Thoughts have more power over us than we realize.

They influence our values. They influence our actions. They influence our beliefs.

They weave themselves into stories and run through our minds.

And sometimes, our minds will trick us into believing a story, even if it’s not true.

“That guy must be a jerk.”

“She’s out to get me. I just know it.”

“He must hate me…”

We’re so sure that he’s evil.

We’re so sure that she’s a bad person — based off some limited amount of information — and we believe it!

And then we hear the rest of the person’s story and realize how wrong we were.

It’s what that the mind is wired to do.

When our ancestors were trying to survive, they only had seconds to respond to threats. Making up stories (and overreacting) was the difference between running your ass off at the sound of a rustling bush and staying there to get eaten alive.

Stories in our heads were (and still are) a survival mechanism.

If my boss asks me to have a meeting with him, I’m already going into “oh god why” and “shit shit shit.”

If the girlfriend says, “Hey, can we talk?”

O_O.

And that’s not even the worst of it.

We’re so good at telling stories, that we tell them about ourselves too — all without even realizing it.

“You can’t do this.”

“Remember that time when you failed?”

“Why do you even try? You’ll never get as good as that guy.”

These are the stories that stop us from accomplishing what we want to do.

There must be a way to fight back — but how?

To manage anything, we need to first become aware of it.

Once we become aware of something (e.g. our thoughts, our beliefs, our habits), then we can start working with it. Changing it. Transforming it, and molding it.

It takes practice. Deliberate practice.

In other words, cognitive training.

In other words, meditation.

No, not the zen and achieving enlightenment type of meditation. More like the process of exercising mentally for the sake of building cognitive capacities.

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Meditation is like building muscle.

The first thing I learned about meditation is that it exercises the muscle of focus (among other things). As you get better at practice, your ability to stay calm gets better too.

The second thing I learned over the years is that there’s something even more important than learning to focus on your breath, and that’s the ability to observe thoughts.

Why observe thoughts?

Have you ever tried to sit down to meditate and found that your thoughts would go nuts no matter how hard you tried to focus?

Learning to observe your thoughts can help you in a few areas, specifically:

1. Building your focus muscle
2. Strengthening your breath focus practice
3. Curating your thought stream

Practical Benefit #1: Building your focus muscle

When you think about it, focus comes down to two things.

1. Being able to focus on something (like your breath).
2. Noticing when your mind has wandered and being able to pull your attention back. (underrated)

Usually, when we first start learning how to meditate, we’re taught to focus on #1, with #2 usually as something secondary.

“Focus on your breath. If your mind wanders off, just bring it back. Keep trying, and you’ll get it eventually.”

There’s something fundamentally wrong with this approach.

When you learn how to juggle, you start off by mastering how to toss 1 ball at a time. You get the speed of the toss down, the height of the toss, and the motion your hand needs to move through to get a “perfect” toss. Once you master this, then we can add on a 2nd ball, and then finally a 3rd. 

It’s pretty impractical (and frustrating) to start off with all 3 balls at once. There are so many smaller, easier microskills we need to master first. 

But this is what we do with meditation.

We do our best to focus on the breath, but our mind keeps wandering away. So we keep bringing our mind back. Over and over and over again. 

At some point, we get frustrated that we’re not “getting it,” and then we give up. 

Like with juggling, when you start at a difficulty level higher than what you’re ready for, it can be frustrating and make you want to quit.

What if we practiced the supporting, easier layers first?

If juggling’s version of the easier layers is to practice 1 ball, then with meditation, this means getting good at noticing mental wandering first. Then, we can add on trying to focus on the breath.

Much easier than brute-forcing our attention onto the breath.

So how do we train ourselves to get good at noticing mental wandering?

The Technique: Thought Hunting

This is an alternative to the traditional practice of sitting with your eyes closed and focusing on your breath (boring!). Instead, we focus the attention on our thought stream and deliberately practice noticing when our thoughts wander. 

1. Sit with your eyes closed, and rest your attention ONLY on watching thoughts. Nothing else! Not breath, not body. Just thoughts.
2. Eventually, your thoughts will wander.
3. When you do catch yourself in a big thought wander (like a vivid memory, daydream, or argument), give yourself a “point” (Like…”Hey! I caught one! One!”), and then go back to watching thoughts. (NOT the breath)
4. Do this again when the next big thought wander comes up. “Ah! There the mind goes again…Two!” or “Ooh, there’s another one. Two!”
5. Sometimes a thought will pull you for a really long time — like minutes long or even the entire session. No worries. It’s part of the game. When you notice you’ve been wandering, you still get a point once you catch yourself, and then you can go back to watching thoughts.
6. Repeat this for as many points as you like. This is the equivalent of a mental-pushup.
7. Take a break between sets of 10 if necessary.

The more you do this, the more you’ll find that:

1. You get good at catching when your attention wanders (during meditation practice and during your day)
2. You have longer stretches of time where your thoughts (briefly) stay quiet

You can check out this article to see how Kobe Bryant inspired the idea of Thought Hunting. See if you can spot the analogy for “makes.”

Bonus benefit:

The ability to know when your mind has wandered and what it has wandered to is useful in everything we do, like focusing on work, being present in conversations, and not falling into unproductive thinking patterns, like anxiety and resentment.

