Dr. Lidia (00:00:00):

The research that we have right now of mindfulness with adults with ADHD is that you do see improvements in A ADHD symptoms. You often see improvements in stress, parenting stress as well, and you may see improvements in mood and anxiety.

Dr. Sarah (00:00:21):

October is ADHD awareness month, and so today we are digging into a question that is near and dear to my heart, both personally and professionally. Does having ADHD make mindfulness and meditation harder to engage in? Spoiler alert: Yes, it can be more challenging, but there are strategies that you can use to help make it easier. So joining me today is internationally recognized expert in adult ADHD and mindfulness-based therapies. She’s also an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Minnesota, Dr. Lidia Zylowska. Dr. Lidia is an author of two books, The Mindfulness Prescription for Adult ADHD and Mindfulness for Adult ADHD: A Clinician’s Guide. And she has been featured in many publications including ADDitudes Magazine, Time Magazine, Boston Globe, The New York Times. In our conversation today, Dr. Lidia is going to share the science behind how mindfulness can improve ADHD symptoms and reduce stress and strengthen the areas of the brain that are most often affected by ADHD Plus. She’s going to offer really practical and usable tips for practicing these strategies for people who really struggle to sit still and calm their minds. And for parents who are often juggling executive functioning in a sensory overload, whether or not you have ADHD, we’re going to talk about how mindfulness can offer really practical support when our usual strategies just fall apart.

(00:02:00):

Hi, I’m Dr. Sarah Bren, a clinical psychologist and mom of two. In this podcast, I’ve taken all of my clinical experience, current research on brain science and child psychology, and the insights I’ve gained on my own parenting journey and distilled everything down into easy to understand and actionable parenting insights. So you can tune out the noise and tune into your own authentic parenting voice with confidence and calm. This is Securely Attached.

(00:02:29):

Hello everybody. Welcome back to the securely attached podcast. We have a really, really exciting guest today. I’m personally quite selfishly excited about the conversation. You’ll see why, but we have Dr. Lidia Zylowska here today. How are you? Thank you for being here.

Dr. Lidia (00:02:55):

Great. Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Dr. Sarah (00:02:59):

So you are a psychiatrist. You specialize in researching and treating ADHD and you incorporate a lot of mindfulness into your work. Is that accurate?

Dr. Lidia (00:03:11):

Yes, very much so. Those two topics, a, DHD, and mindfulness have been very central to what I’ve been doing clinically and also I’ve done research in this area.

Dr. Sarah (00:03:22):

Amazing. So I wanted to have you on today selfishly, because as some of our listeners probably know, I have ADHD. I also believe very strongly in the power of mindfulness and meditation. I have a fledgling meditation practice myself, but it is really hard and I was thinking about, well, because I have ADHD, is that making it harder? And so I wanted to dig into some of the research on that because we have so much research that mindfulness and meditation are actually not only helpful for everybody, but they can actually be part of a treatment plan for ADHD. And yet ironically, so cruelly, you have ADHD meditation and mindfulness can be really difficult. So I was just curious, can you share a little bit about some of the research we know? What does the research say about those two pieces? Its benefits and its challenges.

Dr. Lidia (00:04:25):

Yeah, you put it really well that we know it’s helpful and a lot of patients now and clinicians know that this is helpful, but it’s not easy to do. So a lot of my work has been to try to make it ADHD user friendly to talk about mindfulness in that way and to really help people find their own way. Because as you know, ADHD can look very different for different people. We have different types of ADHD, some people have more inattentive symptoms, some people have more the restlessness, impulsivity. So there may have different unique challenges with meditation. Just for a little context, when I first started doing research in mindfulness and the research was to take what we knew about mindfulness training in other contexts and try to make it doable and informative to those with ADHD adults and teens. There was a pushback initially, and the pushback was that it’s a recipe for failure, right? You are asking people who have trouble sitting still and paying attention to do just that, right? Sit still and pay attention.

(00:05:43):

So it just seemed like people were pushing back on this idea that maybe it will be discouraging, maybe this will be a recipe for failure. And I think it can be if you have some ideas that it has to be done certain way for a certain amount of time and that you have to clear your mind. We have some assumptions in the culture about what meditation should be like. So our work was to develop a program and now it’s called mindness practices for ADHD. That was very much gradual and thinking about the challenges of someone with ADHD and how we can talk about it in a way that’s normalizing the challenges, but also validating how it is when you have ADHD and help people start observing their attention, starting to move their attention at will intentionally to different places. That’s really what you do in meditation and mindfulness as a type of meditation being very versatile that you can move it to different things outside of yourself sounds, or you can use it with senses, but you can also move inward so you can observe what’s happening inside.

