Published on January 12th, 2009 By Nicole Chiu - Contributing Health Journalist

Many parents of children with diagnosed Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) go through phases of their own guilty feelings, especially when dealing with the issue of medicating the child with prescription drugs. Recent research shows that there are alternative and biologically harmless ways of altering the child’s mood swings and anxious behavior.

Published in the December issue of Current Issues in Education, research Sarina J. Grosswald from Arlington, Virginia, has found that transcendental meditation is a highly effective exercise for children with ADHD.

Grosswald’s study involved 10 children between the ages of 11 and 14, who were diagnosed with ADHD. All the children were attendants at schools for children with learning disabilities. Most were already taking medication and having problems learning at their schools.

The experiment was designed to monitor the effects of incorporating transcendental meditation into these children’s lifestyles. Transcendental meditation is the simplest form of meditation, where the individual sits quietly for 10 to 15 minutes, repeating a mantra with their eyes closed. The mantra may be a sound, word or phrase, any combination that calms the mind and body. The key is to focus on repetition of the one word or sound that provides a calming effect.

The motivation behind this research was that past researchers have written about meditation as an activity that effects the nervous system. Some research has even mentioned meditation as an effective exercise for regulation of other bodily functions such as blood vessel dilation, breathing and stress-hormone regulation.

The result from teaching the 10 children involved in this experiment was “much greater than we expected,” said Grosswald. “The children also showed improvements in attention, working memory, organization, and behavior regulation.”

In the experiment, the children had practiced the transcendental meditation activity twice a day, for 10 minutes at a time, over a three month period. The results were reports of lower stress and anxiety levels, based on questionnaires given to the teachers as well as parents of the children.

Grosswald said that the teachers found “they were able to teach more, and students were able to learn more because they were less stressed and anxious.”

The direction of this form of research concerning transcendental meditation is now towards proving that the exercise may be recognized as a legitimate form of therapy for the condition of ADHD, either stand alone or together with medical treatment.

Grosswald is convinced that this experiment shows that transcendental meditation is “well suited for children with ADHD.”