I remember the first time I realised I was not very normal! It was the late 70's at a friend's party and we all took turns to make a little video of ourselves. The other girls videos were cute, sweet, mine was quite simply manic! If you have ADHD, you probably already know that your nervous system doesn't behave the way the world expects it to. You may have accumulated an unhelpful dose of shame for all the "simple" things that you struggle to do.

But what you may not realise is that the yogis created a framework that describes nervous system differences with compassion, thousands of years before neuroscience had the language for any of it.

The model I'm talking about is the gunas.

Three qualities, one nervous system

The gunas are three fundamental qualities that the yogic tradition describes as shaping every moment of experience: tamas, rajas, and sattva. Heaviness, agitation, clarity. They're not abstract philosophy, but they're something you can feel in your own body, and if you have ADHD, you probably feel their swings more dramatically than most.

The yogic worldview holds that the material world, including our minds, is in a state of perpetual change. The gunas are always fluctuating, and this means that our perception isn't a neutral window onto reality. It's coloured, moment to moment, by whichever quality is currently dominant. We're not seeing things as they are. We're seeing things through the particular state we happen to be in.

Tamas: the crash after the storm

Tamas is inertia, heaviness, darkness, felt as stagnation, withdrawal, fog. In nervous system terms, it's a low-arousal state: the system has collapsed rather than rested, stuck rather than still. ADHD brains know tamas well, though we don't always recognise it for what it is. It's the 3am doom scroll when you're not even enjoying it. It's the paralysis in front of a task that somehow never gets started. It's the shutdown after overstimulation, the crash that follows a long rajasic burn.

We tend to judge ourselves harshly in tamas. But it's worth understanding it as a nervous system state rather than a character flaw. The problem isn't that tamas exists. The problem is when we get lodged there without understanding why.

Rajas: where most of us live

Rajas is the quality of activity, agitation, passion. Restless, reactive, driven energy. The system is mobilised and on alert, burning through resources at speed. This is high arousal, and for people with ADHD, it's often home. Not because we choose it, but because it's where our nervous system naturally gravitates.

And rajas isn't without its gifts. The drive, the intensity, the capacity to hyperfocus, to throw yourself at something with everything you have, that's rajas. The creative leaps, the connections made at speed, the willingness to begin before you've talked yourself out of it, also rajas. There's a real energy here, and plenty of the world runs on it.

But rajas has a particular character: it moves fast and it doesn't look far ahead.

I've been told I'm courageous, and I am. I take big risks and love the excitement. But I also forget to look ahead, or plan! It's sometimes the impulse taking me over the edge before I've registered there is one.

All ADHD people know how easy it is to live with that particular brand of regret. Though I try to hold it lightly, because we always assume the road not taken would have been smoother. This is a yogic teaching I have to remind myself of a LOT! 

The problem with making decisions from a rajasic state isn't that you'll always get them wrong. It's that they're as likely to unravel as they are to move forward. The energy that launched the decision evaporates, and what's left doesn't always hold together without it.

Sattva: the state worth waiting for

Sattva is clarity, balance, luminosity. Calm alertness, genuine presence, the capacity to feel clearly without being swept around by what you're feeling. In nervous system terms, this is optimal arousal: responsive rather than reactive, grounded rather than collapsed, adaptable rather than rigid.

For ADHD brains, sattva can feel almost foreign at first. Not because we can't access it, but because we're not used to recognising it, or trusting it, or waiting for it. The rajasic pull is so habitual that stillness can feel like stagnation, like missing out, like falling behind.

But one of the most genuinely useful things I've learned, slowly and with some fairly instructive mistakes along the way, is this: wait until you're in a sattvic state before you make big decisions.

A decision made from rajas carries rajas with it. It's reactive even when it looks like action. Whereas a decision made from sattva tends to hold. It tends to be something I still recognise as mine three weeks later, when the charge has dissipated and the clarity remains.

The longer game

Patanjali's sutras suggest that through sustained practice, we can learn to shift away from the relentless pull of these fluctuating states, moving toward more subtle shifts, and ultimately toward something beyond the gunas entirely: Purusha, pure consciousness, the stable witnessing awareness underneath everything. That's the horizon of yoga as a whole.

But the more immediate possibility, and the one that matters most in daily life with an ADHD nervous system, is building the capacity to recognise which guna is present, to notice when you're in rajas and name it, to spot the early signs of tamas before you're deep in it, and to cultivate the conditions in which sattva becomes more accessible and more familiar.

The yoga practices, all of them, asana, pranayama, meditation, study, are designed to do exactly this. It's an incredibly sophisticated practice- training the body first to help calm some of the excess energy before moving to calm the nervous system with the breath and finally coming to the mind directly.  

The yogis understood the mind is changeable, and that the movement toward stability and clarity is something we can actually practise by harnessing the nervous system states through movement, breath and thought. Pranayama is a very precise approach bridging as it does the conscious mind and the autonomic nervous system. 

For those of us whose nervous systems change faster and more dramatically than most, that might just be the most useful thing we ever learn.

Would you like to explore this approach to practice? Ways to work with me:

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