(00:07:05):

So that research was, I think beginning creating a program that was user-friendly and then starting to look at is it actually helpful? Is it feasible to do it? So that was the initial early work I did at UCLA with a feasibility study with adults and teens and what we found that it is doable, that people can certainly engage. We started with just five minutes of formal practice and increased it to 15 over eight weeks. So that gives you a sense of how gradual it was, and we very much emphasize the informal practice. And even though in a lot of mindfulness training programs, they’re usually done in group and then you have some homework, what you find is people often vary how much homework they do.

Dr. Sarah (00:07:59):

Not shocking.

Dr. Lidia (00:08:01):

And you would expect that with ADHD, first of all, the word homework, it’s probably like, oh, I don’t want to hear the homework. And also people just have good intentions, but it’s hard to follow through. So what we found was that the at-home practice was variable, but very often people would talk about the informal practice as something that they’re keeping in their lives and able to do. So we can talk a little bit more about that. The research that we have right now, it’s mostly about doing this more formal sitting practice. And so I think we still are learning, there’s still room to really understand how people are practicing and what benefits they’re getting from what kind of practice. But what we do have from other studies of group training of mindfulness with adults with ADHD, we also have some with parents and children with ADHD, is that you do see improvements in ADHD symptoms. You often see improvements in stress, parenting stress as well, and you may see improvements in mood and anxiety. If we look across the studies that are available, the inattention symptoms seem to improve more than the hyperactive impulsive symptoms.

(00:09:32):

Which is not surprising because you’re doing a lot of exercising of attention and working with distraction and coming back, let’s say your breath and then observing that, trying to catch yourself when your mind is wandering, coming back. So a lot of it is almost like exercise for the attentional muscle.

Dr. Sarah (00:09:54):

Can I ask a question about that? Actually? Yeah. This might be a little geeky, brain geeky, but so I’m hearing if you’re seeing the benefits more to diminishing symptoms of inattention and helping with focus maybe less, a little bit less with the hyperactivity. Well, I have two questions. One, is there different parts of the brain that are kind of lighting up when you do these types of things that could inform that? My guess is the prefrontal cortex is being really strengthened by meditation practices, and that’s also a lot of what’s helping regulate our thinking, more of the cognitive piece. Is there some other part of the brain maybe like the cerebellum or other things that are leading to the hyperactivity that maybe the meditation isn’t touching as much?

Dr. Lidia (00:10:47):

Yeah, that’s a good question. So I do agree that the cognitive piece inattentive the observing and meta awareness piece, it’s very much connected to the prefrontal cortex and we know that that can be sometimes less efficient with ADHD. So we are strengthening those areas and we do see on brain imaging, and this is brain imaging, not with ADHD, but in other samples, we still don’t have a lot of brain imaging with ADHD individuals. But what we do see in those that practice mindfulness, whether it’s long-term meditators or people that just are learning it and had eight weeks of training, is that certain areas that have to do with attention monitoring and also areas that have to do with interceptive awareness, which is the insula, which has to do with awareness of your body sensations are lighting up.

(00:11:52):

There’s areas of the brain medially that have to do with self-referencing how much you are able, it’s all about your self narrative versus stepping back when it comes to those more deeper structures that we think are probably involved in hyperactivity impulsivity like basal ganglia and cerebellum, which are implicated with ADHD, still kind of evolving knowledge around this. Those areas don’t seem to light up or at least have not been studied directly for some subtle changes in mindfulness research. So I do think there are these different brain areas as you’re suggesting, that are responsible for different symptoms, and I think there are aspects of hyperactivity and that could be potentially helped by the prefrontal cortex strategies. Definitely impulse control or even…

Dr. Sarah (00:13:00):

Yeah, like stopping, planning.

Dr. Lidia (00:13:02):

Exactly, not reacting, but kind of creating some space to respond. So in that sense, you could help those symptoms and we do see improvements in those symptoms, but maybe not on this basic level that you eliminated.

Dr. Sarah (00:13:20):

Got it. I sorry guys. I know of you’re listening. We just got a little sciencey, but I want to translate it super fast in case it felt a little confusing. The reason why I’m asking that question, and I thank you, that answer was super helpful, is because I am thinking in terms of I approach ADHD my own and with the families that I work with, whether it’s with kids or grownups from a very strength-based perspective. And so I’m always trying to think of like, okay, here’s your, and everybody, their ADHD is always going to show up in its own kind of unique way. But when we look at the list of individual symptoms a particular person has, I usually will with people I’m working with, kind of want to create a bit of a hierarchy and rank them out, what ones are interfering and what ones maybe are annoying but can be kind of contained or even ignored.

