I Can't Stop Thinking When I Meditate. What Am I Doing Wrong?

Probably nothing.

One of the biggest misconceptions about meditation is that if you are doing it correctly, your mind should eventually become completely quiet. People sit down, close their eyes, notice that thoughts are still happening, and immediately assume they are failing. Let's think about that for a minute.

Are you alive? Yes.

Is blood circulating through your body? Yes.

Is oxygen getting where it needs to go? Presumably.

Is some of that blood and oxygen making its way into your very alive brain? Also yes.

Then your brain is going to think. That is what brains do.

Meditation does not require you to somehow shut down a functioning human mind while remaining conscious enough to meditate. The practice is learning what to do when you realize that you are meandering.

Your mind wandering is not a meditation failure

Let's say you sit down to meditate and decide to focus on your breath. You notice one breath, maybe two, and then suddenly you're thinking about something you forgot to buy at the grocery store. That reminds you of an email you haven't answered, which somehow leads to a conversation you had three days ago, and before long you're replaying the entire thing and improving your responses to an argument that is no longer happening. Then, eventually, something inside you notices.

Oh. I'm supposed to be meditating.

That moment is not proof that you failed; awareness just came back online.

Research into focused-attention meditation describes a very similar cycle: we place attention on an intended object, such as the breath; the mind wanders; we become aware that it wandered; and then we redirect attention back to the object of focus. The wandering and returning are not interruptions to meditation: they are the attentional process that meditation is training.

So you simply come back to the breath.

And then, at some point, you wander again.

And you come back again.

That is the practice.

Think of every return as a rep

I think this becomes much easier to understand when we stop imagining meditation as a state we are supposed to achieve and start thinking about it as training.

Imagine going to the gym, picking up a heavy weight, doing one repetition, setting it down, and then lifting it again. You would never finish the workout and say, "That was terrible. I had to keep lifting the weight over and over." That is the workout.

Meditation is similar. Your attention wanders, you notice it, and you bring it back.

That is one rep. It wanders again, and you return again = another rep.

If your mind wanders twenty times during a meditation and you bring it back twenty times, you did not fail twenty times. You performed twenty repetitions of the skill you are trying to build.

Over time, those repetitions matter. Meditation training has been associated with improvements in attentional stability and cognitive control, although the brain is obviously far more complicated than a muscle. The gym metaphor is not a perfect neurological explanation, but it is a helpful way to understand what is happening: attention can be trained, and the return is part of that training.

Please stop yelling at yourself

Where people often make meditation harder than it needs to be is in what happens immediately after they notice that the mind has wandered.

You become aware that you've been thinking about dinner and the internal commentary begins.

Come on. Focus.

I'm terrible at this.

Why can't I do this?

My brain never shuts up.

Now, instead of simply noticing that the mind wandered, you have added a layer of frustration, judgment, and self-criticism on top of the original thought.

You do not need that extra step. DROP THE JUDGEMENTS!

The quality of the return matters. When you realize that your attention has wandered, you do not need to correct yourself harshly, analyze what went wrong, or hold a little disciplinary hearing inside your own head. Just come back gently.

Some meditation days really are messy

There are days when you sit down and the mind settles fairly quickly and then there are other days when it feels as if somebody turned on twelve televisions in the same room, all tuned to different channels. Both are meditation.

And sometimes there is a very good reason that the mind refuses to settle. Something significant may be happening in your life. You may be grieving. You may be going through a divorce, dealing with illness, losing a job, worrying about one of your children, beginning something enormous, ending something enormous, waiting on important news, recovering from difficult news, or simply moving through one of those seasons when life seems to rearrange itself overnight.

Of course the brain keeps pulling toward that.

Your mind is trying to process what feels important, threatening, unresolved, or life-changing, and meditation is not the place to begin punishing yourself for that.

Please, please be gentle with yourself during major events.

If the same thought comes back again and again, you can acknowledge it without climbing all the way inside it. Sometimes a very simple response helps:

I know. Not right now.

Then come back to the breath.

If the thought returns thirty seconds later, you can do exactly the same thing.

I know. Not right now.

And return again.

If today's meditation contains one hundred returns, then today's meditation contains one hundred returns. That may simply be what your nervous system has available today.

Sometimes sitting still is asking too much too soon

This is also where the way we teach meditation at Higher State Meditations is a little different: we do not always begin with, "Sit completely still and calm down."

Sometimes the brain is not particularly interested in your request for stillness because the body is still carrying the energy of the day: your shoulders are elevated, your jaw is tight, your breathing is shallow, your hands are restless, and your entire system may have spent the last ten hours driving through traffic, answering messages, sitting in meetings, solving problems, caring for children, working through conflict, and absorbing a nearly endless amount of information.

Then we sit down, close our eyes, and abruptly ask the entire system to become still and sometimes that works and sometimes we need a bridge.

At Higher State Meditations, we often use the body first

A major part of our teaching at Higher State Meditations is using systematic movement before asking the body to become still.

The movement does not need to be dramatic or complicated. It might involve rolling the shoulders, opening and closing the hands, gently twisting through the spine, moving the arms, engaging larger muscle groups and coordinating simple movement with breathing.

The point is not to turn every meditation into a workout but to recognize that sometimes there is nervous energy in the body that needs somewhere to go before stillness becomes available.

So, rather than fighting restlessness, we work with it.

There is a real relationship between movement, attention, and emotional regulation, and research on mindful movement and physical activity has explored how movement can support cognitive control, mindfulness, and reductions in anxiety. At Higher State Meditations, we take that mind-body relationship seriously.

So we often move first and meditate second.

You can use the body to bring the brain into a more agreeable state.

Try this before your next meditation

If you are someone who says, "I can't meditate because my brain won't stop," try changing the order.

Before you sit down, stand up and move for a few minutes. Roll your shoulders. Move your arms. Gently twist through your torso. Shake out your hands. Stretch your legs. Take a few slower breaths and pay attention to what the movement feels like. Then sit.

Choose one obvious point of focus. It might be the breath, a repeated word, a mantra, or an affirmation. Stay there as best you can. When the mind wanders, notice it and return. That is a rep.

When it wanders again, return again. Another rep.

No lecture. No frustration.

No gold star for having a perfectly quiet mind.

So how do I stop thinking during meditation?

You don't and I hope that answer is a relief for you.

You do not need to stop your thoughts in order to meditate successfully. What you are practicing is becoming aware of where your attention has gone and learning that you can choose to bring it somewhere else.

The real benefit is not that someday you become a person who can sit in perfect silence for twenty minutes. The benefit is that outside of meditation, you begin to notice sooner when your attention gets hijacked.

You notice the thought before automatically believing it.

You notice the irritation before immediately reacting.

You notice the worry loop before it carries you away.

You notice when your mind has traveled ten miles down a road that you do not actually want to be on.

And now, you know how to come back.

Returning is the skill.

So if today's meditation was messy, don't throw it out.

You may have gotten more reps than you think.