Same Brain State, Opposite Labels
The Mindfulness Industry’s Billion-Dollar Contradiction
Last week, a CEO was telling me they paid €15,000 for a mindfulness retreat to learn to “be present”.
Ironically, that same week her eight year old daughter was given detention for being distracted in class. In reality, her daughter was deeply absorbed in the sensation of sunlight on her desk, unable to shift her attention to tomorrow’s homework assignment.
At the CEO’s retreat, they called this presence.
At school, it was called Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.
Same neurological state. Opposite labels.
Think about that for a moment.
I know this contradiction intimately, because I’ve lived on both sides of it.
Corporate mindfulness is a €60 billion industry built on teaching executives to stop ruminating about the past, release anxiety about the future…and exist fully in the present moment.
We call this wisdom.
We call it enlightenment.
We even pay meditation teachers hundreds of euro per session to help us achieve it.
The Phenomenological Lens
I was diagnosed with ADHD at 42, a “late diagnosis”.
The thought never entered my head prior to the summer of 2023 when my nephew (who was on a waiting list for an assessment, 1-2 years at this point) mentioned the word “hyperfocus” to me.
Then it dawned on me…I “hyperfocus” on projects. I work hard, I go deep, I love complex problems and spot patterns no one else seems to see at the time.
My clinical assessment revealed what felt like the opposite at the time…it said that I had “severe ADHD, combined type”.
“The report indicates these symptoms have been present since childhood, manifesting as daydreaming, social difficulties, and later, behavioural challenges during adolescence. Your assessment scores were notably high across all ADHD screening tools, with the evaluators describing symptoms including racing thoughts during conversations, time management difficulties, hyperfocus on interesting topics, and challenges with emotional regulation - all classic ADHD presentations that had gone unrecognised for decades.”
I translated this to: “I am a complete mess”.
And I was, I was a mess emotionally.
Because, I didn’t have the vocabulary nor the understanding of ADHD as I do now.
Because, I believed the deficit-based clinical report. Of course I would, my self esteem was through the floor and drowning in a spiral of shame all my life. I crashed. I was burned out.
What I didn’t know at the time, I just need rest and recovery. I needed to stop. To listen to my body. Unravel. Unlearn. Find me?
I was already a “self-help guru” as I must have read 1’000s of books on the subject - obviously in hindsight, I was searching for answers to my “ADHD challenges”.
The Philosophy Seminar
A couple of years ago I was sitting in philosophy class, the topic was Presence of Mind and it occurred to me that ADHD brains are more present than neurotypical brains.
My classmates were visibly uncomfortable.
“ADHD people aren’t less present,” I insisted. “We’re more present than neurotypical brains. I believe we’re locked in the present moment.”
Our tutor looked confused.
“That’s not how ADHD works,” someone said. “People with ADHD can’t pay attention. They’re spacing out. They’re mentally absent.”
I couldn’t prove my argument then. I didn’t have the language for what I was experiencing or the clinical data to back it up.
But I knew something was fundamentally wrong with how we understood attention in ADHD. There was a disconnect between what I was told and what I was experiencing.
Fast forward to now, and a deep dive into the science of ADHD, I have the vocabulary to articulate what I was experiencing.
The clinical data validates what I intuitively understood: ADHD brains don’t have an attention deficit. We have a temporal flexibility deficit.
We’re not absent. We’re radically, overwhelmingly HERE.
The Mindful Deep Dive
I hyperfocused on ADHD and co-occurring conditions, read hundreds of scientific papers…talked to hundreds more about neurodivergence.
A couple of years later and I have learned practically all I can about ADHD (without things repeating), innately understanding the female presentation, how our ADHD brain affects our daily living, I used myself as a guinea pig and experimented hundreds of treatment options.
To learn more about the systemic challenges we face, I embedded myself into the neurodiversity space, advising companies, top neuroscientists, psychiatrists, clinicians, therapists, coaches…all of us, learning from one another.
By decoding and recoding the ADHD & Autism diagnostic assessment process and all that touches, I have learned how our brains operate, how the neurological differences affect us emotionally and uncovered the underlying emotional profile for most neurodivergent people.
In the process, I set up two neurodivergent diagnostic clinics, ADHD Services and built a revolutionary, clinically validated AI tool that reduces the clinician’s workflow by 90%, EchoMind AI. Allowing clinicians to focus solely on the patient, providing the added value people despretedly need to learn about and manage neurodivergence.
…reducing the cost of a diagnostic assessment by 50%, making it more accessible. Achieving the first milestone of our mission:
“Better Access. Bigger Impact. Brighter Futures”
We are in the process of analysing over 1 million lines of data to see what else we can uncover. I can confidently share what I knew to be true, I knew deep down, through my lived experience and speaking with many other ADHDers:
“ADHD is not a deficit of attention…it’s a surplus of presence.”
The Clinical Evidence
I re-did my assessment with our clinical team and analysed the results from a strengths-based lens, rather than a deficit lens.
“I’m highly present-focused, engage deeply in current tasks and have a strong potential for flow and spontaneity.”…I would agree.
