How to Quiet Your Thoughts

by Steve Bearman Apr 23, 2026

A User’s Guide to the Mind

Everyone comes equipped with a mind. No one comes with a manual.

Fortunately, your mind works all on its own, performing everyday marvels without requiring any intervention from you. Only when our minds betray us do we wish we’d had a chance to read the instructions. How do you stop your mind from torturing you with critical judgments or obsessive rumination? How do you face down unsolvable problems and impossible decisions? How do you get free from limiting beliefs when you don’t know what beliefs are limiting you in the first place?

If you learn the ways of the mind, you can thwart its bad habits and transcend its infuriating limitations. But this is just the beginning. You can also learn to perform astonishing acts of intelligence: perceiving patterns, solving mysteries, creating worlds that have never existed, becoming smarter all the time. A User’s Guide to the Mind is a series of freestanding articles that provide instructions and insights into the workings of your very own mind. Here’s one of them . . .

Do you ever wish your mind would just shut up?

You know the kind of thoughts I'm talking about

The constant commentator that adds nothing, but never stops running in the background
What zenheads like to call monkey mind, untamed and always making noise
Your inner critic, persistently berating, shaming, or discouraging you
The ever-vigilant sentry, scanning for threats, or making sure you don't forget something, specifically when you're trying to fall asleep
Random, useless content pulling on your attention while you're trying to meditate
Repetitive replaying of past regrets or mistakes or disturbing experiences
Conversations you keep rehearsing in your head that you wish you could have but never will

Mostly, I'm a huge fan of thinking. It's one of my favorite activities. Some kinds of thoughts, however, are never helpful, and, like you, I often prefer for my mind to be peaceful.

You can learn to quiet your thoughts at will. There is a method to it. It is not, however, a quick trick. It takes some effort to learn.

What I am teaching here is not a concentration practice or an attempt to dominate your thoughts. Some meditation techniques train you to dominate your thoughts so they can't dominate you. Reciting a mantra, for instance, involves repeating one thought so loudly that all other thoughts are drowned out. Following the breath produces a similar effect, essentially encouraging you to think about nothing but breathing. The breath is a useful focus object, as it's always happening, so you can always practice training your mind to remain occupied with it. Such concentration practices ostensibly tame the mind. They strengthen your ability to think only one thing at a time.

What we're doing here, however, is not training in concentration or focus. It is a way to intervene in the very process of thought formation. Or, rather, to stop doing what you are already habitually doing to generate your thoughts.

There are three stages to this process:

Directly study your thoughts. You're already an expert in the contents of your thoughts. You know what your thoughts are about. You probably know very little, however, about the medium of your thoughts. What is the material your thoughts are composed from? What is the lifespan of a thought, from inception to dissolution?
Discover how insubstantial your thoughts are. If you can directly observe the nature of thought, you will find out that thoughts barely exist. Those thoughts aren't really even happening - you just think they are! This sounds absurd at first, but it is the key insight in changing your relationship with thought.
Choose how to relate with thoughts. By learning how thoughts are made, you can also learn to unmake them. At any given moment, do you wish to entertain your thoughts, or to dissolve them before they are even fully formed?

Before we get into each of these steps in more detail, I want to make an important distinction. The process I am offering here does not address the content of thoughts at all. If your thoughts are accompanied by strong, unresolved emotions, this method can offer you momentary relief, but it will never substitute for emotional work. That's what counseling is for. Anyone can benefit from the exercises below, but they're just one component of the larger project of healing, development, and liberation.

To begin, I invite you to observe your thoughts.

Becoming a Thought Scientist

Close your eyes for a moment and think about something, anything at all.

How do you know you're thinking? It's a funny question. Seems like it should be obvious. Given how much energy we devote to thinking, it's strange how little we actually pay attention to the fabric and the texture of thought. Without assuming you already know, investigate right now. What are your thoughts made of? What is occurring in your experience that you're calling thinking?

The moment you attempt to observe thought, you are already making a profound shift. You are positioning yourself outside of thought, as an observer. You are bringing a non-judgmental curiosity to thoughts. This, by itself, is a big difference, but it is just the starting point for scientific observation. This is the science of introspection. Your own thought process is the object of study.

