I meditated for ten years and made everything worse

For about a decade I sat down every day, closed my eyes, and fought my own head.

I lost every time.

I’d like to tell you I was doing something exotic and wrong — some obscure technique, some bad teacher. I wasn’t. I was doing what nearly everyone does when they take up meditation with real commitment and no idea what it’s for. I was trying to win. And the harder I tried, the worse I got — more wound up after each session, more frustrated, more convinced there was something specifically wrong with my mind.

This is the story of what I was doing wrong, why it’s almost certainly what you’re doing wrong too, and what changed when I stopped trying to win.

The fight

Picture the scene. Morning. Cross-legged, because I thought I was supposed to be. Back straight as a rod. Timer set. Eyes closed.

And then the noise. The list of things to do. The conversation from yesterday, replayed with better lines. The worry about the client, the money, the thing I’d said. And my response to every single one of those thoughts was: no. Clamp down. Push it away. I’m meditating. Be quiet.

The thought would come back louder. I’d push harder. By the end of twenty minutes I’d have fought maybe two hundred rounds, lost all of them, and I’d get up with a tighter jaw than I sat down with. Then I’d blame myself, and go back the next day to fight again.

I did this for years. I’m genuinely embarrassed by how many. And through all of it, I’d have told you I was “into meditation.” I was into fighting, in a quiet room, with a timer.

What ten years of fighting cost

I want to itemise it, because I think people underestimate what doing this wrong actually costs — and I’d like you to be able to add up your own bill.

It cost me every morning, for a decade. Twenty minutes of self-generated tension before the day had even started, delivered as a gift to myself.

It cost me the belief that I could do this. Every session was proof of failure — sixty thoughts a minute, all of them supposedly forbidden. After a few years you stop thinking “I’m doing it wrong” and start thinking “I’m the wrong kind of person.” That belief spread well beyond the cushion.

It cost me the real thing. While I was fighting, I never once did a rep. Ten years of daily practice and the muscle that actually mattered — noticing, returning — was as weak as the day I started. I had the habit without the practice.

And it cost my body. All that clenching, all that armouring against my own thoughts — it was more of the exact thing that had made me ill: overriding what was going on inside, by force, every day. I’d found a way to do the damage in a quiet room and call it healing.

If you’ve been at this for years and you’re more wound up than when you started, add up your own bill. Then read on, because the refund is real.

The three mistakes

Looking back, I was making three mistakes at once, and they fed each other.

I thought the goal was silence. I’d absorbed the picture — the monk, the still lake — and I was trying to reproduce it by force. Every thought was proof of failure. So I sat there generating failure, sixty times a minute, and measuring myself against it.

I used willpower. It’s the tool I’d used for everything. Built a business on it, pushed through illness on it, got through life on it. So I brought it to the cushion and applied it to my mind. But you cannot out-muscle your own thoughts. The mind doesn’t respond to force; it responds to attention moving elsewhere. Willpower on the cushion is just tension with a purpose.

I sat rigid. Straight spine, held still, not a flicker. I thought that was discipline. It was armour. Sitting upright and rigid is one of the ways people stop anything from moving — it’s the body refusing to let a feeling through, dressed up as good posture. I was bracing against my own session.

Three mistakes, one result: I left every sitting more braced than I arrived, and called it practice.

What “trying harder” looked like from the outside

If anyone had watched me in those years, they’d have seen a man doing everything right. Consistent. Disciplined. Up early, sitting every day, never missing.

What they wouldn’t have seen was the clench. The jaw set against the thoughts. The breath held slightly, without my noticing, the way you hold it when you’re braced for a blow. Shoulders up a fraction. A face doing its best impression of serenity over a body that was, in effect, in a fight.

I’ve since watched hundreds of people sit, and I can spot it in seconds now — the ones who are practising and the ones who are bracing. The bracing ones look better. Stiller. More like the picture. And they’re the ones who’ll tell me afterwards that it doesn’t work, that they’re not the type, that their mind is worse than everyone else’s.

Their mind isn’t worse. Their effort is just pointed at the one target that can’t be hit. And the harder they try, the more completely they miss.

The elephant

There’s an old line that finally cracked it for me. Don’t think about an elephant.

Go on. Don’t.

You can’t not think about something. The instruction to stop thinking is itself a thought, and it summons the very thing it’s trying to ban. So a practice built on don’t think is built on an impossibility, and the only thing it can produce is frustration — which is exactly what I’d been producing, daily, for years.

