A problem that many people run into when they first begin a meditation practice is the issue of being unable to control the wild run of their thoughts. While in many cases, people are unaware of the never-ending stream of their thoughts since they are active, in meditation, these thoughts can become intrusive and disruptive, discouraging new meditation students. 

If you cannot stop thinking in meditation, do not worry about it—you are not supposed to. Meditation is about learning how to control and guide your thoughts to return to a present state of mind and consciousness. Since the natural state of mind is to be in thought, thoughts should be acknowledged and allowed to pass in meditation.

Have you had difficulties learning to meditate and think that your mind is just too wild to tame? Read on to learn more about how to control your thinking during meditation. 

Meditation Is About Inducing Flow

While many concepts revolve around meditation and the idea of “no-mind,” from the standpoint of Western psychology, meditation is simply about the ability to activate a state of flow manually. Flow is a psychological state that occurs when an individual is completely immersed in their present activity and is not thinking about any other thing than what they are doing. 

Here are some of the side effects of flow:

• Loss of ego: Ego loss is defined as the subjective loss of self-identity. In other words, during meditation, you cease to be you and become part of everything around you. When people talk about being “one with the universe” with meditation, they are talking about ego loss.
  
  
• The perception of time speeds up: Ever heard the phrase, “Time flies when you’re having fun?” This is because having fun often induces a state of flow, which causes the mind’s perception of the passage of time to speed up. The same flow can be induced during meditation, allowing a person to sit for hours and feel as if they have only been sitting for a few minutes.
  
  
• Increased concentration and attention: Meditation causes the brain to manually reduce incoming sensory data and extraneous thought to a trickle, which results in an increased focus on the data that is allowed to remain through stimulation of the thalamus of the brain.
  
  
• Decreased awareness of physical discomfort: Because incoming sensory data is significantly reduced in meditation, this means that practiced students of meditation can ignore increasing amounts of discomfort during a meditative state. Skilled Zen masters have been known to be able to meditate in the snow without a drop in their body temperature, and the discomfort that novice meditation students experience falls away with practice.
  
  
• Feelings of serenity: Feelings of peace and calm are natural side-effects of meditation as stressors, and sensory stimuli are dramatically reduced. This means that once a person becomes practiced in meditation, they can use a meditative state to control their emotions more effectively. Agitated states can be reversed by employing a meditative state to trigger calm, defusing negative emotions such as fear or anger. 
  
  
• Complete focus on the task at hand: People who are deep in meditation often become unaware of the events around them and can sometimes even appear to put themselves in a trance state. 

Flow is often referred to when talking about things like creative endeavors or satisfying work. But flow is also the psychological state that is responsible for a practiced meditator’s complete absorption in their meditative state. With enough experience, a meditator can induce a state of psychological flow within mere moments. 

The benefit of learning how to turn the flow on and off is that it becomes much easier to induce outside of meditation, allowing a person to become more focused in all their tasks.

The Goal is Not to Stop Thoughts in Meditation

Many people who are new to the practice of meditation become discouraged quickly because they find they are unable to control the run of their thoughts. This is normal! There is a common misconception that in meditation, the objective is to stop yourself from having any thoughts at all.

This is not the reality, however. In meditation, it is expected that your thoughts will rise, even in the most practiced meditation students. This wild, restless mind, known to the Chinese Buddhists as xinyuan and the Japanese Buddhists as shin’en, can be referred to in the West as “monkey mind.” 

This is the mind in its natural state, swinging from thought to thought with not only a tenuous pattern between thoughts. Monkey mind can make it difficult to achieve a state of psychological flow or—in the case of people with attention deficit disorders—can make the absorption of information itself difficult. 

Rather than taming the monkey mind, the goal of meditation is to detach from it and observe it like a neutral third party. Being attached to the thoughts of our monkey mind is what leads to emotional upheavals—ever been angry over an imagined conversation? 

Meanwhile, meditation teaches you that your thoughts are not you and that we control all our reactions to them. This is very useful both in everyday life and in coping with mental disorders such as anxiety and depression. 

