HealthyGamerGG - Why Having ADHD Makes You Better At Meditating

Episode Date: January 22, 2024

Ever felt like you can't meditate just because you have ADHD? In this video we dive into why it's actually your superpower. Learn more from Dr. K in his Guide to Mental Health: https://bit.ly/3tyVDno Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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second to tell you all where I'm coming from. So I'm Alok Kanoja, also known as Dr. K. I studied for about seven years to become a monk and then ended up going to med school and becoming a psychiatrist. So a lot of what we're teaching y'all today is sort of a combination of these perspectives. If you'll want more information on ADHD or meditation, we've got plenty of videos on our YouTube channel. And we also have Dr. K's guide to ADHD and do it.

and stuff. So if y'all are interested, you all can check that stuff out. Now, if you're listening it's you're probably like, oh my God, what clickbait man? What are you saying? ADHD is not good at meditation. It makes it so hard. Because honestly, that's our experience, right? So we sort of think that meditation is sitting there and focusing on something incredibly boring, like my breath. And I'm just going to observe the breath. And after all of like six seconds, if you've got ADHD, you're kind of bored with that. And honestly, I was super bored with it too. When I first started learning meditation, I found it to be incredibly boring.

But that's not because meditation is incredibly boring or even that my mind wasn't strong enough to be able to meditate properly because that's what we think too, right? If you've got ADHD or if you're someone who's bad at meditating, you think that, okay, if I practice this long enough and I keep doing it, eventually my mind will improve. and then I'll be able to focus and then it'll be fun. But that's not actually how it works. It's a bunch of BS. If you find meditation to be boring,

that's because the kind of meditation that we have all learned is for neurotypical people. So let's think about this for a second, okay? So there's been an explosion of mindfulness. And mindfulness is not actually meditation. If we sort of look at what has exploded and what everyone has access to, whether it be like apps or whatever and this kind of person is teaching mindfulness and

mindfulness mindfulness mindfulness mindfulness. Why has that spread? So the things that are naturally going to spread in our society are things that are good for neurotypical people because the majority of us are neurotypical. But if you stop and really examine what true meditation is, the most advanced forms of meditation, if you have something like ADHD, you may actually find that you have an advantage at those forms of meditation. Now, you may be wondering, what do you mean advanced forms of meditation? So there's this place in the world called the Himalayas. And in the Himalayas, there are caves. And in the caves,

there are people who sit there and meditate for 30, 40, 50, even by some people's claims, hundreds of years. Now, the question is, what on earth are those people doing? Are people who sit in caves in the Himalayas just observing their breath for like 30 years at a stretch. And the answer is absolutely not. This was not something that I understood until I actually went there and learned from some of those people. And that's when I discovered what real meditation is. Now, if we want to really understand what real meditation is, let's start by understanding this whole mindfulness thing. So mindfulness is based off of the Zen tradition. So the Zen or the Buddhist tradition is like it's a very, very, like, strict, kind of straightforward, kind of like really

hardcore form of meditation. Just to give you all an example, a common Zen practice is for Zen masters to walk around and smack disciples with bamboo switches or sticks. Like, this is part of the practice. So the whole point of Zen is like, we're going to sit there and we're going to brute force our way to enlightenment. And as part of this track to enlightenment, we need to learn things like let go of expectation into learn acceptance, right? This is the kind of crap that we all talk about. Learn to accept, like don't expect things, like live life like the way it is. And that's really hard to do, which is why what Zen masters figured out is the most efficient way to teach people,

which actually involves a mild form of physical abuse. So what Zen masters would literally do is you're sitting there meditating, and the Zen master smacks you with a stick. And if we stop and think about it, what happens after someone smacks us with a stick? you're walking down the halls of the ashram or the monastery, boom, Zen Master jumps out of the bushes and smacks you with a stick. You're sitting there eating your food or trying to cook for everybody else and Zen Master pops out, smacks you with a stick. And so if you sort of think about it, what happens? So the first thing that happens, if you get smacked by a stick a couple times, you get really angry, but you can't really do anything about it, right?