Now try a couple thought experiments with me.

The Lifespan of a Thought

Take a breath, close your eyes, clear your mind, and wait for the next thought to happen.

Observe to see what form the thought takes, and the content of the thought. Perhaps you hear words in your head, such as, "I'm thinking this thought right now". Perhaps an image appears of what you imagine you look like sitting there.

Wait for another thought. Can you observe the moment when the thought first comes into being? Does it somehow cohere out of nothing? Does it just pop into existence fully formed? Does it seem to originate from a sort of internal location?

As each new thought is born, try to catch the moment of its inception.

Where are these thoughts coming from? Are you producing them? Do you have any say in which thoughts show up? If so, how much?

You've been watching thoughts be born. Now can you watch them die? Does a thought end? Where does it go? Does it merely transform into the next thought? Does it somehow dissolve into some kind of undifferentiated thought substance?

Is there space between your thoughts, moments during which no thinking is occurring? What is the difference in quality between thoughts and the space between thoughts?

How's it going so far? These instructions may seem abstract, in particular if you're not practiced at this kind of introspection. Simply trying to observe thoughts arising and subsiding can produce a disorienting feeling. If so, that's a good sign. It means you're using your mind in an unfamiliar way.

It almost doesn't matter if you can come up with answers to any of the questions I'm posing. What matters is that you're cultivating the capacity to watch thoughts from the outside.

Here's a slightly more concrete experiment.

I want you to see if you can contrast the experience of perceiving something in the present with the experience of thinking about something. Observing the differences between the two is instrumental in learning to quiet your thoughts.

The Contrast Between Perceiving and Thinking

To begin, speak some words out loud to yourself. Perhaps try the words, "Listen to the sound of my voice." What is it like to hear words being spoken?

Now, as a contrast, remember what it was like to hear your voice saying those words just a few moments ago. Now you're hearing a voice in the imaginal domain of thought. How is that different from hearing with your ears?

Do you "hear" the voice "in your head", as people say? Does the thought-voice you're hearing seem to have a location? Does it occur over the same period of time it would take to hear the words spoken, or does it happen sort of all-at-once? I'm going to guess that it doesn't sound as loud, clear, distinct, or vivid as when you're hearing it with your ears. Is it more like an echo? Do your thoughts somehow outline the space where the spoken words would be? Try to discover what kind of material the thought-voice is made of.

Take it a step further. Imagine the same words, but spoken by someone else, someone whose voice you haven't heard in a long time. How does that change the mental listening experience? Are you able to reproduce the tone or timbre or cadence of that person's particular voice? How are you doing that? How can you tell that the thought-voice is theirs and not someone else's?

Now try the same thing with something visual. Start by finding an object near you: a teacup or cell phone or house plant. Look at it and notice what it's like to see an object, in the moment, with your eyes.

Now turn away from it, close your eyes, and imagine seeing that same object. How is this experience different from looking with your eyes? Do you "see" it in your "mind's eye"? Does the image seem to have a location? Is it floating in imaginary space, or does it exist in the context of an imaginary visual scene? Are the colors or edges distinct, or fuzzy? Does the image remain stable, or does it somehow morph as you pay attention to it?

To study a little further, imagine the same object, but with polka dots, or turned inside out, or on fire. Of what kind of substance is this now-wholly-constructed thought-image made? Are there threads or pixels or pigments that comprise the mental image?

What if you pull up something from your memory, perhaps the face of the person you imagined saying, "Listen to the sound of my voice"? Where, how, and in what form do you "see" their face? How do you know what you're seeing?

You can continue this exercise using other senses and other sense objects. The point is to study the details of what your thoughts are made of, as you are actively thinking them.

Some people are more visual than others, or more auditory, or more proprioceptive. So you may not "see" mental imagery as vividly as others do, or you may "hear" thought-voices more forcefully than someone else.

Regardless of how clearly any of those sensory modalities occur for you in your thoughts, however, I'm going to make an assertion about the overall quality of thought. My assertion is that your thoughts are quite vague. Certainly in comparison with live sensory experience in the moment, all thoughts are abstract, miasmic, indistinct, hazy.