(00:14:14):

And so I think when we’re able to kind of understand what your particular hierarchy is, it you kind of create a map of what you’re trying to work towards. And so a lot of times I think that the physical piece of ADHD, the hyperactivity, the difficulty sitting still tends to fall to the bottom of the hierarchy when we look at things like impulsivity in attentiveness, difficulty regulating frustration, which oftentimes comes down to frustration management and having a plan and slowing things down, which tends to be the tap of that hierarchy in terms of this is interfering the most. So if we can say that here’s this practice that is relatively easy, even if daunting, but doable in this sort of slow and steady increasing way that anybody can do it, even if you’re just doing it in the training and not always doing the homework, super awesome, and you’re still seeing an improvement in attention, that prefrontal cortex, that strengthening that part of the brain is the most important part. And yes, you still might be fidgety, you still might have trouble sitting down, sitting still, but if you are able to think more carefully and slow yourself, slow your thinking down, it’s like, I don’t know, you have a little bit more control. You might have trouble hitting the brakes and the gas, but you’re steering better.

Dr. Lidia (00:15:55):

Yeah, I love the hierarchy that you just described of what is most kind of difficult. And whereas the struggle, and for adults, and I do a lot of work with adults, often the struggle is with what we call executive functions that what you described, it’s kind of side by side with an attention of difficulty planning, task management, having trouble thinking about time, having trouble with regulating your attention, regulating your emotions, regulating your action, the emotional regulation piece, not always as not included in diagnosis of ADHD, yet very much impairing for a lot of people, the frustration tolerance being a big one, just having these impulsive emotions of sometimes anger and a lesser degree impatience. Those are often very empowering to people. And those are also helped by mindfulness practice because so much of mindfulness practice in addition to working with attention is about inner awareness, particularly emotional awareness and kind of knowing what to do when emotions arise and how do you not react or overreact or underreact because some people really need some help knowing what they’re feeling in the moment too. That’s where mindfulness can be very helpful. And the beauty of mindfulness, why I love the approach so much is that it’s versatile.

(00:17:46):

And it has a lot of different ways you can practice. And we do also have ways to practice when sitting is too hard. And it can vary from day to day for people. Sometimes they can do some meditation practice and other days, or especially if you really revved up emotionally, it’s hard to sit and sometimes a good at least initial practice will be to do some mindful walking or some movement. So you can lower that level of activation and then maybe shift to some other practice or some other way of connecting with mindfulness.

Dr. Sarah (00:18:33):

And you have an eight step program that you teach, right? To help people build mindfulness skills?

Dr. Lidia (00:18:38):

Yes. So that’s the program that we developed at UCLA with my colleagues there. And I reference it’s mindful awareness practices or maps for ADHD, and it is based on a group training over eight weeks. But in subsequent treatment manual that we published on this program, we talk about how to individualize it and how to make it also useful if you’re working one-on-one with someone, and it might be not over eight weeks, it may be a lot longer. And so it’s in my mind, more important to understand the framework of it and sort of the steps and how these steps are executed may be different from person to person, especially if you’re working with them individually or if someone who wants to try it. It’s just so important to say you are your own comparison, right? You are your own comparison. So it doesn’t matter how fast you’re going, it just matters that you are growing or that you are using or sticking with it and seeing some benefit.

(00:19:59):

So in terms of the framework, there are kind of two sides to mindfulness practice. The first intention is to help people move their attention away from being stuck in always thinking, always ruminating in this cloud up here we have these busy thoughts. You might have seen cartoons, right? People sitting in meditation and lots and lots of thoughts going on, and that’s normal and that’s going to be very normal for someone with ADHD. And so the goal is not for that to disappear and have blank mind. It is that you notice that cloud of thought, but you are practicing some control of attention by bringing it back to an anchor in the present moment. And there’s lots of different things that can be anchors, but typically in our program and meditation practice, there will be things like breath or body sensation or sounds. And so you first four weeks or four steps are about just exploring these different anchors and doing variety of practices to notice when you are distracted, spacing out, ruminating, you have lots of thoughts.

(00:21:25):

And that happens automatically for a lot of people. They don’t even know that they are distracted and not noticing the present moment with full awareness. So once you do notice yourself that you have gone away in your mind that you bring yourself back to let’s say the breath, or if you’re doing walking mindfulness for example, if you prefer to try that, we’ll be noticing your movement or noticing your body moving or the sensations at the bottom of your feet. So a lot of the initial training giving lots of, it’s a menu of different things, but what you’re training is noticing your attention, noticing when you’re on automatic pilot and then bringing yourself back more intentionally to something in the present moment. And when you have ADHD, you do it a hundred times that you space out. And if you come back and 101 times, that’s success. Right?

Dr. Sarah (00:22:30):

That’s good to hear. I feel like, and as someone who does practice meditation relatively regularly, I can say for certain that most of the time, and not even most every single time I meditate, there has never, ever once been a time that I meditated where I was not distracted and followed the train of thought at least a little bit, and then I would bring it back. And I think that’s a huge misunderstanding of the goal of meditation or a myth is that the more you do this, eventually you will no longer get distracted. And it’s just that I think, and correct me if I’m wrong, the goal is that it’ll become easier for you to notice and quicker that you’re able to bring it back, but the distractions will continue to come. The goal is never going to be the absence of distraction because our brains, all brains, but especially ADHD brains are just constantly firing those thoughts. And so the brain is not going to stop doing that. It’s just the conscious awareness of that, turning that into background noise and being able to notice, oh, it came to the front again, I tuned into that channel. Hold on, let me bring it back. And you can do that hundreds of times in a 15 minute meditation, I would imagine.