And then what happens is you start to like fear the stick. So around every corner in bush, you kind of like, you're like, oh my God, is a Zen master there? Is a Zen master there? And the Zen master, these guys are real bastards, okay? They leave you alone for like a month. So then you kind of calm down. And then like once your guard is now, they're like smack you with a stick. There's literally a part of the Zen tradition.

And so eventually what happens is the only thing that you can do because anticipating it doesn't work because these people have been smacking people with sticks for like 20 years. Okay? So they're like better at it than you are. Sort of anticipating it doesn't work. And then eventually what ends up happening is you sort of realize as a Zen disciple that there's nothing I can do to stop the master from smacking with a stick. And if you really stop and think about it, it's not like he's smacking me with a stick for like 24 hours a day. It just kind of jumps out

occasionally and smacks with a stick. It's a bamboo switch. It doesn't really cause lasting damage. It's kind of annoying. So eventually I'm going to just learn to ignore him. I'm going to treat the Zen master like a mosquito that bites me. And when you do that, you've kind of advanced in the Zen tradition. That's the whole point is to sort of let go of all of your expectations and just accept whatever comes. Now the problem is that by today's standards, this is concerned physical abuse, right? If I opened a monastery and I was like, yeah, I'm going to teach you all to meditate, and by the way, I'm going to be smacking you with a steak, you're going to be like, no, that's not for me. So what's happened is that this is originally the tradition that mindfulness came from. But what's

happened is this tradition has removed a lot of these pieces. And so what we're, what we end up with is a very watered down version of the original tradition. Because based on our, you know, human rights climate, this kind of stuff is unacceptable. And so what we sort of end up with is the super watered down version of mindfulness where we're just sitting there and like observing our breath and like, we've got an app and maybe we'll do some visualizations. That's not what the people in the Himalayas are doing. So with this watered down version, if we're sitting there and observing the breath, if you've got ADHD, you're going to get bored. So if we look at the brain, you're going to of people with ADHD, there are a couple of features which we think of as disadvantages,

but they're only disadvantages unless we're meditating in the right way. So the first thing is that people with ADHD love novelty, right? You like new things. If there's something new there, you're like mind is going to be super excited about it. If you try to do the same thing over and over and over again, your mind is going to wander and you're going to get bored of stuff. So if we sit down and try to do a standard mindfulness practice, we're basically told to do the same damn thing that is really boring over and over and over again, which works great if you're neurotypical, but really sucks if you have ADHD. The second aspect of ADHD, which makes it really hard for us to meditate normally, but it's actually a superpower if we meditate in sort of this Himalayan master way, is that we're highly, highly distractible or we're highly, highly sensitive to small things. So this is really important to understand. So if I'm sitting there and trying to study, and I've got ADHD, we think of this as distractibility, right?

So in the psychiatry pathology model, we take an aspect of your mind and we say you're sick because you can't study. And we want everyone to be able to sit there and read a book. But this is neither good nor bad. This is just how your mind works. So whereas most people can sit there and just read the book and like they're all kinds of sounds and there's like a bird that flies by and someone is walking. over here, our mind is able to focus. Now, if we have ADHD, what happens is our mind is what we call distractible. But I'm going to change that. What we really have is a mind that's highly sensitive. So this means that whereas normal minds will ignore or not even pick up all kinds of

stuff that's going on around us, if you have an ADHD mind, you are highly sensitive to everything that goes on around you. It's not that your mind is distractible. It's that your mind is highly, highly perceptive and you don't know how to control that perception. There are even some evolutionary studies of ADHD hypotheses really that suggests that the reason that we have ADHD within the population is because when there were some people out there who are like foraging, that there are actually advantages to being highly perceptive, right? So I want to be able to pick up, okay, this twig is broken over here. There's a footprint over here. And if my mind is highly perceptive, I won't be caught off guard. Now, that worked really well when we were hunter gatherers,