These experiments are designed to have you discover elements of your thought process that are happening all the time, but which have escaped your notice. Our next experiments will be further investigations of the insubstantiality of thoughts. First, however, we need a bit of theory.

Everyday Hallucinations

To understand your mind, you need to know something about pattern recognition.

Our brains are pattern recognition machines. It's not exactly that they try to find patterns. It would be closer to the truth to say that they can only recognize patterns. Patterns are all they see. Give your brain information that vaguely seems to suggest a previously recognized pattern, especially one that has been perceived many times before, and it will fill in the gaps for you. This makes it an over-eager pattern recognizer. In order for it to correctly perceive patterns that are present, it must sometimes incorrectly imagine patterns that aren't there.

Have you ever been under a tin roof in a rainstorm? From an acoustic perspective, the rain is a kind of "noise", like white noise: random sound over a wide range of simultaneous frequencies and intensities. It's a richly-textured fabric of sound.

If you relax your attention while listening to the rain, you can hallucinate a wide variety of sounds. Did a dog bark? Was that music? Is that a baby crying? Did someone just call your name?

From a signal processing perspective, these hallucinated sounds are false positives. You are well-trained to hear the acoustic pattern of your name being called. If someone is actually calling you, you don't want to miss it. So you err on the side of misinterpreting similar sound patterns as your name being called.

Now imagine what would happen if you spent your entire life under a tin roof in the rain. You would probably learn to tune out the background noise. You would better learn to distinguish someone actually calling your name from the false positive of incorrectly imagining your name.

You may very well have lived your entire life in such a circumstance. It is always raining on the tin roof of the mind. If you have learned to tune out the mental background noise, is it even possible to notice it? Let's give it a try.

The Tin Roof of the Mind

If you can easily do so, find somewhere dark for this experiment. Close your eyes. If you can still see light through your eyelids, place your palms over your eyes for a moment to make it darker.

Now, notice what you see. Do you see uniform, unchanging blackness? I didn't think so. No one sees that. So what's actually there? Can you sense a texture to the darkness, a kind of subtly buzzing visual activity? Is it like the random fuzz on an old television screen when there's no signal? Is there an ever-changing pattern of light pinpricks? Are there subtle, symmetrically shifting colors?

Whatever is there, it isn't empty. The visual "noise" you see with your eyes closed is also present when your eyes are open, though you may not usually be aware of it. Open your eyes and look at a white wall, or up at the sky, and see if you can notice the same kind of living texture filling the space with tiny changing variations. It's always there, but you have learned to tune it out.

In our first exercise, I asked you if you could notice a sort of background behind thoughts. Between thoughts, or behind them, so to speak, there is a not-so-empty imaginal space, much like the not-so-uniform darkness when your eyes are closed. Can you tune into that background? When no particular thought is occupying your inner awareness, is there a kind of continuous, subtle activity analogous to the visual noise you were just watching?

If you're not quite able to perceive what I'm pointing to, don't worry about it just yet. There's still another aspect of pattern recognition we need to get a more complete picture.

On a dark night, when you look up at the stars, how many constellations can you identify? Even if you hardly know any, I bet you can still find Orion, the hunter. The three stars making up his belt are the giveaway. But is that really a belt? A few dots of light suggest lines, and those lines hint at a shape. A constellation provides the smallest possible number of data points to represent an image. Can you flesh out that small scattering of dots and see the full picture of Orion's body?

In order to see a picture in a constellation, your mind registers a few sparse data points (the stars), and then fills in a pattern that isn't really there. When you can observe your mental process as you observe the night sky, you find something similar. Any given thought is comprised of a few sparse data points, picked out from the noisy background, and your mind fills in the rest.

While you're awake, your senses provide a steady stream of input to your brain. That input dominates the foreground of your awareness, such that you're unlikely to pay attention to the background. When you sleep, however, foreground input ceases. No data is coming from the outside, but your neurons keep randomly firing all over the place anyway. Synaptic noise in your neural network is continuous, like raindrops on the tin roof of the mind.