Dr. Lidia (00:23:56):

Right? Exactly. And it’s important to see that the moment you notice yourself distracted and you bring yourself back or you let go of that channel, that’s the meat of mindfulness training.

Dr. Sarah (00:24:10):

Right? That’s the rep, right? Exactly. If we’re going to use the metaphor, that’s the rep that’s strengthening that conscious attention, and that’s actually where the benefit. So even so if I’m hearing you right, if you get distracted a hundred times and you bring yourself back 101 times, even if you bring yourself back 99 times, you’re getting 99 reps in.

Dr. Lidia (00:24:31):

Exactly.

Dr. Sarah (00:24:32):

And that is the thing that is strengthening and the brain system and the thing that’s going to decrease symptoms long-term.

Dr. Lidia (00:24:42):

Exactly. That’s where the value is that you start to be more aware and more able to notice yourself distracted, and then you have more control over attention by having practice bringing yourself back. And you may notice that the amount of thoughts may vary from day to day, that there’s some days when there’s a lot, you feel more kind of scattered, and other times when it’s a little easier, but it never goes away. As you said, the brain is producing thoughts and that’s what the brain does. And for us, it’s just learning how to observe that, how to relate to it a little differently so you’re not lost in it. You have some choice about how to react to it. So sitting in practice very much informs what happens in daily life. So when you are at work at your desk or maybe when you’re with your children, playing with your children.

(00:25:49):

You have more ability with mindfulness to say, oh, I am in my thoughts. I’m thinking about something else. When you’re at work, oh, I’m thinking about my children, which is nice, but maybe I need to refocus. When you’re with your children and you say, oh, I’m thinking about work. Okay, let’s refocus, right? Let’s be where I am at. Because again, it’s such a universal tendency for us to be somewhere else than where we’re at right now with some practice with meditation, you get a hang of that process and you can actually then do that in your daily life. So the practice continues in daily life. That’s what we call this informal practice, but what it really is is you’re applying this and you’re keeping these practices alive in your life and you’re strengthening your ability to pay attention.

Dr. Sarah (00:26:46):

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the metaphor of exercise and working out and building muscle feels so apt because you think about functional exercise doing squats or it’s been a while since I’ve been at the gym, but those kinds of things that are like, it’s not so that you get really good at squats. It’s that so you can move through life with strength and not injure yourself so you can bend down and pick your kid up, but do it correctly because strong and the point of meditation, while it’s really nice, I think to have a mindfulness practice or meditation practice just to reduce stress and have some quiet and practice that reflecting, but you’re also exercising a muscle metaphorical muscle so that you can use it in your life functionally, right? I find that when I don’t practice, it’s not like, oh, I’m more stressed out. It doesn’t really have that huge of an impact on me that I’m aware of. What I do notice is that I am more scattered. I feel my ADHD symptoms more intrusively in my life. I’m more irritable, but not because I’m just irritated, but because I’m moving too fast and I’m getting in my way and I’m forgetting something important because I didn’t sew, or my kids are coming at me and I’m trying to do five other things, and I’m feeling flooded by that irritation because my thoughts feel so scattered and I’m not anchored.

(00:28:30):

I think where the functionality comes in and when I’m treating families and I treat a lot of families who I’m actually working with the kids, the parents may or may not know they have ADHD, but I often am working with parents who are navigating a child who has ADHD, and we know there’s a genetic component. There’s a higher likelihood that someone who has a child with ADHD may themselves have it. And I find actually my practice, a lot of times we do neuropsych testing, we’ll test a child, they’ll get a diagnosis. And when we kind of explain, because I think people have a very specific idea in their mind of what a DHD is, and it’s so much more nuanced than that. And when we really explain the nuance of ADHD, a lot of times parents are like, oh, oh, wait, hold on.

(00:29:20):

I deaf, that’s me. And then they’ll go and get tested or get a diagnosis and do, I think there are a lot of adults who are getting diagnosed with ADHD later in life, in part because maybe they’ve been able to kind of coast, but when you have kids or when your life gets a little more complicated and demanding, for me, I didn’t really, I sort of pseudo diagnosed in college, never really did much with that diagnosis. I pretty much just figured compensatory strategies out on my own. I was like, I’d pull all nighters in grad school and write my papers at the last minute, but I would get A’s. And so I didn’t really worry about it, but then when I had two kids and I was running multiple businesses, this podcast in my practice, I was like, oh my God. All of it was like a house of cards that I had built up over these years just started falling apart. And I think parents often have that experience where because parenthood requires so much executive functioning and holding so many things coming at you rapid fire, you have to sort and plan and organize on the fly. You have to manage time for multiple people in this very complicated way. I think that’s when sometimes our house of cards can fall down.

