When Thoughts Are Raging Like A Waterfall
How to Turn the Tide of Overthinking and Distraction
You can listen to today’s post, recorded by Dr. Cortland Dahl, or read along below.
When I first started meditating, I thought I was the worst meditator in the history of the world.
This was the early 1990s, long before meditation apps, podcasts, or Instagram quotes about mindfulness. I was 19, living in the Midwest, and meditation wasn’t really on the radar for anyone I knew. None of my friends meditated. My family certainly didn’t. And my friends just thought I was weird.
One of my closest friends even accused me of joining a cult. I remember laughing and saying, “If I’m in a cult, I should at least have some friends in the cult with me!” But the truth was, I was completely on my own. For the first five years of my meditation journey, I didn’t know a single other meditator. I had no community, no teacher, no one to reassure me that what I was experiencing was normal. Just me, a few books, and a lot of confusion.
Reading was my only companion in those early years. I devoured books like Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Wherever You Go, There You Are. On the page, meditation seemed so simple: just pay attention to what’s happening in the moment. How hard could it be?
It turns out, for an anxious and overwhelmed teenager, it could be very hard.
My Lone-Wolf Start
I would sit down to practice mindful breathing. In theory, all I had to do was focus on the breath for 20 minutes. But most days, I couldn’t even count five breaths before my mind was completely gone—daydreaming, worrying, replaying conversations, making plans.
Sometimes, I wouldn’t even realize I’d been distracted until my timer went off. Twenty minutes gone, lost entirely in thought.
If Richie had popped me into a brain scanner back then, he probably would have seen I was distracted 99% of the time. And every time I noticed this, I felt like a failure.
Why couldn’t I do something that sounded so simple?
It’s honestly a miracle I didn’t give up, because I was so sure I was doing it wrong. And I had no one to tell me otherwise.
Standing Under the Waterfall
What I didn’t know at the time is that what I was experiencing was completely normal, so normal that there’s a technical term for it in Buddhist psychology: the waterfall experience.
The metaphor comes from how it feels in the beginning stages of practice. When you first start meditating, it’s like standing under a waterfall—thoughts, emotions, memories, worries, crashing down on you all at once.
Paradoxically, it often seems like the mind is more distracted than ever, your emotions more out of control than before. But what’s really happening is that, for the first time, you’re paying attention.
You’ve always been distracted. The mind has always been racing. But until you sit down to watch it, you don’t notice how chaotic it is. Meditation shines a light on what was already there.
And that shift—from being lost in distraction to actually seeing distraction—marks the first step of genuine practice.
Paying Attention to the Mind
From the inside, standing under the waterfall feels like failure. Every time I’d get lost in distraction, I would think to myself, If I can’t stay focused for even a minute, what’s the point?
But in reality, these were glimpses of awareness. I was getting to know my own mind, and although it didn’t feel like it—the continuous realization of “oh, there I go again…more distraction.”—was progress.
In scientific terms, we call this introspective accuracy: the ability to observe your own mental and emotional state with clarity.
It wasn’t that I was suddenly more distracted than before. I was becoming more perceptive. My awareness was catching things I used to miss.
Unfortunately, back then, I didn’t have anyone to explain this. I thought my mind was defective. But what I was actually experiencing was the beginning of a skill that can completely change how we relate to our minds.
A Universal Stage
The waterfall experience is not unique to our age of distraction, smartphones, and endless notifications. Buddhist texts described this phenomenon thousands of years ago. Monks in quiet monasteries had the same complaint: I didn’t know I was this distracted until I started practicing.
Seeing how out of control the mind usually is feels like failure, but it’s not. It marks the transition from being asleep to waking up. From being lost in thought without knowing it, to realizing—sometimes painfully—just how much the mind runs on autopilot.
It’s humbling. It’s not always pleasant. But it’s universal.
Science Catches Up
Fast-forward a few decades, and I now spend much of my life studying meditation scientifically with Richie and our colleagues at the Center for Healthy Minds.
What’s fascinating is that this same paradox shows up in our research.
In the Healthy Minds Program, which Richie and I co-developed with the amazing team at Healthy Minds Innovations, we’ve now studied thousands of participants. And again and again, the data show the same thing: people’s scores often go down before they go up.