but now in a society of nine to fives and sitting there and reading textbooks and doing the same damn rote task over and over and over again, our mind is not adaptable to that. But as our society has moved in that direction, our meditations have moved in that direction as well. So the two key features kind of neuroscientifically of the ADHD brain are an appreciation for novelty and a high degree of distractibility, or another way to put that, is highly sensitive to the tiniest little thing. Other people can study, but all it takes is a tiny little bell over there, and your mind is distracted. Now, the interesting thing is as we move from the watered down meditation to the hardcore meditation, these things that you think are weaknesses start to become strengths. Now,

in order to understand that, we have to understand what hardcore meditation actually is. So what are those people in the Himalayas actually doing. So they're not observing their breath over and over and over again in kind of a boring way. What they're actually doing is exploring their internal universe. And I know that sounds kind of weird, but if you stop and like really look within yourself, you will discover that there is an endless amount of exploration within you. So let's say you take a thought or an emotion. And you can ask yourself, where does this thought come from? And then you will track that down into something within you that you've never seen before. And then you can ask yourself, okay, where does that thought come from?

Where does that thought come from? Where does that thought come from? And you can literally go on basically close to infinity exploring within yourself. If you feel an emotional reaction, let's say you're walking down the street and you see someone eating a biscuit. And then you can sort of say, oh, wow, like now I want a biscuit. And you can actually close your eyes and you can explore where did this desire for a biscuit come from? Well, it came from my sense organs. Well, how much do I want the biscuit? Well, I wanted a lot. Why do I want it a lot today and I didn't want it a lot yesterday? So you can kind of go on with this internal exploration and we'll teach y'all how to do this so it'll become a lot clearer. This sort of internal exploration can kind of continue like towards infinity. It's kind of like within the internal universe. I know it sounds weird, but we'll all understand in a second. It's kind of like imagine that I board a spaceship and I just fly towards the ends of the universe. So this is literally what those people in the Himalayas and caves in the Himalayas are doing. They're sort of exploring this internal environment in subtler and subtler ways and they're making really cool discoveries.

They're not sitting there doing the same damn rote thing over and over and over again. They're literally out there or in there exploring the vastness of the internal universe. This episode is brought to you by CarMax. Want to buy a car the easy way? Start at CarMax. Want to browse with confidence? Get pre-qualified with no impact on your credit score and shop within your budget.

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So we're going to teach y'all oam chanting, which I know maybe you'll know how to chant oam, but we're going to teach you a different way of ome chanting that I have found I love, and I kind of have subclinical ADHD. And when I have patients who have ADHD and I teach them this kind of meditation, meditation not only becomes easy for them, it actually becomes enjoyable for them. Okay? So the main thing about oam chanting that we're going to do, we're not going to sit there and chant Oam. The goal is not to complete a task because the ADHD brain hates that. The goal is to explore. So we're going to take Ome chanting and we are going to turn it into an exploration. So I want you all to sit up straight, head straight, neck straight, spine straight. And what I want you to do is Ome chanting is really simple. We're going to open our mouths like we are mouth breathers, right? We're going to do this. And then we're going to do. And then we're going to do. And then we're going to do. going to go, we're just going to emit sound. So just emit sound with an open mouth. Ah, that's the first version, okay? And it's really simple. We're just going to emit sound with an

open mouth and then we're going to go all the way to a closed mouth. That's all oom chanting is. It's not some special thing, it's just neutral, open mouth, emitting sound without trying to say anything all the way to close mouth. So, ah, and that's what ome chanting is. If you literally look at the actual, like, you know, translation of OM, it's not O-M, it's A-U-M. And why is that? It's because with a completely open mouth, ah, with a half-open mouth, and then with a fully closed mouth, that's what Ome chanting is. So we're going to go from start to finish A through you all the way to M.