The mind is an organ. Its job is to think, the way your heart’s job is to beat. You’d never sit down and try to stop your heart for ten minutes as a wellness practice. It’s just as mad to try to stop your mind. What you can do — the only thing you can do — is decide where your attention goes when the mind does what it does.

That was the turn. Not stop the thoughts. Notice the thoughts, and come back.

What I was actually supposed to be doing

It’s embarrassingly simple, and I’d been told it, and I hadn’t heard it, because I was too busy fighting.

Put your attention on the breath — the cool air at the nose on the way in, the warmer air at the lips on the way out. Your mind will wander. When you notice it’s wandered, bring it back. That’s it. That’s a rep. The mind wanders again, you bring it back again. Two reps.

The wandering isn’t failure. The wandering is the arm going out in the gym. The coming back is the arm coming in. Nobody builds a muscle by refusing to let it move — and I’d spent ten years standing in the weights room, clenched, wondering why I wasn’t getting stronger.

A good session is one where you drifted a thousand times and came back a thousand times. My worst sessions, by that measure, were the ones where I “held it together” — because I hadn’t done a single rep. I’d just braced.

When the body says no

There was a second thing I’d been getting wrong, and this one was doing actual harm.

Some days I’d sit down and everything in me would scream. Get up. Move. I can’t do this. I need to be doing something. A restlessness so strong it felt like danger. And my response, every time, was to force it. Sit. Stay. Be still. You said you’d do twenty minutes.

I now understand what that scream was. My body was carrying a lot — years of pushed-down feeling, a life spent braced — and stillness, for a body like that, feels like being cornered. The restlessness wasn’t weakness to be overcome. It was a message: not like this, not yet. And every time I overrode it, I taught my body one more time that its signals didn’t count. Which was the exact lesson that had made me ill in the first place.

Forcing yourself to sit through a body that’s saying no is not discipline. It’s the old habit of overriding yourself, moved indoors.

What I do now, and what I tell anyone whose body screams: move first. Rock slightly from the hips with each breath. Sway. Give the restlessness somewhere to go. And keep it short — one minute, then eyes open. Two tomorrow. The body sets the pace, and the body is right.

The day I noticed

I can’t give you a date, but I can give you the moment.

I was sitting, as usual, and a thought came — the client, the money, the usual — and instead of clamping down I was too tired to bother. I just let it be there. And then, out of habit more than wisdom, I went back to the breath.

The thought didn’t leave. But it didn’t take me either. It sat in the corner of the room like someone talking in a café, and I was still here, at the breath, listening to it without being in it.

Nothing about that moment felt like a breakthrough. It felt like giving up. Which, it turns out, is what it looks like from the inside when you finally stop doing the wrong thing.

I came out of that session lighter for the first time in years. I didn’t understand why until much later: I’d done a rep. One honest rep, after a decade of bracing. The muscle had finally moved.

“Isn’t that just giving up?”

The sceptic in me asked this immediately, and if you’ve got the same sceptic, here’s the answer.

Giving up is stopping. This is the opposite — it’s doing the actual thing, for the first time, instead of a strenuous imitation of it. Fighting your thoughts feels like effort, and it is, but it’s effort pointed at an impossible target. Returning to the breath a thousand times is also effort. It’s just effort pointed at something that moves.

If you’re a person who respects hard work, respect this: the rep is harder than the brace. Bracing is one decision, held. Returning is a thousand decisions, made fresh, every time the mind pulls you off — and the mind is very, very good at pulling. Nobody who’s done a hundred honest returns in ten minutes has taken the easy road.

Why the strong ones struggle most

I’ve noticed something over years of sitting with people, and it explains a lot about my own decade.

The people who find this hardest are the most capable people in the room. The ones with the strongest willpower. The ones who’ve pushed through everything life put in front of them and never once let a challenge beat them.

That’s usually why they’re sitting with me. Willpower got them through, and it also got them here — braced, exhausted, running on force. And when they come to the cushion they bring the only tool they’ve ever needed, and it’s the one tool that doesn’t work.

If that’s you, hear this: your strength isn’t the problem. It’s just pointed at the wrong thing. This practice isn’t won. It’s allowed. You don’t beat your mind into silence; you let it be loud in the corner while you keep coming home.

