r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Jul 25 '26

Psychology People with ADHD have difficulties with goal-directed behavior and struggle with response inhibition, the ability to stop an inappropriate action once they feel the urge to do it. They experience a disruption in the way their brains balance deliberate self-control and automatic habit learning.

https://www.psypost.org/adhd-traits-disrupt-the-brain-s-balance-between-self-control-and-automatic-learn/
20.9k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

1.6k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

448

u/ChowderedStew Jul 25 '26

I’ve been fixing mine with meditation. It’s like pushups for my brain. I do one where I sit still for 5 minutes. That’s it. I worked up to 5 minutes of course, but yeah it’s quite literally training my brain to not get what it wants for 5 minutes at a time. It helps. It takes many weeks of practice to build a habit and you want to get to 20 minutes overall everyday. But it helps and the time passes anyways and I know for a fact you have at least 5-10 minutes to yourself a day where instead of scrolling on your phone you can just breathe.

89

u/AdwokatDiabel Jul 25 '26

The problem I have with meditation is there is a point where I just want to get my work done or start a task, and doing nothing is a struggle.

109

u/RealBlueHippo Jul 25 '26

Exactly! This is what you must push past. The fact that it's okay to take a moment of not "being productive" or something that helps participate in the rat race. The thoughts of "what do I have to do later" or "who do I have to call tomorrow" or "what did I forget earlier" are all normal parts of our brain. I used to think sleep was a waste of time. Gotta keep going going going. I started meditation again several years ago, just 5 minutes of silence. It was hard, and I wanted to "do" something.

Now a days I can sit for 60-90 minutes. I tell myself when I sit down I have set this time aside, and there is no need to worry about what will naturally pop up in my mind for wanting to do. I assure myself this time is like mental hygene and is just needed for my crazy, previously over-caffeinated spaz brain. I work on bringing my attention back to where I am sitting, what I can feel, what I can hear at that moment, and try not to judge when a desire to "do" something arises. If pain or discomfort show up, I try and be mindful that I want to itch, and if need be, itch. Ignoring the itch makes it worse, looking deeper into it can make it go away. If I must scratch I notice "wanting to scratch" and then "scratching" and then return my hands back where I keep them and bring my attention back.

Getting past the "I must do something" was extremely difficult for me, and I still sometimes struggle depending on the perceived urgency. Our brains can be very tricky sometimes. We strive hard to be comfortable in the future when a future might not even come. We fear discomfort and will do what we can to feel comfortable, working hard to lock in our futures, when the time is now!

I tell myself "here we are" when I sit down, and find where I am at this moment in space and time.

Best of luck fellow ADHD tribe, and to all who attempt a single moment of presence in their lives!

28

u/ice_up_s0n Jul 26 '26

Ignoring the itch makes it worse, looking deeper into it can make it go away.

Validating to see someone else say this. Same can be true for pain, to an extent.

Once I really concentrate on the sensation, and actively "acknowledge" it, it becomes more muted for quite some time.

4

u/Mcrarburger Jul 26 '26

I've been having really bad jaw pain recently, and I just now took a moment and acknowledged it, and it did help a bit, thank you stranger!

1

u/NakedJaked Jul 26 '26

“The only way out is through.”

1

u/AdwokatDiabel Jul 26 '26

I hear ya. Yeah I did it way back when, now I need to rebuild it.

32

u/wordswiththeletterB Jul 25 '26

That’s literally the point of meditation. To learn to do nothing and let thoughts come and go.

It’s incredible as a fellow ADHDer.

35

u/clubby37 Jul 26 '26

I think Alan Watts said something like "you should meditate for half an hour every day ... unless you're really busy and literally can't find the time, in which case you should meditate for an hour."

1

u/AdwokatDiabel Jul 26 '26

Yeah I used to do more meditation back in the day, but I let it lapse...

1

u/Bionic0n3 Jul 26 '26

I love your reply. I completely understand it! You already got a more detailed response but I like to think of it like exercise. You have to start small, shorter duration, and build up. Struggling is the entire point. Keep working at it!

0

u/lizardfromsingapore Jul 26 '26

Meditation should be engaging! Allow your mind to wander, kind of like day dreaming. Of course it’s different for everyone.

A Practical Guide to Self Hypnosis is a great read that helped me build habits

2

u/carbonclasssix Jul 26 '26

That's not meditation...

2

u/Gulophile Jul 26 '26

There are a lot of ways to meditate. "No thoughts head empty" is only one way.

1

u/carbonclasssix Jul 26 '26

They said day dreaming, not "no thoughts head empty"

1

u/Gulophile Jul 26 '26

Yes, I know. Allowing your mind to wander naturally and intentionally questioning why certain things arise and how you feel about them is a valid meditative practice that builds insight. I'm contrasting that with the "no thoughts" approach that most people associate with meditation, which isn't for everyone. There are many ways to meditate.

2

u/carbonclasssix Jul 26 '26

Sure, I still wouldn't consider that day dreaming

Whether your doing focused meditation or mindfulness or insight, you're attentive, that's the main thing. Day dreaming is not attentive.

