Simple Practices for ADHD Wellbeing and Calm with Joseph Pack
🌟 My new book, The ADHD Women's Wellbeing Toolkit, is available to preorder here 🌟
This week on the ADHD Women’s Wellbeing Podcast, I’m joined by Joseph Pack, founder of Drug Free ADHD, for an inspiring conversation on how to manage ADHD beyond medication, with practical tools you can start using right away.
We dive into meditation practices specifically designed for ADHD brains, no long silences or pressure to “clear your mind.” Joseph shares how mantras, breathwork, and short daily rituals can make a big difference in focus, mental clarity, and emotional wellbeing.
Whether you're looking to add something new to your ADHD toolkit or find that medication isn’t the full solution for you, this episode is packed with encouraging, real-life strategies.
What You’ll Learn:
- Why mindfulness and meditation can support ADHD beyond medication
- Simple, ADHD-friendly meditation techniques you can actually stick to
- The power of mantras to stay focused and reduce mental clutter
- How to build a morning routine that supports your brain (without the overwhelm)
- Why small, consistent practices can lead to lasting change
- The best positioning for meditation to open your heart to change
Timestamps:
- 00:30 – What is ADHD-friendly meditation?
- 02:00 – Techniques that work for busy, distracted minds
- 05:22 – The power of mantras for focus
- 07:05 – Learning to detach from mental chatter
- 10:18 – Building a better morning routine
- 12:15 – How cold showers and breathwork support mental clarity
If you’ve ever felt like traditional meditation isn’t made for your brain, this episode will show you a new, ADHD-friendly way forward.
You can connect with Joseph here on LinkedIn or at www.josephpack.com or sign up for his newsletter here.
Links and Resources:
Book on to the next ADHD Wellbeing Workshop about Creating ADHD 'Routines' and 'Structures' - Stability in Choppy Waters! Click here to book.
Catch all the previous ADHD Women’s Wellbeing Workshop Series workshops here. Available to buy now as on-demand.
If you love the podcast but want more ADHD support, get a sneak peek of my brand new book, The ADHD Women's Wellbeing Toolkit and pre-order it here!
Find all of Kate's popular online workshops and free resources here
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Kate Moryoussef is a women's ADHD lifestyle and wellbeing coach and EFT practitioner who helps overwhelmed and unfulfilled newly diagnosed ADHD women find more calm, balance, hope, health, compassion, creativity and clarity.
Transcript
Hi everyone, welcome back to another ADHD women's wellbeing wisdom episode this Monday morning.
Speaker A:And I wanted to share with you a fantastic snippet of a guest of mine, Joseph Pack, who is the founder of drug free ADHD and his mission is to help more people lean into well being and lifestyle and holistic tools than just rely on medication, which can be very helpful, but if we're not doing all the other things alongside it, it can often just be a sticking plaster.
Speaker A:So he is a proponent of meditation and mindfulness and he's going to share in this clip today about more ADHD friendly meditation practices and also the benefits of consistent mindfulness routines.
Speaker A:And he really sort of hones in on this, these small impactful changes to help improve our daily life with adhd.
Speaker A:So here is my conversation with Joseph Pack.
Speaker A:When you say to me 7:30 meditation, there was something in my body that just was like, that was, there was resistance there, like massive resistance.
Speaker A:Because for me, 7:30 in the morning is bus, kids, breakfast.
Speaker A:It's just like an adrenaline fueled kind of half an hour, 45 minutes and I don't have time or I say to myself, I don't have time to meditate at half seven in the morning.
Speaker A:I could meditate at half six in the morning for sure, but I choose not to.
Speaker A:And I'm going to put, you know, my hands up here that I struggle with my phone because I'll turn it on, off airplane mode quickly, you know, see and I have to use so much self restraint and kind of strength to then not go into the depths of Instagram and reply to messages and before I know it, I'm just like, my brain's just been sucked into that horrendous social media juggernaut.
Speaker A:So I'm really interested to know what type of meditation you advocate for ADHD people because if someone can say, right, I can do this meditation, I just can't do it at half seven.
Speaker A:What do people start with?
Speaker A:ADHD friendly meditation?
Speaker B:Well, the interesting thing about what you've just said there is that if we meditate a lot, say every day, once a day is enough, but twice a day to be fantastic, we develop awareness, more deeper awareness and as our attention span increases and our awareness increases, because it's not, it's not just because you could have a, I mean I historically have had a very good attention span.
Speaker B:That's never been my issue.
Speaker B:I've always been able to focus on things.
Speaker B:I've just focused on the wrong things for eight hours solid and then not Got what I was supposed to get done.
Speaker B:So attention isn't enough.
Speaker B:We also need awareness.
Speaker B:The awareness spot that we're doing something we shouldn't be doing and break out of it, which is like, for example, scrolling through Instagram as an example meditation.
Speaker B:This type of meditation I'm about to talk about will build that awareness.
Speaker B:So you could be 30 seconds into scrolling for Instagram and go, oh, you catch yourself.
Speaker B:Okay, I'm gonna just put it down.
Speaker B:You feel the discomfort in the body of putting it down because really you want to keep scrolling.