Practical Benefit #2: Strengthening your breath focus practice

You’ll find that doing Thought Hunting for 10 points (or however many sets you have time for) brings a sense of concentration that feels different than the normal “focus on breath” practice.

If you haven’t tried the exercise yet, go try it now.

Once you’ve built up your concentration this way, you can then shift this concentration to a different practice:

1. Layer on the practice of focusing on your breath. Put half your attention on Thought Hunting and the other half on your breath.
2. If you do this for awhile and your attention feels stable, move all of your attention to your breath.
3. If you were concentrated enough during Thought Hunting, you’ll find that during breath focus, you’ll be able to focus on your breath more easily OR you’ll catch yourself quickly and refocus when you do wander.

Why do meditation teachers start you off with the breath?

Many meditation classes use the breath as a starting practice.

Why?

The reasoning you’ll hear most often is because “the breath is always with you” and that “you can use it anywhere,” but it goes a little deeper than that.

There are a few things happening when you meditate with the breath. Here’s a simplified explanation:

1. Deep breathing stimulates the vagus nerve, part of your parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), which is responsible for helping you rest and relax.
2. Breath focus decreases activity in the default mode network (DMN) and the amygdala by focusing your attention on an observation task, which activates your task-positive network (TPN). Without your DMN running wild and causing mental wandering and without your amygdala activating and causing negative emotions that come from mental wandering (like fear, anxiety, negativity), there’s less “stuff” going on in your head to produce stress.
3. If any thoughts do come up that cause a negative emotion, in your TPN focused state, you experience (and observe) the emotional reaction as passing physical phenomena (and passing thoughts). This gives you a way to respond to these emotions differently than how you might be used to responding (e.g. negatively) and takes you out of any negative rabbit holes of thinking you would have fallen into otherwise. 

Meditation demystified.

Practical Benefit #3: Curating the thought stream

Eliminating unproductive thinking patterns

The first step to eliminating an unproductive thinking pattern is to notice it, so that you can then practice a response to it. It’s challenging, but it’s not impossible.

If you get in enough practice with Thought Hunting, you’ll start getting familiar with not only how your thoughts pull your attention but also the types of thoughts that pull your attention. This becomes most useful when you’re trying to look for thoughts that cause you to get in your own way, like self-doubt or anxiety.

Try this exercise to help with noticing (and eliminating) unproductive thinking patterns:

Step 0:

Prep yourself by walking through Thought Hunting for 10-20 points.

This is like warming up your muscles before a race.

Step 1:

Bring to mind a situation or unproductive thinking pattern that you know you have and you want to get rid of.

Examples: imposter syndrome, fear of failure, overthinking tendencies, negativity or judgment towards a person, triggers when taking feedback, etc.

Step 2:

Sit and think about this situation or person, do some Thought Hunting, and catch yourself when you fall into these thinking patterns.

When you do catch one, name the emotion that’s there.

“Ha! Caught the brain trying to trick me into unnecessary fear again…”

”Ah, there’s the mind going into anger and negativity towards [this person] again…”

Just by bringing your attention to the thoughts, noticing, and naming the emotion, you distance yourself from the emotion and take away from the emotional pull that causes you to get lost in these thoughts.

TLDR and simplified explanation: naming your emotions (called affect labeling) decreases activity in a part of your brain related to emotions (the amygdala) and increases activity in a different area instead (the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex). Study

Naming emotions short circuits the emotional response, which then gives you mental space to respond with calm and composure.

It’s just a matter of whether you can remember to do it quickly enough before the emotion kicks in…

How to make this useful today

To use this in your day to day, arm yourself with this technique, and be on the lookout for whatever unproductive emotion you want to overcome as you walk into situations that might cause them during your day.

• If fear of failure paralyzes you from working on a hard project, think about the project and catch all the fear thoughts that come up related to it. (“Ah there’s the brain going into fear mode again. This is what usually stops me from working on this project. Alright, let’s get to work.”)
• If you’re tackling anger or negativity towards a person, practice catching those thoughts right before you see that person (like before a meeting or a social gathering), and then be ready to catch the thoughts again when you see that person and your mind instinctively goes into negative chatter. (“Oh, there’s judgment again. Let’s refocus attention to listening (or being present) instead.”)

By practicing this technique, you train yourself to create mental space in situations you didn’t realize you could, saving yourself mental energy and freeing yourself from thinking patterns that drained or tired you in the past.

It’s a versatile, simple, difficult, powerful skill.

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Extra credit

Bonus benefit: emotions like fear and anger will always be accompanied by physical sensations, usually (but not always) around the chest, stomach, arms or face. These sensations are cues that tell you that you’re going into these emotions.

When an emotion like fear or anger arises, try bringing your attention to wherever you feel it on your body. Watch the sensations, and they will evolve over time. With enough time (and patience), you will see the strength of the sensations (and the emotion) decrease until it eventually dissipates.

This technique is also valuable to handle emotional triggers.

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Don’t have much time to practice?

We all live busy lives, and fitting in another workout or exercise can often feel like it’s another thing that you have to do.

Click here for ways to turn everyday situations into free opportunities to meditate.