Here’s what I mean. Before someone starts meditating, if we ask them, “How attentive are you in daily life?” they might give themselves a 4 out of 7. After a week of meditation training, if we ask the same question, they might rate themselves a 2 or 3.
If you just looked at the numbers, you’d think meditation made them worse. Less focused. Less calm.
But that’s not what’s happening. Our intuition—one we plan to investigate in a future study—is that they are not getting worse at all. Rather, they’re simply becoming more accurate observers of their own mind. The practice is working.
What Meditation Really Is
Looking back more than 30 years later, I see that staying perfectly focused is a relatively small part of what meditation is about.
Meditation isn’t about performance. It’s about relationship.
It’s about forming an intimate, honest, and compassionate relationship with your own mind. With your emotions, habits, and impulses. With the parts of yourself you’d rather not see.
At first, that means realizing just how distracted and reactive you really are. Over time, it means softening into that reality, meeting it with curiosity and kindness. Eventually, it can open into something deeper—gratitude, wisdom, even a sense of freedom.
But it all starts with the waterfall stage, when you finally stop pretending you’ve got it all together and begin to see the mind as it really is.
Why This Matters Today
We live in an age of distraction unlike any other. Our phones, apps, and media diets constantly train us to scatter our attention. With AI and other emerging technologies, this is likely to increase.
So when people today try meditation for the first time and feel overwhelmed by the noise inside, it’s easy to jump to the conclusion that meditation is not for them. I hear this all the time.
That’s why normalizing the waterfall experience is so important. It helps people stick with it long enough to discover the deeper rewards.
And those rewards aren’t abstract. Research shows meditation can reduce stress, boost resilience, improve emotional regulation, and even change the brain. But none of that happens overnight. It begins with the humbling moment of realizing just how messy our minds actually are.
An Invitation
If you’ve ever felt like the worst meditator in the world, you’re in good company. I’ve been there. Every serious meditator I know has been there.
The waterfall stage is not a dead end. It’s the doorway.
So the next time you sit down to meditate and feel overwhelmed by distraction, try reframing it: This is not failure. It’s something to celebrate. I’m getting to know my own mind.
A Short Practice
Here’s a simple way to explore this for yourself:
Sit comfortably. Close your eyes if you like.
Notice your breath. Don’t try to control it—just observe.
When you get distracted (and you will), notice it. That moment of noticing is the whole point.
Gently return to the breath. No judgment, no drama. Just begin again.
Try it for a few minutes. The goal isn’t to stay focused. The goal is simply to notice.
Closing
More than 30 years into this journey, I can say with confidence: the waterfall experience never really goes away. My mind still wanders. Emotions still surge. Habits still show up.
The difference now is how I relate to them.
Instead of seeing distraction as failure, I see it as my teacher. Instead of fighting my mind, I’ve learned to befriend it.
That’s what meditation really offers—not escape, not perfection, but a kinder, more intimate relationship with the reality of our own minds.
And it all starts by standing under the waterfall.
✨ I’d love to hear about your journey—whether you’re on day one or day 10,000. What have you noticed? What has surprised you? What feels hardest? And what keeps you coming back?
Reference Notes:
Explore the Healthy Minds Program app
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When I get lost in thoughts it is interesting to notice how engaging, seductive, intriguing my thoughts are. Just sinking into a juicy conversation can be engrossing and often entertaining. Like thoughts are my best friend having a nice nattering conversation about myself or others. But most of it is just a waste of time replaying the same movies over and over again.
Like the ultimate distraction is thought itself. Just thinking, all the time, round and round, and going nowhere. What a trap!
Love the descriptive label - such good advice for starting out. But also at certain periods we might find that waterfall again, when we’re doing it tough or possibly as deeper more ingrained habits of mind are surfaced. It can be disconcerting but it’s how it is. I love the suggestion of making peace with and befriending this and seeing the waterfall as an opportunity. Someone once said something to me which struck me as good advice in this regard: ‘1000 thoughts are 1000 opportunities to return to the practice’. Great topic and discussion thank-you.