What changed when I stopped winning

I’ll tell you what happened when I finally gave up the fight, because it wasn’t what I expected.

I expected to feel like I’d failed. Instead, sessions got easier almost immediately. Not quieter — easier. The mind still roared, but I wasn’t wrestling it, so I came out of the ten minutes lighter instead of tighter.

Then I noticed the gap. Something would happen in the day — a comment that once would’ve taken me for three days — and there’d be a beat before I reacted. Half a second, then a breath, then enough room to feel what was rising and decide what to do with it. That gap, not silence, turned out to be what the whole thing was for.

Then people started telling me I seemed calmer. I hadn’t done anything visible. I’d just stopped fighting in a room by myself every morning.

And twenty-five years on, my thoughts are as insane as ever. They’ve simply stopped being the whole of me. They occupy their small corner and I get on with my life. That isn’t the still lake. It’s something better, because it’s real.

Three questions for anyone who says it made them worse

If you’ve told someone — or yourself — that meditation made things worse, here are the three questions I’d ask. Answer them honestly and you’ll usually find the decade I lost, in miniature.

• Were you trying to stop your thoughts, or trying to notice them? If the goal was silence, you were bracing, not practising. Bracing makes everything worse. It’s supposed to.
• Were you sitting rigid? Straight back, held still, jaw set. That’s armour, and armour is the thing this is meant to take off. Sit comfortably. Slump a little if you need to.
• Did your body ever say no, and did you override it? The restlessness, the urge to get up, the sense of being cornered. If you sat through that by force, you did harm, and you’d be right to say it made things worse. Next time: move, and keep it short.

If all three answers point the way I think they will, you didn’t fail at meditation. You did something else, thoroughly, and called it meditation. The real thing is still available, and it’s kinder than what you were doing.

Nobody said any of it. So I’m saying it, to whoever’s sitting rigid this morning, timer set, fighting.

What I wish I’d been told at the start

That the wandering was the practice. That comfort mattered more than posture. That my body’s no was information, not weakness. That a good session would look, from the outside, like nothing at all. And that I was allowed to give up the fight without giving up the practice — that in fact the fight was what I needed to give up.

The one-line version

If you remember nothing else: you don’t win a meditation. You return to it. A thousand returns beat one hour of holding still, every time, and the returns are the only part that was ever the practice.

If you’ve got a year

People sometimes ask what they can expect if they do this properly for a year. Here’s my honest version, from someone who wasted ten before doing it properly for one.

• Month one: chaos becomes slightly less chaos. You catch thoughts sooner. Nothing anyone else would notice.
• Month two or three: the gap arrives. Half a second between something happening and you reacting. Small, and life-changing.
• Month four to six: things come up — old feelings, memories, tears with no story. This is the body using the safety you’ve built to release what it’s carried. It’s uncomfortable and it’s the point.
• Second half of the year: people tell you you’ve changed. Something that used to take three days takes an hour. The old reaction starts to look ridiculous to you, and that’s how you know.

And at the end of the year your thoughts are still insane. They’ve just stopped being your whole life. That’s the deal — and it’s far better than the one I was chasing.

If you’ve tried and quit

You probably decided you weren’t the type. I decided that for a decade, while doing it every day, which tells you how convincing the decision can be.

You weren’t the wrong type. You were given the wrong picture, and then blamed for not matching it. Almost everyone who teaches this either shows you the monk or lets you believe in him. It’s not your fault. Nobody explained that the wandering was the point.

So here’s the version I wish someone had handed me at the start.

• Sit comfortably. Not rigid. Not slumped.
• Breathe out longer than you breathe in. That’s the only breathing rule.
• Feel the breath at your nose and lips. That’s your anchor.
• Your mind will leave. When you notice, come back. One rep.
• Repeat. Count nothing. Fight nothing.
• If your body screams, move, and keep it short.
• If you drifted a thousand times and came back a thousand times: perfect.

Every week in The Way Home we do exactly this — live, guided, with a voice to follow so you’re never doing the reps alone or wondering if you’re doing it right. Plus the library of practices, the short lessons, and a small community of people who also spent years fighting themselves and decided to stop.

It’s £27 a month. Cancel any month, in two clicks.

— Adam

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This is guided practice for wellbeing. It is not therapy or medical care. If you’re in crisis, please reach out to a doctor or a crisis line in your location today.