Am I still riddled with anxiety and RSD (rejection sensitivity dysphoria)? Yes.
I often wonder if the reason for this anxiety is due to the social expectations and constructs we currently live in? I’m different, and this world doesn’t work for me.
The same assessment that diagnosed me with severe ADHD was simultaneously telling me that being intensely present was my greatest cognitive strength!
How does that make sense?
It makes perfect sense once you understand what ADHD actually is: not a deficit in the capacity for attention, but a deficit in the ability to “time-travel between the past, present and future” the way neurotypical brains do.
The Research
Research confirms this. In the Western world it’s called “Time Blindness”.
Russell Barkley, a renowned psychologist specialising in ADHD, coined the “Now” and “Not Now” categories to explain how time is experienced by someone with ADHD.
“People with ADHD essentially live in a “permanent present” and struggle to learn from the past or look into the future”
Acting without thinking…impulsivity or being present? Think about it.
If you watch a dog in the park…she’s not making to-do lists or rehearsing tomorrow’s conversations. When she sniffs a flower, she’s experiencing every molecule of that scent with total absorption. When a butterfly passes, her entire being pivots to track its flight. She’s not “distracted”...she’s supremely attuned to each shifting moment of reality as it unfolds. What we call “inattention” in humans might actually be this same radical presence? A nervous system so alive to the immediate environment that it refuses to filter out the world in favour of abstract future tasks.
Capturing how someone with inattentive ADHD might actually be more present to sensory and environmental details than someone whose attention is narrowly focused on predetermined goals or concerns.
Studies using the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory consistently show that adults with ADHD score significantly higher on “Present Hedonism”...a dimension characterised by living in the moment, reduced future focus and intense present-moment experience.
Let’s face it, if ADHD wasn’t or isn’t a benefit to our evolutionary existence then the genetic persistence at 5-10% of the population worldwide, suggests a strong evolutionarily advantageous component, no?
The neurobiological differences in dopamine systems and brain regions controlling attention, executive function and impulse control reflect deep evolutionary roots, not evolutionary mistakes.
Natural selection doesn’t preserve genuinely harmful traits across hundreds of thousands of years…if ADHD were purely detrimental, it would have disappeared.
The Striking Contradiction
The research on mindfulness meditation and time perception reveals this striking contradiction. Multiple studies (Wittmann & Schmidt, 2014; Berkovich-Ohana et al, 2013; Droit-Volet et al, 2015, 2019) have examined how mindfulness meditation affects time perception, consistently finding that experienced meditators develop enhanced present-moment awareness and altered time perception…they perceive time as passing more slowly and experience an expansion of the present moment.
Researchers frame this as a beneficial outcome of meditation practice, something that enhances wellbeing and cognitive function.
Yet here’s the profound irony: people with ADHD naturally experience many of these same temporal phenomena…difficulty estimating time intervals, deep absorption in present-moment experiences, and altered time perception…but instead of being celebrated as naturally mindful, we’re pathologised and medicated. Why?
These meditation studies describe practitioners developing what they call ‘enhanced present-moment awareness’ and becoming less focused on clock time and more immersed in immediate experience.
But when someone with ADHD displays ‘time blindness’ and becomes completely absorbed in the present task (hyperfocus), losing track of hours, we don’t call it enlightenment, we call it executive dysfunction?
Which raises the fundamental question:
Why is the same phenomenological state dysfunction in one context and enlightenment in another?
Is ADHD truly a dysfunction, or is it a disability created by our current social constructs? Is the “disorder” in us or in systems designed for the temporal navigation we can’t perform?
So we’re essentially teaching neurotypical people to achieve a brain state that occurs naturally in ADHD, celebrating it in one context as wisdom while treating it as a disorder that requires medication in another?
The Paradox
We’ll pay thousands for retreats to temporarily access a state of consciousness that some people naturally inhabit, while simultaneously telling those people they’re broken and need fixing?
Let me show you what this looks like in real life.
I can read a room in 1.17 seconds. Walk into a space and I immediately know who’s uncomfortable, who’s performing confidence, who’s genuinely relaxed, which relationships are strained.
I don’t believe it’s magical intuition, I believe I’m hyper-present in environmental awareness. I’m processing micro-expressions, body language, spatial dynamics and vocal tone with overwhelming immediacy because I’m completely here.
I’m present.
Which makes sense, as our ADHD ancestors were foragers, explorers and in touch with the land and our environment - intrinsically present.
Not distracted. Not absent. Radically present.
I can hyperfocus for eight hours straight without eating when I’m engaged in something intrinsically motivating. Time disappears. External stimuli fade. I enter a flow state so deep that meditation masters spend decades trying to cultivate it.
But ask me to remember a doctor’s appointment next Tuesday?
I forget. Not because I don’t care, but because my brain can’t hold future tasks in working memory while being anchored in the present moment.
That’s the paradox.
The same present-moment intensity that makes me brilliant at crisis management, creative problem-solving and deep work…makes me absolutely terrible at future planning, remembering obligations and maintaining long-term organisation.