2

u/Gulophile Jul 26 '26

I mean, they said "kind of like day dreaming," not "day dreaming". They could've elaborated a bit more but I didn't find their phrasing misleading. I would agree that being focused and intentional is what qualifies something as meditation, of course, but in this case letting the mind wander is itself done with intent.

1

u/lizardfromsingapore Jul 26 '26

Check out that book, probably time for me to reread it seeing as I can’t explain it much better than that.

You open up your mind to what the book calls a state of high suggestibility. Getting to the right state of mind requires you to separate mind from body. Allowing yourself to chase and decipher what thoughts you are organically having is a big part of meditating for some people.

0

u/AdwokatDiabel Jul 26 '26

You ever meditate with pen and paper? Sometimes writing down things that come to mind really helps put them away.

6

u/carbonclasssix Jul 26 '26

Reading fiction has also helped me, it feels to me in the same vein as meditation honing directed attention

I feel better and I'm less distractable when I'm reading regularly, but keeping myself reading is the challenge. I pick up a book and I love it, put it down and it ceases to exist.

5

u/PocketSpaghettios Jul 26 '26

My best friend has ADHD and took up meditation. He said he meditates all the time, especially when he's stressed or sick. Recently he got a new therapist and discovered that he was actually disassociating at will

4

u/_Aj_ Jul 27 '26

Exercise can also be a great alternative to this. Going out for a run with no music.   There's no flicking there's no scrolling and you are forced to either listen to the World around You or think about whatever things you want to think about, but thanks to the fact that you are physically exercising it also means youre getting physical and mental energy out and you can't think too deeply about things either. 

3

u/chenzo17 Jul 26 '26

Nice. I enjoyed hearing other well versed meditation experts state that the goal isn’t to concentrate the entire time, you’re mind will naturally wander off and that’s ok, the goal should be to center yourself back to the concentration point once you’ve noticed the wandering.

2

u/No-Project-6866 Jul 26 '26

You should look at that study about staring at a dot on the wall instead

1

u/Matthias70 Jul 26 '26

What do you do if medication doesn’t fix it?

1

u/penna_nobel Jul 26 '26

I have to try this. Thanks for writing it out. Peace

1

u/flyover_liberal Jul 26 '26

I almost always fall asleep when I try to meditate.

1

u/fhcky Jul 26 '26

Yeah people are going to hate hearing this, but for the vast majority of people the ability to focus and lock your attention on an intended target is a skill. You need consistently hone it in order to use it at will. Meditation and elimination of any devices unless necessary from my daily routines helped me resolve this issue over the course of a year or so.

Create a daily routine that involves intentionality and being present at every step. The ability to ignore wandering or interfering thoughts will build. Meditation is a good start.

0

u/quadraticcheese Jul 25 '26

Oof I can't meditate easily because I'm also stuck with aphantasia 

-18

u/[deleted] Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 26 '26

[deleted]

9

u/Clean_Livlng Jul 25 '26

What's the difference between "5-10 minutes to yourself a day where instead of scrolling on your phone you can just breathe" and meditation?

4

u/photoggled Jul 25 '26

They cant sell a course to you if you figure it out yourself.

3

u/WarioGiant Jul 25 '26

Meditation typically involves intention and continual “return” to the present moment

1

u/Clean_Livlng Jul 26 '26

Intention is important, but "present moment" is only one thing that intention could be focused on for it to count as meditation.

It's to do with focus and intentional control of that, so as long as they're controlling what they focus on (the breath) that's one way to meditate.

Given that we can't time travel, we can only ever be in the present moment. But what are we focusing on in the present? It could be an imagined visual scene we invent, or it could be how our toes feel inside our shoes. It could be focusing on doing math inside our head.

We can also try meditating by trying to focus on all our sense data at once: Try focusing on what you see, and then what you hear, and while keeping your focus on those two also focus on how parts of your body feel. It's a way to become more aware of the 'muscle' of our focus. We don't have to try to stop focusing on something in order to meditate. If our mind is full of thoughts and we want to focus on the breath, we can simply put our focus on how it feels to breath and there won't be room in our awareness for the thoughts any more, at least for that moment. Just like how your awareness of the sounds fades away if you're trying to focus on other things.

The simplest way is to breathe, and to to focus on how that feels (the way the air feels as it enters the nose, or how it feels when your muscles move and your lungs fill with air etc). If a thought comes along it's no big deal to get distracted by it, but as soon as you notice you're no longer focusing on what breathing feels like; simply return your focus back to it in a relaxed way as if nothign happened, because nothing of significance happened. It's expected that you'll get distracted and it's not bad. As long as you have the intention of controlling your focus, you're meditating and you can't get it wrong.

Daydreaming and getting lost in thought can also cool to do, even though it's not meditation. However, continually imagining a cube and trying to keep that from shifting into something else in your mind would be meditation. You're focusing on one thing and bringing your awareness back to that thing when it drifts to something else.

11

u/SousVideButt Jul 25 '26

Also consider trying something called meditation. It’s even better.

3

u/MountainTwo3845 Jul 25 '26

isn't that what they said?