our ADHD brains and nervous systems, according to science, and my personal experience.

Meditating alone didn’t fix my drinking problem or my overwhelm. But it helped. It gave me more moments of being able to choose to do the things that support me. And it didn’t take an hour a day or require two weeks of sitting on my bum in silence while dying on the inside. It took a couple of minutes at a time, as often as I could get myself to do it.

I hope this post helps you to do it too, so that you can get the benefits. We’re here and we’re alive - let’s do what we can to actually experience our lives!