Methods to Use if You Can’t Stop Thinking During Meditation

If you have started a meditation practice and you’re finding it difficult to quiet your mind, there are several different methods you can try to get more control over your thoughts during meditation. Keep in mind that the number one thing you need to do to improve the control over your thoughts in meditation is to keep doing it—with practice, it becomes much easier. 

Here are some other methods you can try if you can’t stop thinking during meditation:

Try Reducing Environmental Stimuli

There is a reason why all of the meditation students practice by facing a blank wall in Zen zendos. Since meditation is about the reduction of sensory stimuli, sometimes giving our mind a little help by physically blocking out some of those stimuli can help bring us into a more peaceful mindset. 

Here are some ways you can reduce environmental stimuli in your meditation space: 

• Turn off the lights. Many meditation practices are performed with the eyes slightly open, but if you find this distracting on a sensory level, try closing your eyes instead. Bright lights can be distracting even through closed eyes, so dimming the lights or even turning them off completely can help remove visual stimuli as much as possible.
  
  
• Stare at a wall. This is a trick from the Zen Buddhists. To meditate this way, sit cross-legged a few inches away from a blank wall and choose a spot to look at on the wall just slightly below your natural line of sight so that you can tilt your head forward slightly without discomfort. Do not worry about blinking, this is fine. Eventually, your vision will begin to gray out as your mind starts to reduce sensory stimuli. Breaking your concentration will snap you back to reality.
  
  
• Try introducing white noise. White noise can help mask some of the more intermittent sounds around you while you are trying to meditate. With other sensory stimuli such as vision reduced, the mind will use the ears to seek out any stimuli it can notice and call to your attention. White noises help hide these smaller, more distracting noises. 

Try Guided Meditation

If a regular sitting meditation is proving too difficult for you, sitting through a guided meditation where a voice helps keep you centered on the meditation experience can help keep your mind focused on the task at hand.  

There are many good guided meditation videos available for free across the Internet. If you think that guided meditation sounds like a method you’d like to try to control your thoughts better during meditation, you have nothing to lose by trying it out. When I first started out, I had no clue what I was doing, or need to be doing to meditate properly, so I followed a course of guided meditations by Sam Harris —”Waking up”. Highly recommend it, very effective. 

Try Visualization During Meditation

Another method of meditation that can help you focus if you are having a hard time controlling your thoughts is visualization. In visualization, you use your mind’s eye during meditation to either focus on an image (a beautiful place or object is common) or on drawing a simple shape in your mind. 

Visualization is a good way to keep your mind focused during meditation because it keeps your mind anchored on a single thought or object. 

While many people who practice meditation use visualization as a stepping stone to deeper forms of meditation where no visualization is needed to enter a meditative state, some meditation students stick with visualization and can paint or draw elaborate images in their mind’s eye during a meditation session.

Try Counting Your Breaths in Meditation

The counting method is often used to teach novice meditation students how to keep their thoughts focused entirely on their breath as it enters and leaves their bodies. Since breathing is an involuntary practice and connected directly to the physical presence of the body, focusing on it interrupts the brain’s ability to process more abstract thoughts. 

Here is how to use the counting method during your meditation: 

• On your inhale, think the number “One.”
• On your exhale, think the number “Two.” 

Continue this pattern up through the number ten, where it is usually a good idea to go back to one. The object is not to see how high you can count; it is simply to keep your mind focused on a repetitive task that can allow it to enter a state of flow. 

Try Labeling Your Thoughts During Meditation

Some people may find themselves dealing with intrusive thoughts during meditation, especially if they are trying to fit a meditation practice into a schedule that is already jam-packed with other activities. It is easy to fall into a planning or worrying mode during meditation if you feel like you have a hundred other things you should be doing instead. 

To avoid obsessing on a thought, try identifying your thoughts and adding a simple, one-word label to them, such as “plan” or “fear.” Identifying and attaching a label to these thoughts can allow you to let the thoughts pass until your mind grows calm. Through the practice of meditation, these intrusive thoughts will come up less and less frequently except during times of emotional agitation, in which case seeing which thoughts interrupt your meditations can prove useful during introspection.

