What do I do if I can't stop thinking?

Thoughts will keep arriving for as long as you sit, and nothing on this page will switch them off. Practice works on something else: the stretch of time between drifting away and noticing that you have. That moment of noticing is the exercise. A busy mind also comes in two kinds. One wanders from topic to topic and comes back without much fuss. The other locks onto one worry and replays it, and that kind needs a different move.

If the trouble is bigger than thinking, and sitting down at all feels impossible, start with the wider page on when you can’t meditate.

When the mind wanders

The usual picture of meditation is an empty head, and next to it every sit looks like a failure. You close your eyes, and a minute later you’re halfway through rewriting tomorrow’s email. That wandering is your material, and each time it happens you get one round of practice: you were resting on the breath, you drifted, you noticed, you came back.

Here is one way to work with it:

1. Give yourself a few slow minutes before you sit. A head that has raced all day won’t go quiet the moment you close your eyes.
2. Pick one place to rest your attention, like the breath at the belly or at the nostrils, and stay with that one for the whole sit.
3. When you catch yourself somewhere else, say one word inside: “thinking.” Headspace’s teachers suggest this label (Headspace). It names what happened without starting a conversation.
4. Go back to the breath. There’s no need to review where you went or why.
5. Do it again, as often as the mind asks.

The fourth step is the one that slips. If you come back with a sigh and a small lecture to yourself, you’ve added a second layer of thinking on top of the first. And a sit where you came back again and again is a sit where you practised a lot.

When it’s one thought on repeat

Some thinking doesn’t wander at all. It circles: the argument from this morning, the bill, the thing you should have said. Psychologists call this rumination. Nolen-Hoeksema and colleagues (2008) review evidence that it deepens negative thinking, and that it gets in the way of solving the very problem it keeps chewing on, so each pass leaves the worry as unsolved as before and ready to come round again. They also set it apart from self-reflection, which is more useful. Thinking about your life is fine. The loop is what wears you down.

Against a loop a label helps less, because the same thought is back a few seconds later. You have two other moves.

The first is to drop into the body. Find where the worry sits physically: a tight jaw, a heavy chest, a flutter in the stomach. Rest your attention there, on the sensation and not the story. Farb and colleagues (2015) argue that many modern troubles involve misreading the body’s signals, and that contemplative practice may soften those misreadings. That is a theory with some support behind it, not a tested technique. Still, it gives your attention somewhere to go that isn’t the loop.

The second is to stop. You’re allowed to end a sit early and do something absorbing. The same review notes that in dozens of experiments, a pleasant distraction lifted a low mood (Nolen-Hoeksema et al., 2008). One small study looked at people coming home from work. Those who played a puzzle game felt more recovered as the week went on, and those who used a mindfulness app felt less so (Collins et al., 2019). Meditation is one way to unwind, and on some evenings it won’t be the best one.

Expect worry to feel louder when you first sit down, since the quiet may be the first you’ve had all day. Talk to a doctor or a therapist if the loop follows you through your days, keeps dragging your mood down, or turns toward hurting yourself. Rumination is tied to depression and anxiety, and that is work to do with help.

What the research says

Smallwood and Schooler (2014) describe conscious experience as fluid: attention seldom stays on one subject for long. In their review, a wandering mind loosens its hold on what the senses report and fills up with memories and feelings. Executive control, the capacity to steer attention, keeps it in check. Wandering has a cost and a use: it goes along with mistakes, and it’s linked to creativity and planning ahead. Whether it helps or hurts depends partly on being aware of it. That is the meditative move, put in the language of a lab. You can’t turn the stream off, but you can get better at noticing it.

None of the studies behind this page tested the “thinking” label or the habit of returning to the breath. Those come from meditation teachers, not from trials. The game and app study was small, with 45 people in the lab and 20 at home, and it compared one game with one app. Farb’s paper is a theoretical review. So the idea that a thinking mind is normal stands on solid ground. The evidence for the specific techniques is thin, and they are worth trying on those terms.