ADHD: How to Train Your Attention Span with Meditation

For high-energy Hunters, one of life’s biggest challenges can be simply slowing down enough to find a calm center.

Image by GrumpyBeere from Pixabay

For high-energy Hunters, one of life’s biggest challenges can be simply slowing down enough to find a calm center. I’ve been meditating since I was 16, and this note I received from a member of our ADHD Forum on CompuServe summarizes the experience nicely.

From Brian in Charleston:

I’ve found that daily meditation has been very useful for me in training my attention span. I started a few years ago with that course from the Maharishi, called TM or Transcendental Meditation.

It involved sitting in a comfortable, quiet place, closing my eyes, and repeating a sound over and over again in my mind for about 15 minutes every day. The sound could be “Om” or “Eyying” or one of several others, although the teacher gave me one “special” one he said was just for me.

Then our company had a guy come in who was an efficiency expert and he said it was really just a matter of learning to relax. He told us we could do the same thing as TM but instead say the word “one” in our heads, instead of a mystical mantra. That way there was no religious overtones to it for those who were offended or put off by that.

I tried it both ways, and decided that for me I preferred the TM way, but another guy I work with who’s a very solid Baptist didn’t want to have anything to do with TM because he said it was based on Hinduism.

He tried the “one” technique and it works for him. So either will work, I’m pretty sure.

The biggest benefits for me are these three:

1. I’ve learned how to relax. By meditating every day, I feel that I now have a calm center in my life, and when things are getting really hairy, I just remember what it feels like to be in that meditation state and I recover my balance. I don’t get upset as easily, for example. It’s taught me to take things easy.

2. I believe it’s improving my concentration span. Although I’m ADHD I prefer not to take drugs. I found that when I took Ritalin and Dexedrine that I couldn’t sleep, so I gave them up after just a few weeks. But meditation seems to give me more ability to concentrate at the office on things, particularly numbers, which have always intimidated me. Now, when it’s time to do my department’s budgets, I just dig in with the other guys and stick to it.

3. I get more ideas. I keep a notepad on my desk at home, and meditate sitting in my favorite chair at that desk. Often during my meditation, thoughts will come to me. They’re sometimes things that I forgot to do days, weeks, or, in one case, even two years earlier.

Some­times they’re ideas for new ways to do things at work or at home. Sometimes they’re insights: suddenly I understand why I upset my wife the night before, or what that guy at the office meant two weeks ago when he said thus-and-so.

When these ideas bubble up, if they’re keepers, I write them down. Actually, I discovered that it’s essential to do it this way. When I first started meditating I wasn’t using the pad, and I’d get a great idea and then spend the next ten minutes (I meditate for twenty minutes every morning) trying to remember the idea, which makes it nearly impossible to meditate.

So I started keeping the pad there just to be able to write down and then let go of ideas and get back to my mantra. Now that I realize the value of what’s on that pad, and really look forward to seeing what my unconscious mind is going to spring on me each morning as I go up to my study to sit down and meditate.