This does not work if you have ADHD and you notice how you can see your own reflection in the darkness of the dot and oh look I forgot to shave this morning… wait where did the dot go??
I agree... the first (few) time(s) I did this kind of thing I could not for the life of me keep my mind on track, instead it was jitteringly jumping to this or that visual detail, this or that sound, or whatever spark of thought popped up.
Every single time I could not help but hallucinate gigantic infrastructure from the tiniest speck of dust, and I further digressed into blaming my stupid self for being unable to perform such a simple task.
It felt hopeless.
I felt hopeless.
But I kept at it, a day at a time. A moment at a time. I accepted that failure is part of the process. I let go of blame. Oh, here's a thought, oh well, I lost focus; well so be it, let the thought float, a soap bubble drifting wherever it fancies, I could physically feel it wandering around my head while I went back towards the goal, if only for just a little bit, if only for just a little while.
And then, one day, the magic happened. The stray thought vanished, the bubble faded away. I did notice the thought popping up as usual, I did take note of its presence, but I did not notice its later absence. I was there, in the moment, but I did not notice being there in the moment. I only noticed that retrospectively.
I had let go.
I had let go on my mind, but also, and perhaps more critically I had let go of the illness. I am not ill. I am different. This is who I am. This is me. There are others like me.
It does not work at first with ADHD, but long term it does work, and it's a fantastic tool for one to manage ADHD without medication. It's training, like so many other things, one can't reasonably expect to be good at it overnight. And with continued training it gets easier.
Mind you it's not a silver bullet, but now I have one more tool up my sleeve in that endless struggle.
Are you sure it doesn’t work with repeated or sustained effort? Maybe it’s too short, surely one single 60-second sample isn’t enough to know, right? I was just googling a little, while there isn’t a ton of research, there seems to be growing clinical evidence that mindfulness & meditation practices do help people with ADHD. I don’t know that the 1 minute dot counts as mindfulness practice, but I’m also not aware of reasons to count it out.
I read your comment before going to the site. After starting the session, within a few seconds my mind drifted off into noticing how I couldn't see my reflection since my laptops screen is matte and why I prefer matte screens over a glossy one...and I've lost track of the dot too :/
I first got distracted by the "dot" starting to change size, then noticed my reflection while thinking about how the animation was probably supposed to represent breathing and ... yeah, I gave up when I started thinking about Black Mirror because I was thinking about how this problem could have been avoided and black is more reflective than white.
right, so just like pretty much every other aspect of life you can still do it with ADHD, it's just a bit more difficult than it is for the average person. hardly seems worth pointing out when it applies to virtually everything.
they weren't "complaining that their ADHD is making it harder to concentrate", they were claiming that it straight up doesn't work if you have ADHD, which is nonsense.
meditation takes practice for everybody, it literally is absolutely nothing to do with ADHD.
