Lidia Zylowska, M.D. is the author of The Mindfulness Prescription for Adult ADHD. She is a UCSC-affiliated psychiatrist who specializes in mindfulness-based approaches to mental health and adult ADHD. She practices in northern California. Dr. Zylowska is a cofounder of UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center, where she conducted the first study of mindfulness-training for adults and teens with ADHD. She frequently speaks about mindfulness as a way to promote psychological wellbeing, and she focuses on making the mindfulness practice accessible to diverse groups of patients and clinicians. Dr. Zylowska’s website is www.lidiazylowska.com.
What drew you to the practice of mindfulness training and its role in treating ADHD?
Initially, these two interests developed separately but it really made sense to me to combine them later in my research work at UCLA. As a psychiatry resident, I became interested in holistic approaches and completed a fellowship at the UCLA Center for East West Medicine. That fellowship exposed me to diverse mind-body interventions, including mindfulness. I was very drawn to mindfulness both as a practice for myself and as great complement to psychotherapy. At the time, the mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) was being developed for depression and, together with Jon Kabat-Zinn’s mindfulness-based stress reduction program (MBSR), these approaches fueled my interest in mindfulness.
