Is meditation really a cure?

Relation between meditation and ADD

If you already watched the netflix documentary "Take your pills" as I suggested in a past entry surely the Eben Briton experience catched your attention. Briton leave his adderall treatment and mention that he got great improvement about ADD symptons taking meditation sessions during his day.

Meditation from my experience is when you put yourself into a concious state that tries to isolate your thoughts from the outside world and make them less frequent just by focusing in a simple action like breathing. The results of a good meditation session is that you will find your head speaking less and it could be bothering when you don't make it an habbit. Taken from this WebMD article here is why meditation could help with ADD:

"Mindfulness meditation strengthens your ability to control your attention. It teaches you how to observe yourself and to focus on something. And it trains you to bring your wandering mind back into the moment when you get distracted. It can also make you more aware of your emotions so you're less likely to act impulsively."

"Meditation is thought to help with ADHD because it thickens your prefrontal cortex, a part of your brain that's involved in focus, planning, and impulse control. It also raises your brain's level of dopamine, which is in short supply in ADHD brains."

 

My Meditation Techniques

You could find usefull meditation techniques in the internet or in your local yoga classes. Today i'm going to teach you about the one I have learned, there are 3 and they are breathing focused:

Circular breathing:
Find a quiet place or at least a place where you'll not be bothered. Put yourself in a confortable position, preferably sitting, especially if you fall asleep very easily. Close your eyes and start focusing on your breath. Imagine a withe circle and inhale during five seconds. While your lungs are filling put a sparkle on the circle left edge and start to move it around the circumference when your lungs are full the sparkle must be in the right edge of the circle. Start to exhale and count 5 seconds again, at this point and move the sparkle to the left as your lungs are emptied, when there is not air left the sparkle must be in the left and then you'll proceed to repeat the process. Your mind must be only thinking in the circle, the sparkle and your breathing. Whenever you feel you're getting distracted with your thoughts or external noises or events, you must restart the process. 

Triangular breathing:

Same concept as the circular breathing but this time you'll see your breathing as a three parts: Inhaling, retaining and exhaling. The sparkle will move in each side of the triangle while you're doing each of the steps. 

Square breathing:

Add an extra step to the triangular breathing after exhaling. You'll wait with your lungs empty for a period of time. 

On each technique you can increase or decrease the time between the step change (i.e. For triangular breathing you may inhale, retain and exhale each step for a period of six seconds, then make it eight seconds and so on). Be mindfull you could feel dizzy for a couple minutes after practicing breathing meditation.

Benefits

Meditation gives you the mind power to return to a conscious state after distracting. Also there are several studies that affirm that meditation could help with weight loss. 

Cons of meditation as a treatment
The primary problem on using meditation as a treatment for ADD is that relys on the willpower of the patient. If you're not into a group or some other space that motivates you to meditate, efforts could always result on failure.

Attention span average

I want to take advantage of my interest in meditation and this entry to mention that you might find infromation about the human average span time decreasing during 2018 through this picture:

At the start I wanted to use that "fact" to support my point, but some investigation leave me to this article that explains it's false.