I have never been able to meditate. I’ve tried it alone, I’ve tried it in groups, I’ve tried it with apps…instead of getting quiet, I get anxious about my inability to get quiet.
I just figured it was one more thing that people did that I would never understand.
When I began Crowd-Sourcing Neurodivergent-Built Hypnosis, I saw a theme arise in the comments from my group participants: quite a few said they had tried hypnosis before and it “didn’t work”, but several also mentioned not being able to meditate either. One even assumed that what I was doing was meditation and was surprised that it was finally working for her.
The response wasn’t universal by any means, but it definitely felt notable - especially with my own history with mindfulness work. What could be at play here?
In studies, meditation doesn’t fail the ADHD mind at all: in adult ADHD, one meta-analysis of ten studies found an effect size of d = −.66 for inattention in adults with ADHD (Poissant et al.). A broader 2023 meta-analysis of meditation-based mind-body interventions — mindfulness, Tai Chi, yoga, and qigong — found smaller but still positive effects on inattention (g = −0.26), hyperactivity/impulsivity (g = −0.19), and executive function (g = −0.35). (I’m not going to pretend to deeply understand those results, but they basically say that yeah, meditation can work for ADHD brains.) So it’s not a matter of meditation generally “not working”, but that some neurodivergent minds respond more easily to accessing their trance state than a meditative state. As far as I know, there has never been a study comparing these 2 modalities for neurodivergent processing, and so far all studies seem to be only on ADHD participants.
I have a theory (don’t I always have a theory?): maybe meditation was asking me to drive the car, when what I needed was to be the passenger.
Who is doing the work? Meditation is usually asking you to babysit your attention - you need to notice when it has wandered, you need to bring it back in, wash, rinse, repeat. That’s a continuous executive-function task, an open loop that never really closes until the session is finished. In a hypnosis session, you are led through the steps, your imagination fills in the details you want it to, but the executive function demands are removed.
Distraction can feel like failure. While meditation practice always reassures you that the wandering mind is normal, I personally would judge myself each time it happened for “doing it wrong”. This is not the fault of meditation, of course - this is my own self-judgmental reaction to perceived “failure”.
Absorption vs. diffuse awareness. The hypnotic trance state gives the client deep focus - something many neurodivergent minds are attuned to do naturally. So the state itself is very familiar (even though, when one is actually in it, it often doesn’t feel like anything special - you’re not asleep, you’re not “gone”, but afterward you feel the results and you know that you were in the state). By contrast, many types of meditation ask for a broad, unattached kind of awareness instead. (This is a good time to point out that there are many different types of meditation, and the variations may well make some more ND accessible than others.)
Purpose. A hypnosis session usually has some kind of goal, even if the goal doesn’t feel very concrete, often the imagery leading to it is. For example, for my Stress Relief (amorphous goal) session, we create a Sanctuary Space (concrete goal); for my Rumination Release (amorphous) session, we create a screening room to “watch” internal movies (concrete). Meditation can feel just amorphous - without some kind of goal, it might feel like a continuously looping task to a neurodivergent mind.
Relaxation as a chore? In my sessions, I have found several of my attendees having issues with the concept of - or even the actual word - “relaxation”. It can feel like something we have to accomplish that we might do wrong. In some cases, it may feel scary or even undeserved. So I reframe the word: In my pre-talk, I say
Let’s talk about “relaxation” for a moment. I’ll be using terms that refer to growing or increasing your relaxation - but what is relaxation really but a “letting go”- a releasing - of tensions. So relaxation is less of something that we do, and more like something we “allow” to happen, more and more - like loosening the strings on a guitar, gradually turning the pegs so the tension eases.
So here I’m putting meditation in the same category as “relaxation” - at least for me, it’s something I have to accomplish, and keep accomplishing for the duration of the meditation session. And, personally, I just can’t seem to do it.
So perhaps we become the passenger in the vehicle of hypnosis, where we usually feel we need to be the driver in the vehicle of meditation.
As I said, there really are no studies on this. So I am very curious: if you are neurodivergent, what have your experiences been with meditation, hypnosis, or both?