How long did it take you to see results? I've battled (manageable) ADHD all my life and have been meditating for around a year. I've seen many positive impacts on my life, but the ADHD is still very much a thing I still battle.
My personal hypothesis is that the inherent expectation of wanting/needing to feel some kind of effect every time I tried meditating ended up being the very blockade that prevented me from doing so. I kept falling into a negative recursive thought loop of, “I haven’t noticed anything yet. This isn’t working. There’s no point in trying to continue meditating” that cycled into a cascading growth of anxiety that prevented me from reaching a state of balance.
It took me many months to realize that I was trapping myself inside this loop, but once I became aware of it, I was able to almost immediately start seeing results. The biggest thing that helped me was coming to a realization that the thoughts in my head are, at the end of the day, just thoughts. They have no ability to harm or control me other than what I choose to allow them to. The thought loop I was putting myself into could only continue because I chose to let it.
When I meditate in the present day, you might think that I no longer deal with any of these issues. That’s actually completely not the case. In fact, I constantly still get it, especially at the beginning of my sessions, but now instead of stressing out, I just choose to let it go. By actively choosing to accept and let things go, the loop breaks right from the beginning.
This is probably one of the most important lessons i've learned in my life. Realizing this made a hugely drastic improvement to my emotions, my ability to control them and my ability to focus on things and pay attention. Learning to quiet that voice or just ignore it when I need to is a skill I think everyone should learn and would benefit from.
Instead of trying to magically concentrate perfectly, I focused on identifying when my focus would move to something else. I noticed meditation is a practice of becoming quicker at identifying when I would lose focus, giving me the choice to come back to focus.
After a couple of months of meditating I was able to go off of adhd medication. Then maybe a half a year later I noticed my concentration was above average and had been for a while.
Meditation does work well on ADHD, but you have to be willing to take a break from your day to day worries, giving a mini vacation away from mental work. It's quite enjoyable.
I get obsessive about things, so I tried to use those obsessions to shape a regular routine that helped everything else fall into place. I focused my obsession on exercise, specifically jiu-jitsu, because once I got to class, I didn't have to think or motivate myself, I was just there and focused on learning and fighting. Then it turned into a positive feedback loop, I'd get external validation from my teammates, I was improving, I was doing it in the morning, so I absolutely had to get out of bed, and of course after class, I had nowhere else to go but work. So that fixed my habitually late problem as well. Being 10 minutes late to class was fine as long as I was on time for work. Then I could ride that dopamine rush to have a productive morning.
Then life happened, my routines where interrupted, and I haven't been able to get it back.