(00:30:50):

And so I feel like parents often describe the experience of ADHD finally impacting and interfering with their life in parenthood in a way that it didn’t maybe their whole life prior to that.

Dr. Lidia (00:31:07):

Yeah. Thank you for sharing your story. And it reminds me of my first time really learning about adult ADHD, and this was back in my training as a psychiatry resident. I was rotating through a clinic called Women’s Health Clinic, and we often met women during pregnancy or postpartum or after they’ve had children. And I met two women kind of back to back who really did well until they had children. And they very much talked about these strategies and how they structured their lives to have breaks, how they were self-employed or had ways to really manage themselves. And it took a lot to manage just themselves. You developed these compensatory strategies, but when you have children, not only you have to take care of somebody else and manage so many extra things, but you also could be sleep deprived.

Dr. Sarah (00:32:15):

Mhmm.

Dr. Lidia (00:32:15):

You’re also having a lot more stress. You can’t have these little timeouts for yourself to use that word, re-anchor yourself. Those things just are not as easy to come by when you become a parent and there’s so much more coming at you. So it is a setup for the A DHD to get worse, for things to start falling through the cracks. And so many parents with A DHD really do struggle during that time, whether they have been diagnosed or not. It is a challenging time, and especially with every parent knows it’s easy to get frustrated or fly off the handle and you don’t want to, but you are stressed. That piece of parenting can be also very hard, especially if you have a DHD, how not to get overwhelmed and then maybe just be frustrated, right?

Dr. Sarah (00:33:14):

Because also the sensory piece to ADHD, I have so many sensory sensitivities that again, I really wasn’t aware of. If you had asked me when I was 20 years old, do you have sensory sensitivities? I would’ve been like, what are you talking about? I’m fine. I just kind of tuned them out. But when I got pregnant, and especially when I was postpartum with my first, I was like, why are the lights so bright? Why is every sound so loud? I think some of it had to do with just pregnancy and the changes from that, but I feel like it lingered and I have ever since become so sensitive to, and fortunately, I practice a type of parenting where I have from my kids early, early days was like, okay, I am me if I am being climbed on. And it’s overwhelming to me. I will say very nicely to my child normally, but oh, nope, I don’t like that.

(00:34:15):

I don’t want you climbing on me. I have had those sort of physical boundaries when I need them with my kids. So now when my kids are climbing on me and I say, oh, I need space, they usually, not always, but they get what I’m, they know what I’m saying, and they can respect that. But I know so many parents who that’s a new thing for them to tell their kids to get off of them from. And there’s just so many sensory inputs in parenthood, and if you have ADHD and you are sensitive to that could be super dysregulating. And I think that’s where a lot of mom rage comes from is the physicality of being overstimulated. I don’t know. I’m curious your thoughts on that too.

Dr. Lidia (00:34:59):

Yeah, my mind goes to the fact that just thinking about my own pregnancy and never sleeping well again, I sleep like a rabbit now. I hear everything. And I think there’s something about that, that once you become a parent, you also more maybe sensitive and vigilant for what’s happening with your children. And I think that plus any sensory sensitivity that are already there can really combine to have this overwhelm. And you mentioned just knowing yourself can be so helpful in how you navigate this, but for so many people, they really don’t fully recognize how ADHD is impacting them. Even if they’ve been diagnosed, they might not understand the full spectrum of how ADHD shows up. And some parents might have been diagnosed as children and never really invested into understanding what is ADHD. It was sort of a name that they are now used to and they think they have it, but they haven’t. As adults revisited this diagnosis to say, well, what is true for me? What aspect is really difficult for me? What aspect is kind of my strength because of A DHD? And so I think it’s just really important to make time for that to reflect. And maybe at the time when you pregnant or thinking about having children, or maybe after, I guess at any point, just having this intention, I really want to understand what I am, how the ADHD shows up for me, what helps me, what makes it really crazy for me with too much stimulation or too much going on and advocating for yourself.

Dr. Sarah (00:37:05):

So coming back to mindfulness, it’s so interesting. The treatment is also the thing that we do when we have ADHD to help reduce our symptoms is also probably a tool to help us identify our symptoms. What are some strategies you might suggest for someone who’s like, I know I have it, or I think I have it, but don’t really know. I know what it means on paper, but as we’ve been saying, it shows up. ADHD is a constellation of symptoms and you only some people have, some people have others and some people have all, it doesn’t always show up the same way for everybody because the brain is so complicated and we don’t even fully understand it that well. What are some things that you might recommend to someone who wants to become more mindfully aware of the way their own ADHD symptoms are showing up? What would you suggest they look for? What are some things that they should pay attention to?

