On Mind Wandering in Meditation
Marcello Spinella, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Psychology
Richard Stockton College of New Jersey
July 19, 2011
Mind wandering is perhaps the number one obstacle
to people starting a meditation practice. A
surprisingly large number of people seem to have
tried to meditate at least once in their lives. When I
ask people about what it was like and what problem
they ran into, frustration over mind wandering seems
like an almost universal answer. I never heard anyone
say "Oh, it was pure peace and bliss, but I just
decided to stop." When something is that enjoyable,
we tend to keep at it. Ironically, all of this frustration
is based on a mistaken assumption, something like:
“When I meditate, my mind should not wander.”
That’s completely unrealistic. The natural habit of the
mind is to wander. It happens all day long. What
makes us think it would be any different when we sit
down to meditate?
An important point to realize is that we have
absolutely no control whatsoever over when our
minds are going to wander next or where it’s going to
go. It's as involuntary as a muscle twitch or the
functioning of your spleen. Despite our best
intentions, it’s guaranteed to wander and there is no
way to predict when. So putting effort toward “not
wandering” is like putting effort toward making a
cloud not rain. Trying to control something you can’t
control can only produce frustration and helplessness,
which erodes motivation to continue practice.
In psychological terms, attention can be operantly
conditioned. This type of conditioning was
discovered by Edward Thorndyke and refined by B.F.
Skinner. We have the popular cultural image of a
pigeon in a cage who receives a pellet every time it
pecks a lever. Before long it learns that pecking the
lever gets results so it keeps doing it. Developing
concentration not different from this. It involves
conditioning systems in the brain that, to a large
degree, are not under our direct voluntary control. In
meditation, we choose some object to focus our
attention on, like breath sensations or feelings in the
body. We can voluntarily focus somewhat, but how
well depends on the amount of distraction. And even
in a quiet room, it's not long before long the mind is
off again. The most common response to this is
frustration. We realize the mind is wandering and get
frustrated that it didn't stay put like a good doggie.
Well frustration is a form of self-punishment.
There are at least two reasons why this doesn't work.
The first is punishment isn't a good motivator. It
works to some degree, but produces many unwanted
side effects. If we try to beat the mind into
submission, the whole process will become very
aversive and we will start finding excuses to end our
meditation session early or find other things to do
with our time. The second reason is that it makes
absolutely no sense from a behavioral point of view.
The very moment we realize the mind has been
wandering, attention has already returned. That's
good. So to get frustrated is like punishing the mind
for doing what we wanted it to do. It's like trying to
teach a dog to roll over and whenever he starts to do
it, you say "Bad doggie!" It's a strategy that is
doomed to fail. The only reason we do it is out of the
habit of trying to correct our behavior with
punishment. But taking a step back and considering
the process shows us that this not a useful strategy.
One can neutrally bring attention back, and if that
works, by all means do so. However, it has been
recognized in recent years that "bad is stronger than
good," a term coined by psychologist Roy
Baumeister. We tend towards negative emotion,
probably because in evolutionary terms, it was a safer
bet in the short run. It was better for our ancestors to
get scared when they heard a rustling in the bush,
than to ignore it on the off change it was a large,
hungry predator. So the automatic tendency toward
frustration has an unfair advantage. When developing
a meditation practice, self-rewarding rather than self-
punishing can counterbalance this automatic
tendency. As the saying goes, you catch more flies
with honey than vinegar. If the verbal label (e.g.
"good") becomes cumbersome or unnecessary after a
while, you can just drop it. But it can be a very useful
technique to overcome the struggling that many
experience.
A teacher named Upasaka Culadasa (pronounced
"choo-lah-DAH-sah"; http://dharmatreasure.com/)
tipped me off to this simple but critical point.
Whenever we catch the mind wandering and re-focus
on the chosen object, feel good about it. I even would
use a word like "good" or "yes." Do this every time.
Recognize that wandering is not a failure, but re-
focusing is a success, every single time. Literally,
every re-focusing is exercising attention pathways in
the brain, reinforcing synaptic pathways. The more
these pathways are exercised, the easier they become
activated. With every single re-focusing, a person's
ability to stay focused becomes slightly better. Over
time this is like putting money in a bank, it not only
accumulates, but with compounded interest.
Eventually, this results in unbroken attention and
freedom from distraction for long periods of time.
With instruction, a person eventually learn to enter
advanced states of concentration, states of deep
absorption called “jhana” in Buddhist terminology,
where the mind can stay focused without wandering
for hours at a time. This sharpens a person's
concentration greatly, which generalizes to everyday
life. Emotionally, there is an enormous sense of well-
being and stability that comes with this. It also gives
one an awesome too with which to practice
mindfulness and develop insight.
The two general aspects of awareness in Buddhist
meditation are concentration (i.e. sustained attention),
and mindfulness (i.e. metacognitive awareness of
one’s thinking process, emotions, and/or sensations).
Any meditation develops a little of both, but some
forms develop one aspect relatively more than the
other. However, these two skills go hand-in-hand.
When our minds wander so much that it’s hard to get
a clear picture of what is going on in our subjective
experience and develop insight. It’s like trying to
read small text with a magnifying glass, but your
hand keeps moving around so that you can’t get a
good look at what’s there. Concentration practice is
like exercises to steady the hand, so that you can use
mindfulness to read what’s there. Together, these are
like a cognitive microscope. The greater one’s ability
to sustain focus, the more turbo charged one’s
mindfulness practice becomes. That will lead to
penetrating insights that will radically change one's
well-being for the better.

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