Try Listening to Gentle Music During Meditation

Like white noise, soft music can act as an anchor for the mind during meditation, making it easier to block out other auditory stimuli. It is usually better to choose a type of music that is instrumental only, as lyrics can be distracting to some meditation students. 

It’s also a good idea to choose a piece of music that is either longer than the amount of time that you intend to meditate or is exactly as long as the amount of time you intend to meditate. This can serve as an auditory cue that your meditation session is complete, especially if you are not meditating in a Buddhist zendo where a roshi will ring the bell when the session has ended. 

Try Focusing on a Candle During Meditation

Humankind has long stared into the flames to induce a trance-like or hypnotic state, and focusing on a burning candle during meditation is a good shortcut to a meditative state for those meditation students who have not developed enough control over their mind’s eye to visualize a candle in their mind alone. 

A candle can also provide a more comfortable image to focus on than a blank wall in many cases. Humans have an evolutionary predisposition to be attracted to staring at fire, and we have naturally evolved to enjoy being around fires. The state of joy that people feel staring into a fire is one of the inducing triggers of psychological flow. Meditation students can take advantage of this by staring into a candle to try to trigger a natural meditative state.  

Try Walking Meditation to Still Your Thoughts

For people who have problems with controlling their mind during sitting meditation, walking meditation can provide a solution. In formal settings, walking meditation is used to break up sessions of sitting meditation to stretch the body and return circulation to the legs since it is common for the legs to cramp and fall asleep after periods of stillness that can last for hours.

Walking meditation can also be used as a substitute for sitting meditation for those who have a hard time thinking during meditation. Because walking forces our mind to connect with our bodies, it is one of the activities that is an easy trigger for the psychological state of flow. This is also one of the reasons that walking is known to reduce stress. 

Try to Relax Your Muscles During Meditation

One trap that is easy to fall into during meditation is obsessing over how uncomfortable you are during the meditation process—your back hurts, your legs are cramped, and you have a weird muscle twitch that keeps reoccurring just because you’re trying to sit as still as humanly possible. These discomforts are often the result of built-up tension in the muscles from before meditation began. 

Here are a few ways you can relax your muscles for meditation: 

• Stretch well before going into sitting meditation. Making sure that your legs, arms, back, and torso are limber can help increase blood circulation and decrease the likelihood of debilitating cramps during your meditation session.
  
  
• Change sitting positions. There are several different positions you can sit in for meditation, some more comfortable than others. Some simple sitting meditation poses include the Burmese position, lotus position, half-lotus position, and full-lotus position. Try sitting meditation in several different poses to find which one is most comfortable for you.
  
  
• Relax your muscles using your mind. One way to relax at the beginning of a meditation session is to focus on relaxing one part of your body at a time. You can start by focusing on relaxing your toes, then your feet, then your ankles, legs, waist, and so on, moving your way up the body until your entire body has been relaxed manually. The meticulous process of this physical check is sometimes enough to induce a meditative state by itself. 

Try Not to Think About Not Thinking During Meditation

It sounds like a paradox, but one of the worst things you can do to try to stop thinking during meditation is to think about not thinking. It works on the same principle as telling yourself not to think about a pink elephant—just the thought puts the pink elephant in your mind. 

This is why when you find your mind wildly wandering in meditation, it is better to anchor your mind on a single word or image rather than focus on the fact that you can’t calm your mind. Obsessing over a state of mindlessness in meditation can have the opposite effect and make it nearly impossible to enter a meditative state. 

Instead, accept the fact that you will have thoughts during meditation no matter how practiced you become at the art. Acknowledge your thoughts and let them pass, working to bring your attention back to your breath if you notice your mind beginning to wander. 

Try Free-Writing Before Meditation

If you find yourself consistently overwhelmed by monkey mind during meditation, one method for trying to get ahead of your racing thoughts is to sit down and journal for ten to fifteen minutes before a meditation session with stream-of-consciousness writing.

