Noting: The Antidote to Overthinking

How labelling your thoughts can create space, clarity, and calm.

Photo by Colin Heron Payne

As someone with a chronically busy mind, practicing mindfulness never came easily.

The second I’d sit down to meditate, a mental laundry list would show up: replaying conversations, worries (lots of those), to-dos, and more.

It was the opposite of presence. I was lost in a torrent of mental detritus.

Sitting with the thoughts was hard enough. Feeling like a failure often made practice unbearable.

Two teachings changed everything for me:

1.) Thinking is OK. Returning is the practice.

Getting lost in thought isn’t a failure. Thinking is normal. It doesn’t matter how many times the mind wanders; what matters is coming back.

2.) Thoughts ≠ truth. They’re mostly noise.

Most thoughts are recycled predictions my brain has run a thousand times. I don’t have to believe them.

Grounding in these ideas made practicing mindfulness bearable enough to stick with it.

But the teaching that changed the game was noting.

A simple way to work with distraction

Noting involves noticing where the mind drifts when it becomes distracted and inwardly labeling the experience.

Here’s the basic instruction:

1. You notice an inner experience coming up (like a thought, emotion, or sensation)

2. You gently label it with whatever word arises naturally. (“thinking,” “worrying,” “itching,” “hearing,” “planning.”)

3. When the experience subsides, you kindly return to your anchor (usually breath or other bodily sensation)

Noting creates space between you and the experience; you observe it instead of getting carried away.

It can act as an antidote to overthinking, supporting calm and concentration for those with busy minds.

But, as I see it, noting’s true superpower is its ability to reveal the mind’s habitual patterns.

Discovering our “Top Ten Tunes”

The mind gets distracted by our present-moment sensory experience: an ache, a dog barking, or the sudden waft of fresh-baked bread.

Consider these the low-hanging fruit in mindfulness practice. They’re short-lived and fairly easy to notice. They can pull us away, but not for long.

The real grist in the meditation mill is thoughts, emotions, and urges.

They’re tricky because they can linger for a long time, be repetitive, pull us into stories, and feel very…true.

This is where noting becomes a superpower, because it’s about seeing where your mind goes, not just that it’s drifted.

Practice it regularly for a while, and you’ll start to realize: your distractions aren’t random.

The mind has habitual tracks it likes to play over and over. My teacher, Jack Kornfield, calls them our “Top Ten Tunes.”

Here’s what I’ve learned through years of noting practice:

• I often start by reviewing the past: remembering my day, regretting a mistake, or replaying a difficult or happy moment. (Here I might gently note: “remembering, regretting, replaying.”

• I might get some space for present-moment awareness before drifting into the future: imagining next week, planning the next day, or worrying about an upcoming speaking engagement. (“Imagining, planning, worrying.”)

Seeing the patterns changes everything

The more I notice where my mind goes, the more familiar I get with its patterns.

That familiarity helps me catch myself sooner, before I get pulled into a drawn-out story or thought loop.

I can see my thoughts as repetitive mental constructs and choose not to believe them. They’re “real, but not true.”

In doing that, thoughts tend to lose their power.

Sometimes they dissolve into stillness for a while. Or they might stick around, but the volume is turned way down.

This helps steady the mind and work with difficult material in practice. But noting really pays off when you’re stuck in the mess and muck of everyday life.

Beneath the thoughts

What’s really going on under the hood with all these thoughts?

When you start paying closer attention, you notice that the repetitive thoughts and stories the mind spins are tied to underlying emotions: fear, anger, sadness, disgust, or even joy.

Despite what we tend to believe, emotions don’t show up as abstract ideas. They come from the body: a tightness in the chest, a knot in the belly, or a twitching eye.

Emotions are signals from your system that something matters right now.

But often, we miss them completely.

Instead of feeling the sensation directly, the mind starts telling stories. The emotion gets translated into a thought that’s fast, automatic, and convincing.

Thoughts seem to come out of nowhere and can carry us away into stories that feel very real.

These emotion-fuelled thought patterns have a lot of power over us. They decide how we react, often in ways that are unhelpful or downright harmful to our well-being.

Cutting through the noise

Noting can take the wind out of their sails.

When we start noticing our thought patterns, we can begin connecting them to the underlying emotions.

Since emotions live in the body, we can begin paying attention to the physical cues: tightness, pressure, tingling.

Developing awareness of these sensations lets us meet our experience closer to the source, before we spin out into stories.

After half a decade of noting practice, many of the patterns that once pushed me around have started to lose their bluster.

Noting doesn’t always make the noise go away. I still sit, at times, in that same torrent of mental detritus.

But I’m less like a flailing branch and more like a boulder: steady in the current, able to watch it all pass by.

The patterns are still there. But when I see them clearly, they have far less hold on me.