Not meditation related, but a lot of people with ADHD have some serious shame issues, and taking meds that treat the ADHD can put them in a state where they can no longer easily distract themselves from the fact that they hate themselves, which is ... not a great feeling.
It’s a subpar way to treat ADHD and similar issues with focus/attention. Subpar because other medications or non-medication treatments are usually better - but many use it as an accidental coping mechanism.
Also anxiolytic. And seeing as anxiety disorders are highly prevalent among people with ADHD, and untreated anxiety can really mess with your life, maybe people should stop stigmatising psychostimulants so much.
The people who really need these and have tried everything else or struggled for years with ADHD really find the "you are just going to be an addict, have you tried meditation" approach patronizing.
> I have heard anecdotal tales about ADHD medications as revelations bordering on spirituality, people crying after taking their first dose at age 30 and realizing how much more "normal" it might make them.
It really does whenever you have ADHD and you feel like your restless mind is finally at rest. It's absolutely infuriating to be unable to concentrate throughout most of my days.
As a counter point, being diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed medication was one of the best things to have ever happened to me. Everybody is different though, medication is beneficial for some and detrimental for others. It's important to be aware of your mental state and how treatment (whether drugs or other) affects it, and to be able to make informed choices regarding treatment. A good doctor/shrink should take into consideration your feedback and act accordingly. Bad doctors will just push pills on to you. This is why I'm deadset against prescribing stimulant medication to children, it's easy (and common) for doctors and parents to basically force feed their kids amphetamines, often causing them great harm (I also believe that it stops children from learning proper ADHD management strategies, leading to them being completely incapable of functioning without medication or illicit drugs)
Meditation and yoga do nothing for me. Seeing a counsellor has been good though, and I think that its something that everybody should do, regardless of neurotype or how well they appear to be functioning in life.
This seems like a very puritanical viewpoint. So much so, that it's a little peculiar and almost feels like a caricature. A life of avoidance does not help an ADHD brain, and the idea that your brain wants stuff to do is not the case at all. You will burn out very quickly going down that path. You'll get much further just taking a few times a day to slow your thoughts via meditation or engaging in a passive activity that allows constructive mind-wandering.
Hell, I'd even recommend medicating over locking your whole life down and living in fear of your own brain.
Not exactly. ADHD isn’t equivalent to having a lack of discipline to focus on things you don’t like.
ADHD is a more severe condition. It’s important to avoid equating dislike for uninteresting tasks with ADHD. That’s not what ADHD patients are suffering from.
It’s also very important to avoid giving the impression that stimulant medications are an easy solution for motivation. The motivating side effects of stimulants wears off as tolerance sets in, so people who depend on stimulants for motivation to do boring tasks can end up in a bad place after a few years or even months. ADHD treatment isn’t equivalent to getting motivation from a pill, but it can reduce some of the distractions and impulses that can pull people away from tasks.
Being very recently diagnosed with ADHD in my 30s (after searching for a source of my chronic exhaustion), it was interesting to notice just how much I masked my own ADHD from myself and others my whole life, where the experience of taking medication definitely matched "putting on glasses for the first time".
I've always felt like doing uninteresting things felt like wading through 3 feet of water, but I assumed everyone felt that, and that I was just lazy.
The biggest realization I had was that I have been using negative feelings/emotions in order to get stuff done for years. On the outside I looked like a productive, healthy person, on the inside I was beating myself down all day every day, and that behavior didn't lead to a great relationship with myself.
Now that I'm on medication, my brain actually rewards me for doing boring stuff. I see a dish in the sink and I want to rinse it and put it away because it feels good.
tldr; Just because you lead a successful, healthy life, your own perception on how hard life needs to be may still be skewed, and treatment for those who have been diagnosed with ADHD can really up your quality of life
I know a lot of people who are on ADHD medication and they're universally positive about it; nobody says they lost something. What they gained is mental silence so that for the first time in their lives they can think and focus clearly. Also emotional stabilisation.
Hear, hear. This is practically a trope, and not just with ADHD but all kinds of illness, mental and physical. I'm not saying psychiatry or the pharmaceutical industry are perfect, or that there are zero people taking meds who don't need to, but come on - there are actually lots and lots and lots of folks who have tried things like meditation and it didn't make it possible for them to get through the day.
People with these kinds of problems reach a point of desperation after having tried everything you could possibly think of. So when the hundredth person comes along and says "you don't need meds, you just need X," where X is one of the many, many things they've already tried, it's exasperating.
Ive been diagnosed with ADHD since I was in 2nd/3rd grade and have been on Ritalin and now Adderall pretty much the whole time. That article sounds exactly like my experience. This morning I have been avoiding working on a project, and I caught myself staring at my computer with my hands ready but I just couldn't start. I do feel that it is my ADHD, but I also feel that there are other emotions involved. It kind of relates to this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22124489.
My main piece of advice that I write on every post about ADHD is the following: Get plenty of sleep, exercise, and look into meditating. Using the Waking Up app by Sam Harris has really taught me so much more than I was expecting. For the first time last year I went 3 months without medicine. I wanted to gauge how strong my attention/focus muscle was without medicine. At the end of 3 months I was able to start noticing when I was distracted or in my head and that was such a be improvement for me, because it allowed me to start paying attention again. I also noticed how I was communicating with myself. I went from being negative towards myself because I knew i should be paying attention. To understanding where my mind is at that day and knowing that today might be a harder day than yesterday, but that is okay. Just take it one step at a time.
TLDR: Exercise & Meditation. Mindfulness will help keep you present and away from the endless mind games you can experience with ADHD
I have diagnosed ADD/ADHD. Would hardly consider myself a "victim." It has pros and cons just like everything else in life. Personally I don't take medication and am totally sober. Mindfulness meditation helps tremendously
As someone who has dealt with ADHD both with and without medication, at least from my experience this line of reasoning leads to much pain.