And we kind of want to do it in a gradual way. So we want the whole thing to maybe last 9, 10, 12 seconds, something like that. So we're going to open our mouths, do it with me. That's one round. Now, what does this have to do with ADHD superpower meditation? So when we do this practice, the goal is not to chant a certain number of times. The goal is to pay attention within us. And what you will discover is that there is a really, really subtle and profound vibration

that happens within you. So when we chant, we're not focused on sound, we're going to pay attention to our vibration. So now we're going to close our eyes. We're going to chant one more time, okay? And what I want y'all to do is pay attention to how the sound travels through your body. So close your eyes, open your mouth, deep breath in. Now chances are as you do that, you feel some kind of vibration,

but you're not quite sure where it is. The most common thing that people originally feel is that the ah in the ooh are kind of somewhere around here, and then the mm is very like centrally located kind of somewhere in your head. And even towards the end of the mm, you'll notice that the vibration kind of goes from the bottom of your chin, kind of to the top of your head. Okay. So you may be wondering, okay, like, why are we doing this stuff? So now we're going to get into what real meditation is. So you've done this. maybe you're just listening along or maybe you're like watching this on the subway or something.

You can't start chanting like a weirdo. But as you do this practice, what's going to happen is you will discover all kinds of subtle variations of vibration within you. So, for example, at this point when I chant, you know, I can really feel the ah starts down here. The a is like spreading out from the middle of my chest. And then the mm starts at the bottom of the chin and goes kind of all the way to the top. And this is what real meditation is.

So when we do this kind of meditation, the goal isn't to chant Ome like seven times and get bored with it while your mind is distracted. Actually, what we need is for your mind to be hyper-focused on trying to detect as much vibration as you can. So what we're sort of doing is like right now we're at the top where we can't really detect a whole lot. But as we move, as we really pay attention, you'll start to discover that, okay, there's actually something that I couldn't detect before. And as you sort of honed on that and you get really good at detecting that second layer of vibration, you'll discover a third layer of vibration underneath it. And this is where if you try to come to an answer and you say, I don't feel it, I'm done. Then this isn't going to work for you. The whole point is if you practice a little bit, if you really close your eyes and you try to really feel that vibration, it's just like sort of trying to close your eyes and like, let's say I'm drinking a wine or a beer and I say, if I really close my eyes and I concentrate, I can notice notes of like,

Oh, there's like notes of irk and oak and like, oh, my, like there's some kind of burgundy or like there's some kind of like, I don't know, flowers or seeds or fruit or it's got a note of fruit or what other fuck, right? This is what like people, wine tasters do. This is what those people in the Himalayas are doing. They're noticing these subtler and subtler things happening within themselves. And all I can say is that when I've taught this to my patients and when I learned it myself, it became incredibly addicting. It's like so cool that if I really pay attention, I can discover something. about vibration that I've never discovered before. And then the really cool thing about this, and this is what really reinforces it, is if you do this for a little while,

you'll start to like understand things about the universe. Now, this is hard to explain because until it happens to you, you're not gonna really get it. But it's really weird. Like you start to see that this vibration of OM is present in other kinds of places that you see it's kind of weird

and esoteric and mystical. You just gotta trust me. If you keep doing this for a while, you'll start to discover things. And that's just kind of how it works. And if you can get to that first point of discovery, then meditation will become really easy for you. Now, let's talk a little bit about how ADHD is an advantage for this. So the key thing to understand is that remember, what we're looking for is novelty, right?

So as we subtly increase our awareness as we pick up more about subtle vibrations, this becomes more and more novel for us, and the ADHD mind will become addicted to it. The second thing that we're really good at is remember that ADHD people are highly distractible. But highly distractible is bad if you're trying to study. But let's remember what this really is is our perception is very, very sensitive. So whereas a normal person, when I sort of teach this to people without ADHD, it takes way longer for them to understand what the hell I'm talking about. Whereas if you have ADHD and you are willing to give it a shot, you will actually advance quicker than the neurotypical person. Hey, just a quick note. A lot of people will ask us, what do I do next?