Speaker B:And then you just sit with that discomfort for a minute or so, and then it will go away on its own.
Speaker B:But it only goes away on its own by doing nothing about it.
Speaker B:Okay, we can come back to that.
Speaker B:So.
Speaker B:So the technique to get you there again, I understand why it's difficult to meditate at 7:30am every single day if you want to do it in your own time.
Speaker B:Meditation is really very simple.
Speaker B:It's all about creating an object of attention.
Speaker B:So in lots of Buddhist types of meditation, you'll focus on your breath, and sometimes it can be very subtle, like you're actually focusing on the breath as it touches your upper lip.
Speaker B:Extremely subtle sensation.
Speaker B:Some types of meditation, people will hold beads and run them through their fingers.
Speaker B:So they're just concentrating on that feeling of the beads running through the fingers.
Speaker B:Other types of meditation, again, people will light a candle and they'll just stare at the flame flickering again.
Speaker B:It's all about all three of those are different objects of attention.
Speaker B:Well, with adhd, that's quite difficult because the mind is so frantic.
Speaker B:It's incessant chatter that by using an object of attention that is not mind, is not in the mind.
Speaker B:It gives the incessant mind chance to just go more crazy, really.
Speaker B:So the antidote to that is to use a mantra instead.
Speaker B:And a very specific type of mantra, because that's another thought.
Speaker B:So actually a mantra is just giving the busy mind something to compete with.
Speaker B:And another mistake, I think that a lot of people think about meditation is that it's about having an empty mind.
Speaker B:It's about clearing your thoughts.
Speaker B:No, that is a recipe for disaster.
Speaker B:It's never going to happen.
Speaker B:And in fact, I would say that with most neurotypical people, they're not even achieving that.
Speaker B:That empty mind state.
Speaker B:Empty mind is something that's reserved for the Buddha or for a Buddha, which would be an enlightened person.
Speaker B:And that's not to say that any, you know, some people listening to this may one day get There it may one day it's available to everybody.
Speaker B:Forget quieting thoughts completely like they are not present in this ADHD friendly meditation.
Speaker B:So basically we repeat this mantra and you could just use something as simple as, I can handle this, I can handle this, I can handle this, I can handle this.
Speaker B:Repeating that silently in your head at the same time as you are willfully repeating those words, the busy mind will kick in.
Speaker B:Oh, this is boring.
Speaker B:Oh, I really don't want to be doing this.
Speaker B:Oh, I've got to get the kids here.
Speaker B:Oh, I forgot to do this.
Speaker B:Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker B:Continue repeating the mantra.
Speaker B:Keep doing it.
Speaker B:Don't try and make those thoughts stop.
Speaker B:Every time you notice that you're being pulled into the busy mind, just acknowledge that's happened and gently guide yourself back to the mantra.
Speaker B:You may have to do this 30, 40 times in one meditation session.
Speaker B:Each time you do it, it's like a bicep curl for your awareness, a bicep curl for your attention.
Speaker B:Keep doing that every single day.
Speaker B:In a month it might be 15 times that you get dragged into automatic thoughts.
Speaker B:It'll never be zero.
Speaker B:There's always going to be some chatter going on in the background.
Speaker B:In fact, the mind can chatter for the whole meditation session so long as the mantra doesn't stop.
Speaker B:And you will still get huge benefits from it.
Speaker B:But if you keep doing this again, say for six months or more, and you're very consistent, all of a sudden a shift occurs.
Speaker B:You who are in there aware of the busy mind is now further away from the busy mind than you were six months ago.
Speaker B:So it doesn't matter what it says.
Speaker B:You know it's not you and you don't take anything it's saying seriously.
Speaker B:In fact, things that used to upset you now make you laugh, literally laugh out loud.
Speaker B:I've been just walking down the street and laughed my head off at the things it says.
Speaker B:To me, that's a turning point.
Speaker B:That's a realization that in fact, does that mind ever need to be quiet?
Speaker B:And in fact, I've heard some genuine enlightened yogi masters say that the voice in their head is still not quiet, but they're enlightened.
Speaker B:But the reason they're enlightened and I'm not is because they know definitively that the voice in their head is not them.
Speaker B:It's just a passenger that lives with them.
Speaker A:Basically, they've had that opportunity through the meditation to detach from the mind that we have been conditioned to believe is true and is part of us and to not, not have any separation from.
Speaker A:So we've just believed that everything that we hear and think is the truth.
Speaker A:It's the absolute truth.
Speaker A:And from what I understand and know from meditation, from my own experience, is that we can have that detachment and we can question it and get curious like, as to, you know, and like you say, we can start kind of going, I'm not sure that's true.
Speaker A:I want to go and go really practical with your meditation because first of all, it's amazing.
Speaker A:Are we sitting down, lying down, stood up?
Speaker A:Can we move?
Speaker A:Like you say, can we have something in our hands?
Speaker A:Like, what are the rules?
Speaker A:Are there rules?
Speaker B:No.
Speaker B:Well, sitting down on a chair is fine.