Dr. Lidia (00:38:03):

Yeah, it’s hard to notice something you don’t know. So I do recommend often some psychoeducation around ADHD, not just by looking at the typical criteria or the screening tests and things like that that you can find, but on the looking at lived experience of others with ADHD, and there are some resources that are really good. There’s ADDitudes Magazine. It’s an online magazine that has free webinars and lots of other free resources and articles on the topic of ADHD. And even just signing up for the newsletter and seeing the titles that come up in your newsletter can give you a sense of this landscape of ADHD. Things like rejection, sensitivity dysphoria, which you might not hear about, but it is a thing with A DHD that sometimes feeling rejected can feel very intense and difficult.

(00:39:14):

Things like emotional dysregulation. How do you experience emotions or how to deal with overwhelm those things? Do you hear that in stories or in articles that are a little bit more geared to really talk about ADHD? Both the struggle, but also what are some of the neat things that maybe come with ADHD lately? And you may be aware of it. We have October is the ADHD Awareness Month. So there’s a lot of information that is available from that magazine as well as two leading organizations on ADHD. One is CHADD Children and Adults with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, and also ADDA, which is organization, another nonprofit just for adults with ADHD. So those three places can give you lots of information and also lots of podcasts by people that live with ADHD and some of the narrative now when we talk about awareness is to also say empowerment.

(00:40:29):

Not just awareness, but empowerment month, which is not just looking at what are the deficits, but also what are the strengths or what are the neat things about having ADHD. And it’s important to acknowledge both. So I think having access to those information for such information being engaged in that will tell you what to look for yourself. So you can then check it out in the moment, oh, I’m noticing now that I’m just paralyzed. Oh, that’s procrastination. I’m avoiding, or I’m stuck. And then you have learned this word chunking before, so then you can try to observe yourself with mindfulness, how do I break things down? Is it easy for me or not? Do I need help from someone to do this chunking? What else helps me to get unstuck or less overwhelmed? Because there’s lots of aspects to ADHD. There’s lots of strategies for ADHD when you start learning about that space of information. But what works for you still needs to be individualized.

(00:41:55):

That’s where mindfulness can be helpful to say, huh, what’s happening with me right now? And what do I need right now? Do I need to go for a walk because it’s too much? I need to do something to bring down the sense of stress and overwhelm, or maybe I need to take a piece of paper, write things down so it’s not in my head, it’s outside. And then I can utilize some other strategies by prioritizing or putting things on the calendar. And then noticing that when you do that, what happens? Are you overwhelmed with the list or are you actually feeling that sense of shift in your body?

(00:42:42):

Now it’s manageable because I did this strategy. Maybe I really am stuck. I don’t know how to start and I need external, something else, another person to help me get unstuck. What I can do is not enough. So calling someone and even using them as a sound board, talk it through. For a lot of people, they’re problem solved by talking when they have ADHD. So having the soundboard, it can be really helpful. Sometimes writing things out for yourself. The paper is sort of a soundboard, but it’s not as effective and you still be stuck, can be procrastinating on it. So having somebody else can be super helpful.

Dr. Sarah (00:43:28):

Yeah. Yeah. It’s so funny. All the things you’re saying are literally strategies that I’ve learned to use.

Dr. Lidia (00:43:37):

And for a lot of people, they come to it through their own exploration, experimenting their own intelligence and skills. They can find different tweaks, and there’s still value sometimes to hear what other people are doing with their tweaks. And then you could say, oh, that makes sense to me, or, well, I don’t struggle with this as much, or this doesn’t resonate with me. So using mindfulness to really be attuned to what you need, what makes a difference for you,

Dr. Sarah (00:44:16):

That’s super helpful. One of the things I’m thinking about is like, okay, I really want, if someone’s listening right now, I want them to feel like, okay, after turning off this podcast episode, I could go and do one or two things today that would help me feel like I’m starting. Because I think there’s a couple things that are particularly difficult when you have ADHD one is starting things feels like an impossible uphill battle. We always, at least I do, I have a very distorted sense of the amount of energy it takes to get the car started. After I’ve started the car, I’m usually like, oh, well that was a lot easier. Why did I put this off for so long? But in my mind, the output is overwhelming, and so I want to avoid it. One of the things that I have done to help me with that is I will put things in my schedule.

(00:45:16):

I’ll literally put them in my calendar and I will put in a 15 minute buffer and then I’ll put the 30 minute task. So I’m always buying in more time because I have total time blindness. I also use my Apple watch I set because I genuinely do not know how much time goes by in a minute or two. I don’t have a sense an internal clock. So if I’m doing something, I won’t know how much time has passed. So I use the buzzer on my watch. I’ll literally set a five minute timer so that I know in five minutes I need to just check and see am I still doing what I need to be doing or should I be done? Do I need to move on to the next thing? And when I’m meditating, I also find, and this is a little less conventional I think for meditation, but it works for me, is because I do get so easily distracted by the thoughts, and then I really feel almost like FOMO in letting them go away.