To do this, set a timer for the amount of time you wish to free write, then write whatever comes to mind, letting your hand move across the page no matter what springs to your mind. If you get stuck, write the same thought over and over again until new thoughts arise. 

A major benefit of free-writing is that it can show you a physical representation of your monkey mind – your stream-of-consciousness. This, in turn, can give great insight into how your mind works when it harnesses the power of meditation. Free-writing is also a good idea for showing you the things that you obsess over so you can address them outside of meditation, leaving your mind freer when you do sit down to meditate. 

Try Meditating on a Mantra

Like meditating on a visual image, meditating on a mantra helps anchor the mind to a single thought rather than running off on any new train of thought that passes by. Om is a traditional word used as a mantra since it is simple, but here are a few other mantras that are popularly used to invoke the chakras of the body during meditation:

• I am
• I feel
• I do
• I love
• I speak
• I see
• I understand

Saying these two words to yourself over and over during meditation until the words themselves almost become meaningless can act as a trigger for self-hypnosis, and if used consistently, a mantra can be a quick cue to the brain for inducing a meditative state. 

Try More Meditation—Don’t Give Up

The number one best way to get better at controlling your thoughts during meditation is to stay consistent with your meditation practice. That does not mean that you have to meditate for an hour a day or give it up. On the contrary, even just working five-minute and ten-minute intervals of meditation into your daily routine can have significant positive impacts on your mental health and tranquility. 

One way to stay consistent in your meditation practice is to record each day the amount of time that you meditated and when. Gradually, as you become better at meditation, you can either increase the amount of time you meditate during a sitting, or you can increase your sessions to twice a day. 

Morning and night after waking and before sleep are popular times to meditate, but everyone sets a different meditation schedule in their daily routines. 

Try to Let Your Thoughts Pass Without Judgement

Many people may be shocked at the kinds of thoughts that arise in their subconscious during a meditative state when they first begin meditation. It is not uncommon for a meditation student to become so swept up in the emotions associated with the thoughts experienced in their meditative state that they are brought to tears or become enraged. 

This is just another, more emotional manifestation of monkey mind. Essentially, the mind rages against any form of control, throwing up the most disrupting and agitating thoughts it can conjure to disrupt the meditative state. 

The hardest part of meditation is to accept these intrusive thoughts and powerful sweeps of emotion in stride, without breaking the meditation session. Many meditation masters will tell their students to sit and continue to sit, no matter if the building falls around their ears. 

This is largely metaphorical and dramatic to make a point about how persistence in stillness is vital toward progression in meditation. Still, it also applies to the disturbing thoughts you sometimes experience during meditation. If you allow your mind to drive you out of a meditation session by attacking you with thoughts that make you angry or full of sorrow or fearful or frustrated, it will only fall back on that tactic even more readily the next time you sit down to meditate.

Try Choosing a Better Place to Meditate

Sometimes you can’t focus on meditating no matter how hard you try simply because of the environment you’re trying to meditate in. If you are learning to meditate in a place with thin walls, barking dogs, screaming children, or other environmental distractions, sometimes shutting yourself away in a private room isn’t enough. 

Here are some other places where you might find a better vibe for meditation: 

• A Buddhist zendo: Trying to find some Zen? You would be hard-pressed to find a better place to find it than a real-life Zen meditation center. The great thing is that most zendos allow meditation students to practice zazen (meditation) at their facilities, whether they are Zen Buddhists or not.
  
  
• A meditation circle: Sometimes, one of the obstacles during meditation is that you are too easily distracted on your own, while the peer pressure of a group meditation can help still your mind and focus on your meditation goals. You can find a group for meditation through social apps such as Facebook and Meetup.
  
  
• The forest: The stillness of the wilderness can sometimes be an easier place to find calm than artificial environments. The forest is a great place to practice walking meditation as well.  

Meditation Is About Controlling Your Thoughts, Not Eliminating Them

If you have a hard time not thinking during meditation, join the club with every other single person who has ever tried to meditate. Thankfully, eliminating conscious thought is not the goal of most meditative practices. Instead, you should focus on trying to control your thoughts and your emotional reaction to them.