Each random zap in your neural network triggers a random fragment of experience, depending on where in the network the spark happens. What might happen if one electrically-activated experience fragment is the color green, another is the scent of your grandmother's perfume from when you were a kid, and a third is the sense of something dangerous looming? The over-eager pattern recognizer that you call your brain might take the constellation of those three points and try to fill in the rest of the picture. Green + grandma's perfume + something looming = "Here you are with your long-dead grandmother, in a very green jungle, worried about something out there that's going to get you. You better run!"

Now you're dreaming! Dreams are remixes of stored elements of experience. Whatever is most well-represented in your brain is most likely to be activated by random sparks. So even though they're random, you're getting randomly-selected bits of familiar perceptions and feelings and ideas, all combined into imagined patterns.

A dream is a full-fledged hallucination. It is all false positives, but at the time, it seems just as real as anything else. When you wake up, you realize none of that really happened. But that doesn't mean you stop hallucinating.

Even while you're awake, you're dreaming. You are hallucinating voices in the mental background noise. We have a name for those hallucinations. We call them "thoughts". Every time you "think", it's like a puff of dream. You're perceiving something that isn't really there.

So far, I have asked you to observe a couple of contrasts.

One contrast was the difference between the experience of a thought occurring and the space between when no thoughts are occurring. Later, you did your best to perceive the "noisy" texture or activity in the background behind thoughts.

The second contrast was between the richness of a live sensory experience, and the vague echo of that experience in the imaginal space of the mind.

Put the pieces together, and you've got some kind of activity in the background behind thoughts, and a foreground made up of suggestive hints of sound or imagery. I want you to see if you can discover for yourself just how misty and abstract your thoughts are.

In the Mist of a Thought

Switch back into scientist mode. Take a few breaths, release any tension you're running, and do your best to relax your mind. Bring your awareness to the imaginal space where thoughts seem to occur.

Now, as well as you can, try again to notice the background behind or around or between thoughts. See if you can sense a subtle quality of ever-shifting randomness there, as you might sense the sound of the surf on the ocean, or the gauze of fog as it blows over you. Can you find something like ambient mental "noise" in the background - some kind of potential energy, or gentle buzz, or static?

In order for a thought to be born from this primordial thought soup, your mind will have to hallucinate one into existence. Your mind will attempt to discern a pattern within any minimal constellation of data points. It will fill in the picture, hallucinating the experience of a thought.

Your goal here is not to prevent thoughts from being hallucinated. Your goal is to try to see just how few data points make up the thoughts that momentarily cohere. Observe each new thought closely. How little is really there? How much of the pattern are you filling in?

Try deliberately evoking a thought. Think it as hard as you possibly can. Think with all your might. Still, you can look to see how sparse and minimal the sensory elements are that comprise the thought.

Whether a thought seems to appear unbidden, or you're deliberately thinking it into existence, ask yourself the same questions. "Is it possible this thought isn't actually happening? Could I just be hallucinating it?"

This line of questioning may still seem paradoxical. I'm asking if you're really thinking a thought, or just imagining that you're thinking it. But of course you're imagining it. Thinking is an act of the imagination. I'm asking you to find out if you might be imagining more than you imagine you're imagining.

This is mind yoga. It's not easy at first. Keep leaning into the weird mental feelings that come when you try to do the exercise. With practice, you can strengthen these underused mental muscles.

In the night sky, you can learn to see the pictures supposedly made by the constellations. You never forget, however, that all you're really seeing are a few points of light. Thoughts are already always like that. There's almost nothing there, but what is there forms the sparse outline of a thought.

When you're plagued by thoughts, it's like finding the constellation images in the sky to be threatening and oppressive. They're always staring down at you. Even when you're indoors, you can't help but remember that they're looming up there somewhere.

We're reversing the process by which the pictures came to seem real. That belt is just three stars in a row. The body is barely a stick figure. There is no hunter unless you imagine it into existence. What if you didn't?

Playing with Proto-thoughts

When you begin to study your own thought process, there are three aspects of thinking to pay attention to:

The content of your thoughts. We haven't been addressing that here, but what you think about obviously matters.
The medium of thought. That's what we've been studying so far - what thoughts are made of, the texture and composition of thoughts.
How you engage with thinking. What are all the ways you respond to or relate with your thoughts?