Speaker B:Sitting down on a chair, backs of your hands on your laps, palms facing the ceiling.
Speaker B:Why would we do that?
Speaker B:Two reasons.
Speaker B:One, it opens the chest.
Speaker B:So immediately means it makes the breathing deeper, just automatically.
Speaker B:But the other thing is it's an open posture.
Speaker B:You know, like if you closed off, you know, you know, you feel a bit down, you close immediately.
Speaker B:You just feel yourself close.
Speaker B:You can just turn your palms over so your palms facing the ceiling stay open like this.
Speaker B:No matter how uncomfortable it is, it's just like you're being more receptive to the experience.
Speaker B:It makes.
Speaker B:Seems like nothing, but it makes a massive difference.
Speaker B:And having your spine very straight with your arms relaxed makes a huge, huge difference.
Speaker B:Raise your chin, feet on the floor.
Speaker B:You can do it cross leg, leg if you want.
Speaker B:I don't, I don't think you need to, but you can.
Speaker B:That just depends what, whatever you feel like.
Speaker B:So either sitting on the floor, cross legged or sitting on a chair, don't do it standing up, don't do it walking around.
Speaker B:You want to be completely still.
Speaker A:And how long would.
Speaker A:If someone's saying, right, I can do this and like, where would you say, what are the benefits?
Speaker A:Can you do it for five minutes and get benefit?
Speaker A:Like, what's the kind of.
Speaker A:The optimum length?
Speaker B:We do 15 minutes on the meditation session in the morning.
Speaker B:That's fine.
Speaker B:I think 15 minutes is probably optimum.
Speaker B:You can go much longer if you want.
Speaker B:I think I found that the first seven or eight minutes are a settling of the mind.
Speaker B:Like it's really busy.
Speaker B:But when I get into like the last six and a half minutes, I'm really settled.
Speaker B:In the last three or four minutes, I can be getting to the point where there's really nothing going on in there.
Speaker A:So do you think changing our daily routine and even starting from our morning routine can take us from that place where everything just feels chaotic and out of control to like what you said, where you said, actually you're not quite sure where your ADHD is now, it feels like you're not being driven by all these impulses.
Speaker B:Well, the morning routine is like a circuit breaker, really.
Speaker B:It's the perfect place to begin if you're really not doing too well right now.
Speaker B:And there could be a myriad of reasons why you're not doing well, but let's say perhaps you're very, very impulsive, you're drained, perhaps experience burnout from a job or something like that, but you're not doing any of these things like meditation or breathing or eating well or exercise or whatever it might be.
Speaker B:Selecting one very, very simple thing to do tomorrow morning could be like laying the foundations for building the next chapter of your life.
Speaker B:Which is why I recommend picking something very small.
Speaker B:Like I would genuinely, if you want my advice directly for almost anyone here, is do 15 to 20 seconds cold water at the end of a hot shower tomorrow morning.
Speaker B:And don't worry about doing anything other than that for a month, 30 days.
Speaker B:So start off with 20 seconds.
Speaker B:When you comfortably that go to 30 and 40, 50, 60, keep going up, aim for about two minutes in cold by the end of the month.
Speaker B:By the time you get to the end of that month, you'll feel quite different.
Speaker B:You'll have gone from a person who would think, well, I'm never going to have a cold shower to someone who's actually enjoying it.
Speaker B:When you get, you know, almost everybody who gets to two, two and a half minutes in a cold shower, they say they really enjoy the process, that they still hate getting in.
Speaker B:It's a funny thing.
Speaker B:The first 10 to 15 seconds is brutal, always brutal.
Speaker B:A minute in, you are alive.
Speaker B:And then after two or three minutes, someone's just come and turn the lights on.
Speaker B:The entire, the entire room changes.
Speaker B:Everything changes.
Speaker B:So that's why I recommend cold.
Speaker B:And it will then make it so much easier then for the next month to bring something else in which I would recommend breathing.
Speaker B:Because breathing techniques, something like you can go on Google, there's parasympathetic breathing where the only thing that matters is the exhale is significantly longer than the inhale.
Speaker B:And what that will do is it will reduce your heart rate, reduce your blood pressure and reduce your cortisol, cortisol being stress hormone.
Speaker B:And you'll realize I've just done two things that have completely changed the way I feel.
Speaker B:And I didn't have to ask anyone's permission to do these things.
Speaker B:They didn't cost me anything.
Speaker B:It's all completely in my power, and I'm now taking full control.
Speaker B:So then you start to get all these side benefits coming in.
Speaker B:Like, I can do this.
Speaker B:I'm in control.
Speaker B:I can handle this.
Speaker B:And, yeah, I mean, it's, it's a game changer.
Speaker A:So I hope you enjoyed listening to this shorter episode of the ADHD Women's Wellbeing podcast.
Speaker A:I've called called it the ADHD Women's Wellbeing Wisdom, because I believe there's so much wisdom in the guests that I have on and their insights.
Speaker A:So sometimes we just need that little bit of a reminder.
Speaker A:And I hope that has helped you today and look forward to seeing you back on the brand new episode on Thursday.
Speaker A:Have a good rest of your week.