And that's why we built Dr. Kay's Guide. It's a comprehensive resource that distills over 20 years of my experience, both as a monk and as a psychiatrist. And it's designed in a way that's tailored to fit your needs. So if you're interested in better understanding your mind and taking control of your life, check out the link below. So now let's get to practicalities. What should you actually do?

So this is where things get hard, because I'm not going to tell you that you should do seven rounds of ome, that's not going to be enough. Nine rounds of ome is not going to be enough. 21 rounds of ome is even not enough. For my ADHD patients, what I recommend is 33 oms. And you're sitting there and you're saying, oh my God, Dr. Kate, 33. That's so long. That's like half an hour of meditating. I can't do that. And this is where you will say that at the very beginning, which I totally get. But if you really want to get to this, what you will notice is if you do, 33 omes and you can work your way up by going 7, 9, 21, 33. Like you can step yourself up that way. That's totally okay. But the real goal is to do many, many rounds. And what you will literally

notice is that there is a huge difference between the first ome and the 33rd ome. The two experiences will be completely different. You will notice so many more things within yourself at the 33rd round compared to the seventh round. Because remember, when we start to meditate, the first couple rounds, our mind isn't even really paying attention. We're trying to really pay attention. We're trying to sort of settle it down. But as you get into more and more rounds,

you will discover like the experience completely changes. And even for me, having meditated for 20 years, even today when I sit down and I do this kind of practice or another kind of month or practice, I still notice that my mind doesn't jump right to the end of the practice right at the beginning. Even when I chant om today, it takes me five, seven, nine rounds to really get

into it, which is just sort of how the practice works. So I know that a lot of people out there think that ADHD, like they suck at meditation. And your experience has been that meditation is hard because you can't force your mind to focus. And then you look at all these scientific studies that say that, yeah, like it trains

your frontal lobes and then you're kind of like practicing focusing. And all that crap is true. But the key thing to understand is that the meditation that we practice today is actually a watered down version of a tradition that used to be so much more robust. This is like the difference between a cocktail and a mocktail. It's the same drink where it's just taking out all the alcohol. Which is the point of a cocktail? When we look at the Zen tradition, it used to be a complete tradition. And then it got kind of watered down and turned into an app and turned into a subscription service and became a business model that private equity

companies and VC companies are like investing in because everyone's into meditation. The true spirituality of the practice has been completely annihilated. And why is that? It's because you've got meditation apps that are competing. And if they're competing, they realize, oh my God, if I make this too hard for someone, someone is going to unsubscribe from my subscription service and they're going to sign up for someone else who makes it easier for them. So we're going to pretend that we're meditating and we're going to help people feel good about themselves. But we don't actually care about your spiritual growth, whereas a Zen master who's smacking you with a stick is actually invested in your spiritual growth. They don't care whether you come or go because you're not

paying them anything anyway. So our whole system of meditation has been bastardized by all this crap going on. And this is the reason that you think you're bad at meditation. It's not that you're bad at meditation. It's that the people who are teaching you meditation don't really know what they're doing, right? Their goals are different. Their objectives are different. And it turns out that this happened to me where, like, I started to meditate and it was really hard. And then someone taught me what actual meditation is.

And suddenly I fell in love with it. So remember that if you want to meditate with ADHD, don't do something wrote. Explore within yourself. Try to discover as much as you can. And what you will discover is if you give it a shot, because you're not going to know this right away, you'll discover that there are layers of stuff going on within you. that are incredibly fascinating. And you could keep on peeling away layers of the onion.

And like, you'll discover all kinds of things, but it's unclear whether the onion ever ends. So I have some ideas about that, but that's where I'm not going to give you the answer. You keep peeling them away and then you let me know what you discover.