Some notes on the usefulness of meditation for adult ADD.

Thoughts are my own only. YMMV

Tl;DR:

Jump here for my meditation technique.

Jump here for how meditation helps with ADD symptoms.

Background

My dad is what I term a “stream of consciousness” thinker. He is 74. He has a hard time going toe to toe with me or anyone talking about knotty issues. His emotions are always present at the surface of the conversation and dominate it. He tries to be helpful but it can come off as condescending and a lecture. It is hard to form a connection with him. Yet he has a wealth of experience with hardships and life. I am where I am because he muscled through running a small business that put a floor under all of us. I do have my hacker mentality and work ethic from him, but those have been less useful off late in solving mental well being related issues off late I have very strong suspicion that my dad is suffering from the after effects of some kind of Executive malfunctioning, maybe ADD maybe something else, though hard to say since he has no interest in getting diagnosed at his age.

This is diametrically opposite to my mom (TBH I have no idea how they are a couple, but they are happy together). She introduced me to meditation and mindfulness and my wife and I were able to use this as a jumping off point to dive deeper into it to help me with my ADD.

Me.

I am a Software Engineer and I have struggled all the way through professional life and much of my adult life without knowing about ADHD, until the last few years. Losing jobs(3 to be exact), losing time, being lost but not knowing how or why am I lost.

But I want to tell you about what I have discovered is practically useful about meditation in the last 4–5 years, especially if you as an adult have Executive Functioning challenges like I do; ADD/SCT that create specific problems in adults, which I would like to define first as they manifest for me.

Defining ADD’s Manifestation in myself.

• Working memory issues, i.e. the what and why of the goal you want to get to. We are talking about short term things.
• Proper persistence towards goals in the future. This is more of a long term issue.
• Lack of Self Control: You are unable to inhibit your emotional state; Take actions towards self direction.
• Self Motivation: You are so dependent in external stimuli that you cannot focus on things that have delayed consequences.
• Probably more, but the above are the most important ones.

When I first starting feeling the effects of meditation (after about a year of doing hatha yoga), it was as if a light bulb turned on. The first thing it did was slow down time and the speed of thought. If the time of your life was a long tunnel and you are in the middle your past and your future are at the two ends of the tunnel. ADD makes this tunnel rather dark. Meditation brings light into it.

How I do meditation.

First, let me define how I do meditation. There is no one way of doing it. All have their pros and cons. Schools, Books, backbones of certain cultures exist on how to do it. Assume the setting when I start meditation is that my mind is a mess.

• I sit down any where quiet and confront myself:

"Deep breath 1", "Its ok to have these thoughts, they are a part of me, 
don't judge them, feel comfortable in their presence.", 
"Deep breath 2" "Try to put these thoughts in a small imaginary cup on the 
side but don't bottle them up, don't judge yourself for having them." 

"Deep breath 3". "For a bit just focus on my breath and take up these thoughts 
later from the cup". I do this 10 or so times

• At this point I might be still fidgity and am distracted, so distracted that I might get up all of a sudden and try do something. So I quickly enumerate and acknowledge these thoughts because they have a strong will and are distracting me. I sit back down and have a conversation with my self to see what is the issue :

"I have an important email to check, its ok check that in a bit".
"I did not get enough work done yesterday, I need to get on it right away"
"I am worried about writing my year end self-review"

"Its ok to be worried, these are important tasks, I can worry about after 
10 minutes, put them in this in the cup on the side." 

"Oh I am worried that I don't get time to spend with my wife :(;
Its ok put that in the cup too".

"Focus now on the proper breathing. Deep breath 11... 12".

I also do nasal and throat sounds of Om that help me focus on the cadence of the breath just long enough to get it going for the next 10–15 minutes where there is only the focus on the breath and not to thoughts, which while still there, are not what I am paying attention to.

Breakthrough

It is this precise slowing of thought(s) and focusing on one thing lies the subtle secret(the light at the front and back of the tunnel) of meditation’s benefits and it is also the easiest to miss. To be sure here are the enumerated benefits :

• Slowing thoughts allows my mind to remember what my goal was, because other thoughts are less intrusive. So if I have to context switch I can take a note and put a pin in what I was doing, before I jump. This aids the Working Memory issue I mentioned earlier.
• A bigger issue I have is forgetting about lessons from past work. Like for example if I previously did a task poorly and felt regret later, I would not be able to call upon this regret to inform a task now. Meditation makes this thought easily accessible to me now. This is accessing your longer term memory and really focusing on it, it ensures goal persistence and makes you efficient at avoiding dragons.
• Now the future. Say you have to make a project plan and it includes many steps, like writing the plan, doing some risk mitigation for the plan, adding time lines, capacity estimation; You get the idea, its like a 3–4 month long project. With ADD one tends to not be able to focus on what are called Delayed Consequences and do long term planning effectively. Its 1:30 PM and I am low on energy(maybe its called ego depletion) and I cannot motivate myself to do this; I want to delay it. In the past I would just switch to doing something else short term like a code review or write more code. But now I try to stop my train of thought and do a variation on my meditation:

Do the above format of meditation and put all thoughts in the cup until only the breath remains. Now, try remembering this plan and bring your focus to it and have a conversation:

"Why am I trying to build the plan;  why is it important to ? 
Your team depends on you." 

"What is worrying me? 
I fear won't be able to build a good enough plan and/or I can't focus on my 
coding work. Well this is important because the consequences for delaying
will be bad, I won't get time for feedback and delays will snowball."

In effect it primes me to the importance of the task at hand. It gives me a break and lets me focus on it.

• This also helps in conversation: When you converse with someone you can lean on meditation to empathize. Something like: “Why is she saying this? Why is she upset? I must ask her.” instead of “This is not what I think, she must be wrong, let me correct her.” Less train of thought and more intentional conversation. I am able to recall previous conversations, consequences of how I managed them as well as where I want to go with this current conversation.

All day long

This is the ideal scenario, in reality day-to-day is a hit and a miss. But even if I do 40–50% better its better than 0. If It sounds exhausting that’s because it is. It is also rewarding because you understand something about yourself. It gives a floor to understand the proverbial floor of your behavior. I can also tell you that picking up meditation in the first place is also very difficult(Some people like my dad and sister are not at all open to the idea), its worth trying. I would recommend Hatha Yoga where breathing is really a necessity to hold your own to build that muscle.

It is also not the complete story of me and possibly you. If you are an adult with undiagnosed, untreated ADD it is likely that there are some bad habits that have set in along the way and you will have to undo them, which is a separate process and that is related to Behavior Therapy I will come back to later.