ADHD, Impulse Control through the Transcendental Meditation Technique

Dr. Stixrud: I make my living by evaluating kids who are struggling with classroom achievement, behavioral problems, depression and neurological disorders. Stress plays a significant role in all of these problems. I see many children with learning disorders and ADHD—Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder—and there’s absolutely no question that stress significantly interferes with a child’s ability to learn and perform in school.
Related Scientific Research

Dr. Stixrud: The stress response, also called the fight-or-flight response, presumably evolved over millions of years in order to protect us from predators. When that fight-or-flight response is triggered, you aren’t supposed to be able to think clearly. From an evolutionary point of view, if people thought a long time about “What’s the right thing to do?” as a tiger approached, they got eaten, and they didn’t pass on their genes. Nature has protected us from thinking under stress. Consequently, if a kid is under stress, it’s very hard for him to think, to learn, to do school work, to pay attention to the teacher, and to manage his own behavior.

I would say that the main principle that’s been most commonly derived from 20 years of applying brain research to learning is this: a child needs to feel safe in school in order to learn, because you can’t learn when you’re under stress.
Related Scientific Research

Dr. Stixrud: I think that TM can play an extremely important role in alleviating learning and attention problems. In some schools the Transcendental Meditation technique already does play a dramatic role in helping children overcome learning, attentional, and behavioral problems. (See stressfreeschools.org)
Related Scientific Research

Dr. Stixrud: Absolutely. Many researchers think that a lack of impulse control, or a lack of inhibition, is the primary deficit in people who have ADHD. One of my favorite patients with ADHD is a tall kid; he’s 14 or 15 years old and he speaks loudly. I always know when he’s in the building. Once he was talking in the waiting room, and a woman from another practice came out and said, “When you come here, you’re going to have to be quiet.” And he snapped back, “If I could be quiet, I wouldn’t have to be here.” Which is absolutely true.

With the practice of Transcendental Meditation, the nervous system becomes settled and quiet. And when the stress response starts operating normally, you’re simply less impulsive. I think there’s reason to believe that the process of quieting the mind and body through the Transcendental Meditation technique—which results in increased integration in the electrical activity of the brain, seen through increased coherence between the two hemispheres and the front and the back part of the brain—allows children much improved ability to control their impulses. They get in trouble less; they act without thinking less; they can inhibit the tendency to get distracted better.
Related Scientific Research

Dr. Stixrud: In a pilot study on middle school students with ADHD practicing Transcendental Meditation, we interviewed the students after three months of meditating. We asked, “What do you notice after meditating for a few months?”

Virtually all the kids said things like, “I feel much less stressed, and I feel more relaxed.” Most of them said, “I feel more organized. I feel I can do my homework better. My parents don’t need to help me.”

One strikingly impulsive boy said, “Before I started meditating, if I was walking in the hallway and another middle school kid bumped into me, I’d turn around and hit him. Now that I’ve been meditating for three months, if somebody bumps into me, I stop and think, “Should I hit him or not?”

To some that may not sound like much, but from my experience in working with impulsive kids and teenagers, this delay in reacting is very hard to achieve. If the Transcendental Meditation technique gives this child a little bit of time between a stimulus and a response—which then allows him to think, to plan, to ask what’s the right thing to do in this situation—that’s a capacity that he didn’t have before he started meditating.
Related Scientific Research

Dr. Stixrud: Most researchers think ADHD is a disorder of multiple executive functions. “Executive functions” refers to the functions of the front part of the brain; the mental control and the mental organizational skills that you need to carry out purposeful behavior. When you have to get something done, for instance, you need to be able to plan, to organize, and to hold relevant information in your memory. You also need to self-monitor, to ask yourself, “How’s it going?”

And there’s good evidence in several hundred studies on Transcendental Meditation that it improves every one of these executive functions. This is probably, at least in part, because the Transcendental Meditation technique increases the coherence of brain functioning, and in part because it reduces stress, which makes all these other things worse.
Related Scientific Research