Why? Because organisation requires holding future tasks in mind while acting in the present. It requires mental time-travel.
And that’s exactly what ADHD brains struggle with.
The Neuroscience of Mental Time-Travel
Here’s what neurotypical brains do constantly, so automatically they don’t even notice they’re doing it:
“They hold the past and future in working memory while acting in the present.”
A neurotypical person can sit in a meeting, fully engaged with the current discussion, while simultaneously maintaining awareness that they need to pick up groceries after work, remembering what their partner said at breakfast and planning tomorrow’s presentation.
They’re mentally time-travelling. Constantly.
Russell Barkley’s research on executive function describes this as “cross-temporal organisation of behaviour”. The ability to use working memory to hold past experiences and future goals while making decisions in the present moment.
ADHD brains can’t do this effectively.
Not because we lack the capacity for attention, but because we lack the cognitive infrastructure for temporal navigation. We’re anchored in NOW. Locked in the present moment, whether that’s intense focus on external tasks or deep absorption in internal sensations.
This is what neuroscience shows.
Think about “spacing out” …the classic ADHD symptom that everyone uses as evidence that we’re not paying attention.
Here’s what’s actually happening:
My mind isn’t absent. It’s experiencing internal presence. I’m fully engaged with internal sensations, emotions, bodily awareness. I’m just not present where others expect me to be…on the external task.
Still present. Just not externally directed.
Or consider hyperfocus, which researchers Ashinoff and Abu-Akel (2021) describe as “the forgotten frontier of attention”. Diminished perception of external stimuli. Complete absorption in present-moment experience.
We call this a symptom when it happens in an ADHD child.
We call it an achievement when it happens to a monk.
This is the exact state mindfulness retreats try to cultivate.
The Systems Problem
Here’s where the real problem emerges:
Our entire society…our education system, employment, healthcare, social systems are all designed for people who can mentally time-travel…linear thinkers.
It’s no one’s fault. It’s systemic.
But everyone is still complicit and not questioning the status quo.
Our school system is archaic and it’s this that sets people up for their future…to remember data. AI is already making memorisation obsolete, yet our schools still optimise for data retention.
Imagine instead designing education around building personal AI architectures that 10x or 100x learning? Systems that help children disseminate massive datasets that may find correlations that solve humanity’s biggest problems?
But we don’t need to wait for an educational revolution, we can start now with organisational change right now.
Is there an overlooked cohort in your organisation that could produce 2x, 3x or 10,000x output within the right environment?
Companies are still operating in outdated procedures, policies and rules as “this is how it was always done”. Even big tech…who claim to be the forefront of innovation. Yes, I know there needs to be standard governance in order to keep some level of control.
Considering ~20% of the adult population are neurodivergent, which translate to one in every five people in your organisation.
That’s ~1.2 billion people globally, roughly equivalent to the working populations of two of the most powerful countries in the world…China (2nd) and India (4th), with ecominies producing a combined GDP of `€20 trillion.
There is untapped innovation and productivity potential, sitting right under your nose.
Perhaps it’s time for business leaders to explore this underuntilised talent?
Perhaps that €15k mindfullness retreat budget might be better spent on cultivating the cohort that’s already mindful?
I’m not talking about tick-box reasonable accommodations that make organisations feel compliant while changing nothing. I’m talking about radical universal design that supports the entire organisation rather than constrains it.
I’m not stating neurodivergent people are brilliant and others are not. Far from it. I’m highlighting that invisible social and organisational constructs determine your company’s success or its ceiling.
Don’t get me wrong, there will be challenges when change happens, there always is.
The will be lots of challenges such as rigid thinking or when hyperfocus hits and for how long. We can’t choose hyperfocus state, nor can we easily exit it.
Neurotypical brains can shift between temporal zones (past, present, future) with relative flexibility. They can visit the present, then return to future planning.
It’s a bit harder for neurodivergent brains. But there are workarounds.
There are easy-ish fixes. When you have to traverse between clock time and event time, you can work 1-2 months (clock time) ahead of deadlines, that’s what keeps me on track. This gives me all the time I need to produce what I want to and complete it, in the time it takes to finish it (event time).
What works for me, may not work for everyone. But change is happening anyway.
You are going to feel the pain. The question is, do you want to feel the pain you introduce strategically…allowing you to get ahead of the curve…or the pain someone else inflicts on you? A competitor. Geopolitical shifts. Market disruption. Technology that renders your current practices obsolete.
You still get to choose which pain you experience.
But you don’t get to choose whether change comes.
In the next article, I’ll show you exactly what infrastructure makes this transformation possible and why the organisations that build it first will own the next decade.
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Charlene Coleman is cofounder of EchoMind AI and ADHD Services providing accessible ADHD assessments and support. She was diagnosed with ADHD at 42 and dedicates her work on reframing neurodivergence through phenomenological and systems-thinking lenses.
#ADHD #Neurodivergence #Mindfulness #Phenomenology #TimePerception #ActuallyADHD #tdahbr