A review by finesilkflower
The Mindfulness Prescription for Adult ADHD: An 8-Step Program for Strengthening Attention, Managing Emotions, and Achieving Your Goals by Lidia Zylowska

4.0

It took me a very long time to read this book: it's dense with helpful information, and it encourages mindfulness and meditation practices which take effort. I didn't do all the exercises, but I read the book slowly, in small installments, while taking notes, on and off over a period of six months. At first, I was skeptical, because mindfulness is so impossibly difficult for me and in many ways I *LIKE* autopilot. I felt that I was finally gaining control over my ADHD symptoms *BECAUSE* of autopilot, because I had set up routines which allowed me to simply do things instead of expending willpower and effort. By Zylowska doesn't tell you to be mindful every second of every day, or to reject autopilot; she encourages setting up routines - intentional ones, the ones you want, not just ones that happened to you. The point of this book isn't that you should be hyperaware all the time, but that awareness is a tool or a muscle you can develop so you can use it when you want to. Some of the suggestions in this book are things I won't do (for example, I have a peculiar aversion to mindful eating); that's fine, Zylowska encourages flexibility and making the practice your own. Some of the suggestions were ones I'd already discovered - such as using a yoga practice to build a mind-body connection or using external accountability to encourage tasks - but it was still helpful to see these strategies validated and to see the explanation of why they work.