(00:46:17):

I sit with a pad of paper when I meditate so that when I have a thought that I can’t let go of, it keeps coming back and coming back and I can’t get back into the meditation. I will just write the word down on the piece of paper quickly so that I can really release it and then come back to meditating. Are there any other really kind of concrete strategies that you find might help someone who’s had a hard time starting a meditation practice or even starting anything that’s mindfully aware in their life to just take some of the overwhelm out of it or make it feel a little more accessible?

Dr. Lidia (00:47:00):

Yes. So we have these different ways to practice mindfulness, and there are benefits to each having some time, quiet time, even if it’s just five minutes, can have benefits and how you practice. And also giving yourself a little bit of that time to experience calm experience, a little bit more connection to yourself, and there’s some strategy to help you establish that. And that would be things like put it on the calendar and have a reminder for yourself. Think about when is the easiest time for you to have this extra five minutes just for yourself? So thinking of the logistics of how can I approach this and how can I keep it in my life just as you would with another task or exercise? And sometimes having a mindfulness body is helpful. So you have exercise body and it’s more of you don’t necessarily have to meditate together, even though that could be nice. It could be in two different places and you text each other and say, Hey, I’m about to sit down. Okay, talk to you in five minutes. That can be helpful. So especially if somebody is really motivated to try to create that structure, it could be helpful. Sometimes it’s helpful to think about the physical aspect of restlessness, so doing some exercise or going for a walk before you decide to sit down so you’re not been sitting all day and then you try to sit down.

(00:48:45):

Mornings are nice because sometimes people are still a little sleepy. They’re getting going. And then for some people it works to do the meditation in the morning because they’re still not yet in that their engine is not fully on.

(00:49:03):

And for some people, they just do a little bit of a practice just when they’re waking up, they’re in the bed and they’re doing some mindful stretching and mindful breathing, and that’s how they start their day. But it’s not a formal sitting somewhere meditation practice. And if that’s hard to do, I think sometimes just signing up for a class, any mindfulness class is helpful because you get support of the group, you get the structure of the group, you hear other people and their struggles. And I think ADHD thrives with connection. And so having a community or group where you learning the skills of mindfulness for the first time, it can be very helpful. There’s some apps like Insight Timer app where you can meditate with others. It shows you how we are so many people meditating at this moment, and it can be a nice sense of connection and motivation to actually do it. For a lot of people that I work with, mindfulness, we also just start with the mindfulness in daily life and think about what is it that you are already doing that is a good starting point? What activity are you already doing that you could bring more mindfulness to?

(00:50:33):

And some activities can more easily or readily bring on mindfulness, almost like spontaneous mindfulness. So being in nature is one of ’em. Working in the garden, for example, because it’s so sensory and you working with your hands, there’s all this sensory stimulation of nature. Those things already can spontaneously bring you in. For some people, it may be during or after exercise that that’s when they can sit with their breath a little bit longer and just notice their breath. Or it could be cooking. So cooking is another activity that’s sensory. And yes, you can be scattered and running around the kitchen, or you could say, when I handle my vegetables, I really kind of notice the textures, and when I’m chopping, I’m chopping. I’m really attending to that activity. So maybe finding something that you identify as, this is a place I want to start, want to start bringing mindfulness to my life, and I’m going to make an intention that that’s when I do it. And another easy thing would be shower.

(00:51:59):

When people are in, we all take showers on regular basis and just noticing the water of the shower, the temperature of it, the sensation on your skin, the sensations of wetness that comes from the water, and just noticing how quickly you start thinking about work or your day or something else and bring it back to that sensation. So that could be your practice. That could be a beginner practice is to say what daily activity I’m doing, I’m going to do mindfully. Maybe it’s the first sip of your coffee, right? I’m going to drink coffee mindfully, at least for the first three sips.

(00:52:46):

Okay, I’m just going to really feel the cup, how warm it is. I’m going to smell the coffee. I’m going to feel the cup touching my lips. Pause for a moment. So you’re anchoring yourself in the present moment. All these ideas are ideas to be more anchor in the present moment, which is counteracting this automatic pull of our busy minds and stress really too, to be scattered, to be in your thoughts. So the more you have these little drops of anchoring throughout your day, the more you’re practicing mindfulness and you, the breath is so powerful. It’s not easy to stay with the breath. So that’s why I’m emphasizing some of these other ways to be anchored through senses, because that’s a good starting point. But you can also play with noticing your breath, like, oh, I spontaneously took a sigh. And then maybe just notice your breath for a bit, and then you can just observe how your breath is in different situations.

