lived-experience data: what actually helps me experience mindfulness

Using the Scientific Method and a mindset of experimentation to learn about your brain wiring

Things that have a wildly low success-rate for helping me experience mindfulness:

• Breath work

• Meditation

• Stretching, yoga

• Practicing mindfulness while doing tasks (like dishes or putting away laundry)

Unless I just bought a brand new scent of dish soap (generally, basking in any form of novelty) or I’m trying these on a particularly good brain day, these forms of mindfulness are not ones I gravitate towards.

I don’t find them helpful, I don’t find them useful, and so I don’t find that I partake in the practice of doing them.

And yet, a few years ago, trying to meditate used to make me feel so defeated: What on earth must be wrong with me, when everyone says this works for them? And everyone says it should work for me, too?

But somewhere along the way, I stopped wondering why I was so broken, and started looking at this entire experience as an experimental study. An exploration of my own personal needs, and the things that work for me.

If you google search “mindfulness,” things like breath work, meditation, body scans are going to show up first. They are the default; the things our therapists and psychologists tell us to do when we’re stressed, anxious, un-grounded.

And when that doesn’t work? Well, we could say maybe it’s because I’m not trying hard enough, or that I haven’t given these mindfulness exercises a real chance.

But I HAVE. I really have. I’ve tried so many times. I’ve used every popular meditation app. I’ve done dozens of tai chi and yoga classes, from hot yoga to restorative yoga to Vinyasa. I considered spending over $100 on a fancy yoga mat, just to see if it would “make the magic happen.”

And honestly? I got really fed up with it all. I hit a breaking point, a figurative fuck off to the world for trying to make me feel like I’m not trying hard enough, when I freaking am.

So I gave all that up. And when I felt ready to try something new, I began asking myself questions instead:

What does this feel like in my brain?
What am I noticing?
Did I like that? Do I want to do it again? Did it do anything meaningful for me? Or did I just enjoy it for now, because it’s novel? (That’s ok, if so).

All to get to the root of: What actually helps me? What doesn’t? And most importantly, WHY?

I became a curious, objective observer. A research scientist, ready to collect data. My primary goal became to seek to understand, rather than to hurry up and fix what felt broken.

I learned that none of this was about lacking discipline, or having a faulty brain, or doing it the wrong way.

I found, instead, that I need a different approach to mindfulness: one that’s personally curated for me.

What activities give me the benefits of mindfulness, even if it’s not the version I typically see around me?

When I stopped asking what I should be able to do and started asking what actually brings me into a state of mindfulness, of flow, of presence, of grounding, of feeling centered in my brain-body-blob as it hurtles through the universe, the answers were unconventional.

Through a process of experimentation and gathering data on my lived experiences, here are some things that I’ve found actually help me enter this state:

• Journaling with pen and paper (slowing down my go-go brain)

• Playing with fountain pens (sensory delight!), swatching inks, observing shading and sheen

• Taking notes on my thoughts about different pen and ink pairings (some inks are wet and some pens are dry, or vice versa, so certain characteristics of inks work best with different pens)

• Commonplacing: Researching a random topic I think is interesting and taking notes on it. (Most recently, I took notes on how blood pressure monitors work, Final Fantasy series lore, thalassemia, and information about how microcytic blood cells affect A1C levels.)

• Pasting in photos, stickers, washi tape, birthday cards, and letters into my journal

Genuinely, it’s not that I can’t experience mindfulness with my ADHD.

It’s that I’ve needed to find the forms of mindfulness that actually feel useful, beneficial, and valuable to me. Unsurprisingly, most of these are related to my decades-long special interest of stationery.

Every body and every brain is different. Which means, you get to figure out what works for you. You get to try it, get the data, build a body of evidence, and use your lived, personal experiences to decide what helps you and what doesn’t.

So often, self-help books present their frameworks as miracle overnight solutions, a packaged promise of instantly fixing your whole life.

“This method works for everyone! Everyone!!!”—is a great way to mass-market a product for sales.

And when it doesn’t work for you, who gets the blame?

You do, of course.

You didn’t try enough. You didn’t do it thoroughly enough. You didn’t go deep enough, or stick with it long enough. You aren’t doing it right.

You are the problem.

This is the messaging I’ve heard my entire life.

And as neurodivergent people, we tend to internalize that. We believe it must be true, because according to the people around us, it is working for them.

We try harder. We try again. And again, and again. Until we hit burnout.

But the truth is, we are supported by the systems we use. And when those systems are designed with someone’s else’s brain and body in mind, we can’t charge through that barrier via sheer force of will.

And I think there’s another way.

A mindset of experimentation, the collecting of data, and a problem-solving and change-oriented approach to navigate your own self-understanding.

Not one-size-fits-all.
But a size made exactly for you.

This is what I believe the essence of help and support should look like—not, “this is guaranteed to solve all of your problems,” but, “hey, let’s try this, let’s find out how it feels, and let’s take what we learned from it and go from there.”

Even the experimentation mindset might not be the right fit for everyone, and that’s okay too. But I can say, I really wish I had known about this perspective when I was a teenager and young adult, trying to fit the round peg into the square hole, and wondering why everything I built kept collapsing when everyone else’s seemed to stay standing just fine.

I talk more in detail about using the scientific method to experiment with your brain in this week's podcast episode. I’ve included the recording in this Substack post for your convenience, but if you’d prefer to listen on your favorite podcast app, you can find it as Episode 81 on the Connected Divergents podcast, with links below.

Listen on PocketCasts
Listen on Apple Podcasts
Listen on Spotify

---

This experimentation-first, non–one-size-fits-all approach is also how I work with clients in my 1:1 coaching practice. If you’re curious about that, you can learn more about working with me here.