Why your mind will not be quiet when you meditate, and why that is completely normal

In 2014 a team of psychologists led by Timothy Wilson ran an experiment that sounds like a joke. Participants sat alone in an empty room for six to fifteen minutes, with no phone, no book, only their thoughts. There was a button in the room. Pressing it gave a mild electric shock, one they had earlier said they would pay money to avoid.

The results, published in Science: about two thirds of the men and a quarter of the women pressed the button at least once. They preferred an electric shock to fifteen minutes alone with their own minds.

If your first attempt at meditation felt unbearably noisy, you are in very large company.

The noise was always there

In 2010 Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert at Harvard built a phone app that pinged over two thousand people at random moments during the day, asking what they were doing, what they were thinking about, and how happy they felt. Nearly 47 per cent of the time, people were thinking about something other than what they were doing.

They found something else too: when minds wandered, people were on the whole less happy than when their minds stayed with the task. Their paper had a memorable title: a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.

So when you sit still and find your thoughts jumping about, you did not create the noise. It runs all day long under the traffic, the phone and the people. You have simply switched those off long enough to hear it. Buddhism has an old image for this: the monkey mind, swinging from branch to branch.

The brain has a default mode, and it is loud

In the early 2000s the neurologist Marcus Raichle and colleagues noticed something odd in brain scans: a set of regions grew more active when people were doing nothing, and quieter when they started a task. They called it the brain's default mode.

In that mode we think about the past, predict the future, replay conversations, imagine what others think of us. It is the normal activity of a healthy brain, not a fault. It is even useful: plenty of good ideas arrive in the shower or on a walk.

But most of what runs in that mode repeats. Write it down and you will find the same five or seven worries going round, like a playlist on repeat. Sitting still long enough to notice the repetition is often more helpful than any advice, because by the fifth time through, you start to hear it as just a song.

Meditation is not emptying the mind

This is the commonest misunderstanding, and the reason so many people give up after three sessions. The aim is not to have no thoughts. That happens to nobody, experienced meditators included. The aim is to notice you have wandered off, and come back. The coming back is the exercise.

Every time you notice you have drifted and return to the breath, that is one repetition. Like lifting weights: the heavy moment is the one that does the work.

Three things that make it easier

• Keep it short. Five minutes every day beats twenty minutes once a month.
• Pick a concrete anchor: air moving at the nostrils, or the belly rising and falling. Anything too abstract is hard to hold.
• When you notice you have wandered, do not scold yourself. A silent "ah, thinking" and a return is enough. Self-criticism only adds another layer of thought.

After a few weeks, what changes is usually not that the mind goes quiet. What changes is the distance between you and the thoughts. You begin to see them pass rather than being carried off, like someone at the foot of a waterfall. The water still falls, but you are no longer standing in it.