Because you only have direct access to your own mind, it's easy to imagine other people are doing the same things you do when they think. But that's pretty unlikely.

Consider all the varied styles and approaches different people have when it comes to communication, or meal preparation, or self-care. Just as you have your own idiosyncratic ways of engaging with those complex activities, you also have your own habits of thinking. If you want to quiet your thoughts, you probably need to learn new ways to think.

There are many deliberate ways to engage with the activity of the mind, different aspects of mental hygiene. When it comes to quieting thoughts, we want to examine how you relate to the very onset of a new thought.

I've been suggesting there is a kind of noisy background to the mind. Not noisy as in loud, noisy as in filled with a flurry of randomness, like the static on a radio when it is between stations, or the snow on TV that isn't receiving a signal. Thoughts are the patterns we seem to discern within the noise.

If you're under a tin roof in the rain, and you keep thinking you hear voices, there's a way to stop. First you determine there's not actually anyone there speaking, and recognize the apparent voices as curious hallucinations. Then you make a deliberate effort, when you start to think you hear a voice, to listen instead to the rush of noise that the voice-like pattern is made of. Pay attention to the medium of the hallucination, not the content of the apparent words.

Before a thought fully coheres in the foreground, there's a moment when it is just a semi-patterned constellation of noise beginning to stand out from the noisy background. Cognitive philosopher Thomas Metzinger refers to these phenomena as proto-thoughts.

They actually are only precursors of thoughts,

spontaneously occurring mental contents,

that, as it were, are constantly calling out "Think me!"

Thomas Metzinger

Let's see if it's possible to catch proto-thoughts before they fully form, and to instead help them disintegrate back into the raw material of mental process.

Pattern De-cognition

Once again, shift into study mode and observe the inside of your mind. Find out if you can sense the constant, subtle activity in the background before any specific thought comes into being.

Either wait for a thought to spontaneously occur, or deliberately begin to think about something. Focus on the texture of the thought-substance, but ignore the apparent content of the thought. It may be hard to ignore the content at first. Your mind is accustomed to grabbing onto a proto-thought, fleshing it out with hallucinated details, and then interpreting the whole thing.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to recognize the impulse to interpret, and instead to allow the noise to remain as noise.

If the automatic impulse to interpret happens too quickly for you to catch it, no problem. Just resist the mental habit of caring what the thought is about. About-ness doesn't matter. Instead sense into the substance and texture of the stuff from which the thought is composed, from which all thoughts are composed.

Your mind is accustomed to contracting around proto-thoughts. It grasps them and structures them and makes them seem real. What you're practicing here is the opposite of contraction. Can you notice the tendency of your mind to contract, and help it to relax instead? There is no pattern, only a few pinpricks of light in your mental sky.

Can you allow the noise to remain noise without adding any interpretation to the noise. Keep practicing sensing proto-thoughts begin to form. As soon as you notice a proto-thought trying to get you to think it, sense the substance from which the thought is made, and then release that substance back into the ever-present background.

No matter what you do, every thought will spontaneously return to the ether. You want to deliberately encourage this to happen before you even discover what the thought is about.

You might imagine the thought proto-thought decomposing into vapor or glitter or space. You could allow it to melt and dissolve back into the primordial thought soup. Any such image is only a temporary aide as you learn to reverse the process by which thoughts cohere in the first place.

Play around with how you might accomplish this with the least effort. It is the contraction of the mind around a proto-thought that builds it up into a full-fledged mental hallucination. If you want to unthink proto-thoughts, you'll need to learn to keep your mind relaxed so it doesn't automatically contract.

It's always raining on the tin roof of the mind. You can hallucinate voices in the noise. Or you can learn to hear it for what it is: a sound like the surf at high tide, the gentle whishing of electricity, pulsing through the channels of the mind.

The directions in these exercises can be hard to get your mind around, so to speak. I hope you'll stick with it. While I can't guarantee that these specific experiments will deliver you the quiet mind you're seeking, I can guarantee that you'll learn more about how your thought process works along the way. It is well worth becoming an expert in your own inner workings. When you change your mind, you change everything.