I cannot speak for those with depression, but ADHD has easily tripled the amount of stress I have in my life, if not more. It causes impulsive behaviour that can wreck relationships(both personal and professional), and makes it extremely hard to concentrate on many things that aren't totally gamified from the outset.
There's a trope about how ADHD ends up being a gift because of creative thoughts coming to you, and that the medication will dull your senses... but I don't buy it too much. There have been studies that have measured no noticable difference in "creative capabilities"(hard to measure, granted) when being medicated and non-medicated.
Before being put on medication, I had never finished a single piece of homework in my life. Afterwards I was able to finish the homework assignments before class was even over. I would study autonomously, and was able to reach my full potential because I was able to manage my thoughts for the first time in my life.
There is no moral high-ground to not medicating oneself, just like there is no moral high-ground to using crutches when you have a broken leg. Asking me not to medicate is the same as asking me to go through meaningless suffering in almost every social interaction. Countless studies have shown that medication is much much more effective than any form of behavioural therapy (and that BT has an extremely high failure/"relapse" rate).
I don't think it's right to mock people looking for non-medical treatment, because various reasons mean you cannot have access to alternatives.
But medication has been proven to be very effective, and BT has proven to be a very difficult path... if you are a parent of a child suffering from ADHD it is your duty to at least explore the medication option in my opinion.
There is likely to be no higher reason for ADHD and depression to exist. We have looked at "normal people's" brains, and see that for depression/ADHD some things work differently. And that these people tend to have lower-quality lives because of a lack of something... It's hard to argue that there's a reason for it all except in some religious context. It's not like there's a higher reason for brain tumors either.
As an aside, despite the fact that I currently love where I live (Japan), I always consider moving back to the US if only to get access to medication that is illegal here. My life is a lot shittier (still great overall though) because of some drug laws. I have spent a lot of time working on different non-medical coping techniques that have helped out a lot, but nothing matched the chemicals.
Medication isn't something they just hand out to anyone who asks. The reason it exists is because there is a large body of scientific research that all points to it helping treat disorders such as ADHD, whether you believe it or not. Meditation may also provide benefits, although there is less scientific evidence today that it does.
I never took ADD meds as an adult, but what really enabled me to kick the habit in college was a sincere and dedicated meditation practice (in particular I took up passage meditation, but any sincere practice would have done the trick). Actually I just sort of forgot to take any for about a month and didn't notice! ADD made meditation really difficult and frustrating, but it's been really worth it.
I was diagnosed with ADHD in my 50's. Without meds I have to spend an enormous amount of energy managing my cognitive state. Imagine you had to spend 60% of your time creatively managing yourself into a mental state where you can do something meaningful with the remaining 40%. And I've been practicing meditation for 30 years, I'm very active, I've adapted my lifestyle around my needs.
All that work doesn't even come close to the benefit I get from Vyvanse. I get effortless self control, and all that time back.
I figured out I had ADHD by observing my (very intelligent) daughter in kindergarten--she was the obvious behavioural outlier. All the other kids were mostly attending to the teacher, my daughter was attending to everything else. We didn't medicate her until Grade 4, when she started to think she was dumb. Meds changed everything for her, allowed her to develop a better self-concept (and winning the academic prize that year). She's off meds right now, struggling a bit, but a least she knows she's not dumb. That's huge.
Here's my thinking: stimulants are relatively safe. They aren't particularly addictive. Yes, they suck, there are tradeoffs. But if they don't work out, you can stop. You can stop whenever you want.
But once a kid has internalized "I'm dumb" or "I'm a loser" it is very hard to undo. That can stay with them for life.
Lifestyle changes work for some people, but coping with ADHD is not for everyone. Most of the folks taking the meds are not looking for some "medicated state of productivity" that is beyond human, they're trying to stop feeling the urge to get up and run around during meetings.
I spent 24 years of my life without the meds. When I started taking them, I didn't become substantially more productive at my workplace. I became substantially more able to deal with my personal life, my chores, my upkeep. That's it. And I felt like I had been wasting so much of my life looking for coping mechanisms, like I hadn't fully lived until I started taking them.
Or to put it briefly, the fact that I wasn't medicated made me feel less human, made me less able to enjoy the aspects of life and work that make us human.
As someone with a lot of focus potential, its mildly frustrating to read these accounts because even I'm terribly distracted, if I let myself be. But I've been meditating for a while and, in conjunction with a lot of discipline around avoiding social media, have been able to hit a sweet spot.
I wonder though if I never discovered these two things, and simply absorbed everything I read online and convinced myself I had ADHD and got on meds. It's modern life, getting people down. There's simply no way to break through without recognizing that life is inherently distracting, and finding strategies around that.
This is not dismissing the reality of ADHD, however, only to note that medication is overprescribed and that many confuse biology with extremely targeted algorithms designed to capture attention.
And then there are the drug companies who capitalize on workers required to maintain long periods of focus; knowing they are vulnerable to performance pressure, they flood the industry with marketing. Next thing you know, an entirely healthy person's attention is destroyed, because the new baseline is oriented around a stimulant which they do not need, and which operate contrary to someone who actually has ADHD, which meds benefit. Like the opiate crisis, its all just an everyday American tragedy.
Meditating every day has done amazing things for me in terms of bringing clarity/focus to my life. I understand, however, that my ADHD if any is likely less pronounced than others and can see the benefit that taking medication can provide.
Before I started training myself to meditate, I noticed that drinking a lot of coffee seemed to help me focus better. Though it was only really until I started meditating that I realized it was possible to direct my focus/attention in such a calculated manner. I had always resigned myself to "my attention" controlling the actions I took rather than the other way around with me actively choosing how I apply it.
reply