(00:53:55):

Or you could manipulate your breath by saying, I’m going to take few deeper breaths. There’s one visual I like to use with people to say, you can breathe as if you were climbing a slide on the playground. So when you think about what you do with a slide on the playground, you first climb it up to get to the top of the slide. You pause there a little bit, and then you go whoosh down the slide. So you could practice breathing like this. So as you’re taking a breath in, you’re climbing up the slide, you pause at the time of transition, and then you take this longer, maybe twice as long breath out, you can do it fast or you can do it slowly. Some kids can go down the slide very slowly.

Dr. Sarah (00:54:47):

These are fun games. I could see a parent playing with their child too. If you meditate with your kids, it counts as your meditation for the day. If you do some breathing exercises with your kids, you could check that off your list. You both get the benefit.

Dr. Lidia (00:55:02):

Very much so. I do that with my son before he falls asleep. There’s lots of meditations for kiddos. Some of them have nice imagery, and that’s fine too. You can kind of notice how is this imagery affecting me, right? That’s mindfulness. And doing it with kids counts for both people, right?

Dr. Sarah (00:55:27):

Yeah, it’s true. I love it. I feel like this is super helpful and hopefully if you’re listening, whether you have ADHD or not, we all have moments where meditation can feel really difficult. And I love this idea that it’s not sitting on a cushion for 30 minutes in a candlelight room where you have a blank slate of a mind. Let’s just take that out. It’s not the goal. It sounds lovely, but it’s not realistic for probably many of us listening to this episode today. Just brush your teeth mindfully tonight before you go to bed or do breathing, exercise with your kid, make it fun, and then start to try to put some of these things in. I love this idea of chunking, where you’re adding to what is already happening. You already have a habit. Add something mindful to that habit. You’re more likely to do it. Put the stuff in your calendar. Make space for it. Dr. Zylowska you have a couple books that you’ve written on this. People want to follow your work or find out, read your books, or learn more about maps. Where can I send them? Where can they find you?

Dr. Lidia (00:56:48):

They can go to my website, which is just my first and last name, lidiazylowska.com. There’s a book that’s written for everybody, so it’s not a technical book called Mindfulness Prescription for Adult ADHD. It also comes with some guided meditations, so that could be a good starting point for some people. I also have a YouTube channel that I recently put together. It’s MindfulRxADHD, and you can just check out some meditations there. They’re similar to what’s in the book, but if you don’t want to buy the book, you could just kind of check it out first and see how that feels.

(00:57:37):

And one aspect, I didn’t bring up as much today, but it’s really big part of why mindfulness can be helpful for ADHD. So I want to at least mention it is this self-compassion piece that when you do mindfulness, we talk about being nonjudgmental or what you noticing about yourself. And even more so not just being neutral, because for a lot of people when they start meditating, they’ll say, what’s wrong with me? I can’t focus. I’m not doing this right? I’m failing at this. So mindfulness is more about curiosity. It’s about just observing nonjudgmentally what your experience is, and not only, but with kindness, with compassion to yourself. Like, oh, this is hard for me. I know I have ADHD. Maybe this practice is not so easy for me, but I’m going to play with it. I’m going to play and find ways that make sense to me. And with that attitude, then mindfulness doesn’t have to be this scary thing or something that, oh, I have to do it certain way. If I don’t do it certain way, then I’m failing at it because that’s already a fear for a lot of people that whenever, especially with ADHD, that I’m not going to be able to do it. I’m not going to be able to stick with it, so why even try it, right?

Dr. Sarah (00:59:06):

Oh yeah. If you have ADHD, if your brain thinks something is going to be too hard, your brain doesn’t produce norepinephrine. It’s just like it’s an interest-based regulation disorder. So it’s like if I don’t think this is going to be fun or doable, if it’s going to be too hard or too boring, I will not make the neurochemical necessary for sustained attention. So you have to think it’s a lot of it is like this kind of mindset shift. If I think this is something I can play with that could be fun, that I don’t have to be perfect at, that I am allowed to be frustrated with, I’m allowed to struggle with, all of a sudden we’re opening our ability to produce sustained attention for it, which is kind of an important brain hack.

Dr. Lidia (00:59:55):

So being curious how you are in the present moment, that’s all right. That’s what mindfulness is. Checking in with yourself, checking in with what’s happening in that moment, that’s mindfulness.

Dr. Sarah (01:00:08):

That’s doable.

Dr. Lidia (01:00:09):

And that’s doable. And then practicing being kind to yourself too.

Dr. Sarah (01:00:13):

Thank you so much. It was lovely talking with you.

Dr. Lidia (01:00:17):

Likewise. Thank you for having me.

Dr. Sarah (01:00:25):

If you enjoyed listening to this conversation, I want to hear from you, share your thoughts and your feedback with me by scrolling down to the ratings and review section on your Apple Podcasts app or whatever app you’re listening on. And let me know what you think of this episode or the show in general, your support means the absolute world to me, and just a simple tap of five stars can make a real impact in how this show gets reached by parents everywhere. So thank you so much for listening, and don’t be a stranger.