How to Calm a Restless Mind

(gentle music) Headspace Studio. (gentle music) Welcome back to "Radio Headspace." It's Dora, and I'm so glad you're here. A few months ago, I was mentoring a student in my mindfulness teacher training program. She was passionate, committed, and wildly creative, but every time we met, she would start with, "I don't know what I'm doing." And then list 17 ideas she had, four she had already scrapped, two new ones she started that morning, and how none of them felt quite right. She'd laugh at herself and say, "I'm restless, I know, I just wanna get this right." And that's when I knew we weren't just dealing with perfectionism. She was bumping up against a very familiar obstacle, restlessness and worry, one of the five hindrances in meditation. Restlessness and worry show up when our minds can't sit still, when it's jumping from one thought to another, convinced something's wrong or that we're missing something. It can look like anxiety, fidgeting, overthinking, even guilt. But beneath it, there's often a deep desire to feel safe or in control. This hindrance isn't here to punish us. It's here to show us how we relate to uncertainty and how we might return to steadiness one breath at a time. The student reminded me so much of myself, especially in my early days of teaching. I used to obsess over getting everything perfect, my script, my tone, the pacing of my voice. I would record something, delete it, rerecord it, delete it again. I wasn't just being meticulous. I was caught in the spin of restlessness, my nervous system scanning for anything that might go wrong and trying to outrun it before it did. So I saw a younger version of myself in her. In one of our sessions, I asked her, "What would happen if you didn't try to fix it all right away?" She blinked. "What do you mean?" "What if instead of chasing the perfect answer, you just paused and noticed what's here?" She sat quietly for a second, then said, "Honestly, I'd probably cry." I nodded, "And maybe that's exactly what's trying to come through." Restlessness and worry aren't just distractions. They're often coverups for deeper emotions we haven't made space for. When we pause and soften, we don't just calm the mind. We get to hear what's really underneath all that movement. By the end of the training, she still had some of that whirlwind energy, but something had shifted. She learned how to pause, how to ground, to trust that clarity comes not by thinking harder, but by softening into stillness. Restless and worried doesn't mean that something is wrong with you. They just mean your mind is working overtime, trying to feel safe. So here's a few things you can try if you're feeling that spin. One is to ground your body. Press your feet into the floor, place one hand on your belly, and breathe slowly. Number two is to label it gently. Try...