A meditation timer for ADHD brains

You've done the January thing

You downloaded a meditation app in January. You did four days, missed a Tuesday, watched the streak die, and never opened it again. The app sent a disappointed notification in March. This is not a story about discipline.

Here’s the part nobody told you: the stock photo of meditation — serene person, empty mind, faint smile — is fiction for everyone. Every mind wanders. The difference with ADHD is degree and speed: attention that is interest-driven rather than intention-driven leaves sooner and travels further.

Which sounds like a disqualification, until you look at what the practice actually is. Meditation was never “hold your attention in one place.” It is: place attention somewhere, lose it, notice you lost it, bring it back. That third step — the noticing — is the entire rep. A brain that wanders forty times in ten minutes gets forty reps where a calmer brain gets six.

You are not bad at meditating. You are, in a strictly mechanical sense, over-provisioned for it.

Why meditation apps and ADHD get along so badly

Most meditation apps are built like fitness apps: streaks, badges, milestones, a push notification when you miss a day. For an ADHD brain this is a trap with good lighting. A streak turns a nice thing into an obligation with a scoreboard. The day you miss, the broken counter reads as a verdict, and opening the app now costs shame. So you don’t.

Then there’s the choice overload: libraries of ten thousand guided sessions, courses, moods, narrators. Deciding what to meditate to is its own executive-function task — exactly the kind that stalls an ADHD brain at the menu. And the serene voice is one more thing to attend to, interrupting to suggest you notice your jaw right as you’d finally settled.

An app that demands attention is a strange tool for practising not being yanked around by things demanding attention.

How Sit is built for a brain with strong opinions

Each design decision maps to a specific failure mode:

• Starting is the expensive part — a two-minute preset. Two minutes is a low enough wall to step over on a bad day, and a distracted two minutes counts. The two-minute timer opens ready to go.
• Sessions start before you’re ready — three silent settle-in seconds between tapping Begin and the opening bell, so the sit doesn’t begin while you’re still putting the phone down.
• Silence is where minds go travelling — an interval bell, a soft mid-session chime that catches your mind three streets away and walks it back.
• Distraction gets treated as failure — a “My mind wandered” button. Tap it, get a kind word, keep sitting. At the end, the app tells you how many times you came back — counting the reps, not the lapses.
• Streaks turn missed days into verdicts — no streaks, no totals, no history at all. Skip a week; there is nothing to reset to zero in anger.
• Apps nag — nothing blinks, badges or notifies. No red dots, no “we miss you.” The app asks for nothing between sessions.
• Sign-ups kill momentum — no account, no cost, works offline. The gap between “I should meditate” and actually sitting is where ADHD intentions go to die, so nothing stands in it. Open, tap, sit.

If that already sounds right, open the two-minute timer — the rest of this page will still be here.

What a session actually looks like

You tap Begin. Three seconds of nothing while you put the phone down. A bell. You follow your breath for maybe eight seconds before you’re composing an email in your head. Somewhere in there, a soft chime — you notice, come back. You tap My mind wandered, because you did. More breath, another departure, another return. The closing bell. The screen says you came back six times.

Six is the score. It’s a good one.

If following your breath bores you in ten seconds

The breath is the traditional anchor, and it is — by design — the most boring object in the room. For an interest-driven attention system, that’s a hard sell.

So don’t fight it. Make the interval bell the anchor instead: let your mind do what it does, and when the chime arrives, that’s your cue to notice where you went and come back. An anchor that arrives on its own suits an attention system that doesn’t idle. The Random setting spaces the bells irregularly, so a novelty-hungry brain can’t learn the rhythm and start anticipating it.

This isn’t a lesser version of the practice. Noticing and returning is the practice; the bell just rings the doorbell for you.

A routine that survives contact with real life

1. Anchor it to something that already happens — after the kettle, after the school run, before opening the laptop. Prospective memory is not an ADHD strength; borrowed triggers work better than remembered ones.
2. Start with two minutes. Not as a trial run — as the practice. Let it stay two minutes for weeks if it wants to.
3. Tap My mind wandered as often as it’s true. High numbers are repetitions, not bad scores.
4. When you miss days — days, plural, because you will — just sit the next two minutes. There is no streak to mourn and the app holds no grudge.

When two minutes starts feeling genuinely short, the five-minute timer adds the interval bell. That’s the whole upgrade path.

Questions

Try it

Open the two-minute timer. Sit the two minutes. That’s the whole assignment.

(When you outgrow it: five minutes, ten, or the plain timer. More on the about page.)