There Was a War Going On in My Head. I Only Found Out After I Started Meditating.

There were a few stretches in my life that were genuinely hard. I'm not being dramatic — they were bad.

At the time I couldn't have told you what was actually happening. I just knew it hurt. Looking back, I can lay out what that stress was made of.

What actually happens in your head when you're stressed

Stress isn't one lump. It's your head running in three directions. Here is what mine was doing.

Backwards. Reconstructing things that had already happened, over and over. Regret and second-guessing tangle into it.

Forwards. Playing out what might happen next, mostly the bad versions. Then planning against them, then picturing the plan going wrong, and getting scared of that.

Sideways. Guessing what someone else is thinking, then building more scenarios on top of the guess.

And that is before the real problem. Every scenario branches at every possible outcome. One becomes two, two become four. It runs on a loop. It's hell.

At the time none of this was laid out for me. I just hurt.

You look blank. Your head is a war zone.

Running scenarios costs an enormous amount of energy. I had none, all the time. From the outside I looked like I was staring into space, and inside my head there was a war going on.

A day would end and I'd be wiped out without having done anything. I wasn't tired from doing nothing. I was tired because my head had put in a full day.

I didn't go looking for meditation

I never set out to meditate. I was throwing everything at the wall trying to get out from under it — exercise, far too much drinking, anything that looked like it might work.

One of those things was a book about rest. I bought it without knowing it was about meditation; I figured I needed rest and wanted to see what that even meant. Then I started meditating on whatever I'd picked up from podcasts at the time, with no idea whether I was doing it right.

What I only saw once I'd been meditating

Once I'd been meditating for a while, it became clear what the hell had actually been. It wasn't the circumstances. It was being dragged around by thoughts looping in my own head.

Stressful things happening isn't what made it hurt. Running those things back a few hundred times, writing scenarios about things that hadn't happened, and getting pulled along by all of it — that's what made it hurt.

Before meditating I couldn't see any of that. If you don't know a thought has come up, the thought just feels like you. And while you're being pulled, you don't know you're being pulled.

What's different now

I can catch my own thoughts now. That's what the training did, and it's why I don't end up inside the loop.

I'm no Buddha, so it isn't perfect. But I don't fall all the way into that loop anymore.

My head still writes scenarios. As far as I understand it, that's evolution doing its job and not something you get to delete. What I do is notice one has started, and cut the pointless ones.

Being able to catch your own thoughts is a serious skill. Stray thoughts stop taking you with them, and I'm not as much at the mercy of whatever feeling shows up. My life changed after that.

It isn't that your willpower is weak

Stress being this heavy isn't a willpower problem. I tried everything I could think of.

The problem is not catching a thought at the moment it comes up, and getting pulled along by it instead.

Noticing isn't something knowledge can control. It's an ability you build by training.

And there is a method that trains exactly that: mindfulness meditation.

If your head is full of thoughts you can't put down, if the stress is heavy, give mindfulness meditation a go. It isn't just some dusty old thing. Three thousand years of people passing it down means something.

I meditated this way for years, and then I built it into an app. The one this site is about.

In short

Stress isn't one lump. It's your head running in three directions: reconstructing things that already happened, building worst-case versions of things that haven't, and guessing what other people are thinking. Every scenario branches at every possible outcome and keeps multiplying, and the repetition burns through a day's energy. That's why someone can look like they're staring into space while their head never stops.

I only saw that structure after I started meditating. What made it hard wasn't that stressful things were happening. It was running them back in my head and getting pulled along by them. Before that I couldn't see it at all. When you don't know a thought has come up, the thought feels like you, and while you're being pulled you don't know you're being pulled.

What changes isn't that the thoughts stop. The scenarios still show up. But noticing that one has started means you can cut the pointless ones there. Noticing isn't something knowledge controls; it's an ability you build by training, and mindfulness meditation is that training.

True Meditation: Mindfulness is not an app you listen to. It's an app for doing mindfulness meditation yourself — the training of noticing your own thoughts, built into an app. It's free on the App Store and Google Play.

Related reading

• I Learned to Meditate From a Book — the book that started it, and how it turned into an app
• What's Going On in Your Head When You're Trying to Impress — what it costs to notice a thought too late