Transcendental Meditation for ADHD
Monday January 26, 2009
In a Reuters Health article entitled "Meditation Seen Promising as ADHD Therapy," researchers are said to have found that children with ADHD "showed improvements in attention, working memory, organization and behavior regulation" using transcendental meditation (TM), which uses the repetition of a word, sound or prayer to meditate. You may know TM by its western incarnation "relaxation response." Following 10 students between the ages of 11 and 14, researchers observed students meditating twice daily for 10 minutes to 15 minutes. What they found was quite interesting: after three months, students had less stress and anxiety issues "while their ADHD symptoms also improved," according to questionnaires. Teachers said, "they were able to teach more." This is definitely an important stride for parents of ADHD children who want to use alternative therapies to treat their children.
Comments
I found this announcement a little bit confusing. Who conducted the research? Was there a control group who participated in some other kind of activity at the same frequency and duration as the group practicing meditation techniques? Thank you.
The study is outlined at: http://cie.asu.edu/volume10/number2/
Overall Study Design
A private K-12 school for children with language-based learning disabilities with 235 students agreed to participate in this study. Thirty-two students were in middle school grades, and 11 of these were diagnosed with ADHD. A randomized controlled study would have only 5-6 subjects in each group. Since this was an exploratory study, we chose to use a pretest-post test design with a single cohort. The subjects served as their own controls. Because ADHD most often involves not only attention problems, but behavioral and executive function problems, we selected a number of instruments to identify the variables that might be influenced most by the intervention.
This strategy does in fact work wonders in so many ways. Repetition of positive thoughts will in fact have a positive feedback on your mental and physical health. This is very similar to actualization, which proves the power that the mind has over the body. It is highly beneficial to research different areas of alternative medicines before deciding on the right form of therapy that each individual should try.
This strategy is very similar to actualization. With actualization you can go about the same technique of repeating a word, phrase, or positive thought. This has in fact proven to work in so many different areas of life. The effects Actualization has been recognized for centuries. Dating back to Einstein, this technique of constantly having a certain thought running through your head and speaking it will actually end up happening in one way or another. Look into documentations accumulated over the last few centuries called the secret.
This sounds so promising.How would the average teacher go about using this with her ADHD students? How do you convince parents to give it a try?